There Are No Cynics Among the March Sisters

Dorie Chevlen explains TikTok to the March sisters in an immersive adaptation of “Little Women” at the Heritage Square Museum.

By Dorie ChevlenDecember 3, 2024

LITTLE WOMEN BALLET: THE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE, Heritage Square Museum, Los Angeles, November 23, 2024.

Caro and I are too old to play dress-up, but there is such an obvious and inherent uncoolness about this event that we feel like it would be a waste not to. When she picks me up in her car, we gush over each other’s outfits. I’m wearing a long wool skirt, Victorian-style button-down blouse, and leather lace-up boots. She’s wearing a brown maxi skirt and linen wrap top. Like little girls on Halloween, both of us refuse to wear coats, and we shiver all night for our foolishness.

When we reach the Little Women Ballet’s Immersive Experience venue at Heritage Square Museum, we’re greeted by a young man in an old-timey suit: “Hello! Is this your first time in Concord?” He asks it in a faux British accent. For a second, I gaslight myself—Little Women takes place in … the United States, right? I raise an eyebrow at Caro. The actor introduces himself as Frank Vaughan; again, I’m embarrassed—this is one of my favorite books and I have no idea who he’s supposed to be. Caro doesn’t remember either. We check in and receive a pinnable pink bow and a little bell and are encouraged to chat with the cast until the show begins. We’re too shy to do that yet, so we wander around the gift shop instead.

Soon, we’re split into groups based on the color of our bows: Caro and I join Sallie Gardiner (finally, a non-March character I remember!) who is played to uncanny perfection by a recent UCLA grad named Ellen Relac. Sallie guides us between the different houses of the museum, narrating scenes from the story before dancers bring them to life. We’re not going in chronological order, but we’re all familiar enough with the book and the movies that it doesn’t matter.

Sallie’s commitment to the role is incredible. On our walks between stations, she asks us how we came to hear about her town. Caro admits the TikTok algorithm got her. “TikTok? Like the sound a clock makes?” Sallie asks, not missing a beat. “More like a newsletter,” Caro explains. “A Chinese newsletter,” I add. She grins but doesn’t break character: “I’ll have to read it sometime.”

Though it’s dubbed a ballet, choreography is not really the point of the immersive show. In the Octagon House, Sallie just tells us some plot points from the book using props; in the museum’s stand-in for the author’s Orchard House, a young Louisa May Alcott gives each of us costumes and scripts to put on one of the Christmas plays Jo March wrote in the novel. (This being Los Angeles, I am wrongly cast as the lead, while women in their fifties upstage me with their real acting chops in supporting roles.)

When we do experience dance, though, it’s genuinely impressive. The show is choreographed and conceptualized by Emma Andres, whom Caro and I meet after it ends. Like the March sisters before her, Emma is precocious and sweet, a sentimentality reflected in her movement vocabulary: stylistically, it’s definitely more Nutcracker than Rite of Spring. One dance, of the four young March sisters portrayed by the child cast, is so cute that my mouth hurts from grinning. And a duet between the ghost of Beth March and elderly neighbor Mr. Laurence made me tear up. But the venue presents a performing challenge; for the dancers in pointe shoes, turns land precariously on the thick carpeting; the taller dancers brush the hanging chandelier with their fingertips as they raise their arms aloft.

None of that really matters. This show isn’t about presenting a professional ballet experience. It’s about girlhood. There are few heterosexual couples in attendance: we’re mostly pairs of women, mothers and daughters. After kibitzing with the cast and buying jam from the merch table, Caro and I finally get back to my apartment around 10:00 p.m. Too late for dinner out, so I make her pasta in my small kitchen while we drain a hand-me-down bottle of Josh. Sitting at my table, flush-faced with tannins, we talk about our loves and our heartbreaks, our hopes and our disappointments, the kinds of lives we want to live. We discuss which March sister we most relate to. I usually consider myself a Jo—of course I do, I’m a writer who left home for her art. It’s so obvious. But tonight, I realize, there’s a little touch of Beth in me too. There must be; I loved the show.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.