ӣ����Ƶ

Colin Healy, artistic director for Fly North Theatricals, wrote the story, lyrics and music for the show after learning about Eliza Haycraft, a successful ӣ����Ƶ madam in the mid 1800s, around the time of the Civil War.

Haycraft’s great, great grand niece told Healy about her relative.

“It felt like a musical,” Healy says.

And why not? It has everything: sex, alcohol, betrayal, a post-Civil War era ӣ����Ƶ.

After being seduced by a ne’er-do-well, Haycraft fled her hometown in Callaway County, Missouri, at age 20 in 1840. She took a canoe partially up the Mississippi before getting passage on a steamboat to take her the rest of the way to ӣ����Ƶ.

When she arrived, broke and illiterate, she turned to prostitution to make money, leveraging that success into becoming a madam. The mid-1800s were a good time to be in the rapidly expanding city: Haycraft’s business exploded thanks to the Civil War and the thousands of soldiers stationed nearby.

“Madam” picks up the story at the end of Haycraft’s life, when the powers that be are trying to tear down her real estate empire — Haycraft didn’t put her money in banks, but instead invested in real estate.

The city legalized prostitution with the social evils ordinance of 1870, which seems like it would be a boon to Haycraft and her girls, but it was the opposite. The act gave the police unprecedented power to search homes and persons, deny habeas corpus to women arrested for prostitution and institute a large tax on prostitutes in the form of a fee.

In the musical, Haycraft, who never learned to read and write, is dying, self-medicating with alcohol and fighting for her business. She’s also battling to be buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery. Despite her wealth, the venerable cemetery doesn’t want her due to her occupation.

“I think ӣ����Ƶ will like the ӣ����Ƶness of the show,” Healy says. “I’m hoping that people will find joy in it, the way I found joy in writing it.”

Healy first produced “Madam” in Hannibal in 2019. (He was working at a theater there as a music director.) In 2020, he brought it to ӣ����Ƶ. This is a reprisal with the same star, Kimmie Kidd, once again playing Haycraft.

“We knew from the moment we decided to do ‘Madam’ again that Kimmie was No. 1,” Healy says. “Frankly, if Kimmie couldn’t do it, we might not have done the show.”

Kidd initially auditioned after hearing the show’s opening song “Empire.” “When I heard that, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m in.’ It was instant for me.”

She has been involved with the production since the beginning, even appearing in early workshops for it.

“I absolutely love her,” says Kidd about Haycraft. “She opened her home to women. If you felt that you needed protection from someone, if you were out on the street, she opened her home without question, without payment. One of the things she says over and over is, ‘No debts amongst women.’”

The musical paints Haycraft as a real girls’ girl. Rather than an exploitative madam, she protects the women who work for her. Her three rules: Respect. Consent. Pay up front.

“So a girl had the power to say no, which was unheard of,” Kidd says.

While not much is known about Haycraft’s life, when she died in 1871, obituaries noted that she was known for her philanthropy, particularly for her support of widows and orphans during and after the Civil War.

Haycraft won her fight with Bellefontaine Cemetery and is interred there, but to this day her grave bears no headstone.

Healy says he and his Fly North Theatricals partner, Bradley Rohlf, picked a different show for the season, “but then the election happened” so they pivoted to “Madam.”

For Healy, the social evils ordinance reminds him of today’s political atmosphere.

“The (ordinance) was about control, and not only about controlling the narrative but also controlling other people’s bodies, and controlling the ways in which men, in this particular case, could use women,” Healy says.

“The men of ӣ����Ƶ at the time paralleled so much what politicians, especially politicians on the right, do today when it comes to controlling women’s rights and women’s bodies.”

Haycraft and her girls in the show are ready to fight cemeteries, politicians and plots to steal the business out from under them.

“She’s just a strong, bad ass woman,” Kidd says. “Her clients were the big politicians and businessmen. So she had a lot of power. It’s really fun to play that. Almost like playing royalty.”