Maggie Flynn 1968 - Articles Page 3.4

Maggie Flynn is a musical with a book by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss (in collaboration with Morton DaCosta) and music and lyrics by Peretti, Creatore, and Weiss.



Based on an idea by John Flaxman, it was inspired by a true story set in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. The title character, an Irish woman providing asylum for orphaned children of runaway slaves, is on the verge of marrying a Union Army colonel when her vagabond husband Phineas Flynn (who abandoned her to pursue a theatrical career and whom she had presumed was dead) returns to the scene. The cast of characters is a mélange of Confederate insurgents, prostitutes and drunks, bigoted socialites, circus performers and a passel of African American kids endangered by the local political situation.