The new orchestral composition that makes its world premiere this Sunday has its roots in a children’s book. Which has its roots in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story. Which has its roots in a real-life incident in 1947 St. Louis.
The details of that incident are scant. The Post-Dispatch reported at the time in a brisk 181 words that “an alley cat that wandered into the Hamilton Hotel” two days before the Greater St. Louis Cat Club Show ended up winning two firsts in the competition—and was then adopted by “Miss Marcella Duffy, hostess at the hotel.” The newspaper included a photo of the pair. The alley cat—now named Mr. Silver—looks like he’s agreed to accept the ribbon that he always knew was his due. Miss Duffy looks thrilled. The story, says author Kate Klise, ended up being picked up by newspapers around the country.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
But then, inevitably, it was forgotten. It wasn’t until 2021, when the Post-Dispatch republished its brief story on its website as a part of a daily peek back into its archives that Mr. Silver saw new attention.
At that point, Klise was riding out the pandemic in the Missouri Ozarks, and something about Mr. Silver’s story resonated with her. A former journalist at People Magazine, who splits her time between the Ozarks, St. Louis, and Lisbon, she’d become a prolific author of children’s books, with 35 to her credit. That includes the 43 Old Cemetery Road series, the Regarding series, and a host of picture books, all collaborations with her California-based sister, M. Sarah Klise.
During the pandemic, Kate Klise says, there were just too many hours in the day to fill. “I read, like, every article in the newspaper,” she says. And at a time when she was struggling with the chapter book she was writing, the story of the prize-winning alley cat was a bolt of inspiration. “I saw that clip on the Post-Dispatch website, and I thought, This is charming,” she says. “And then I went over to my other big time-waster, which is newspapers.com,” a searchable archive of historic newspaper coverage. “I just sort of started noodling around, searching, like, ‘Mr. Silver 1947,’ and it’s like,Oh, my God, this story just caught fire.”
Klise thought about America in 1947. Segregation was still widespread, but that summer, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. “They were these glimmers of hope,” she says. Letting an alley cat win the fancy cat contest, she says, was “another one of those just little hopeful moments when we get it right.” She sent her editor at Macmillan a rough draft of a children’s book about Mr. Silver the very next day.
The timing, it turns out, was perfect: Klise’s editor had just adopted a pandemic kitten. She greenlit the project, and in just over a year, with rewrites and reworking and illustrations from Klise’s sister, How Mr. Silver Stole the Show was officially a book.
But that wasn’t the end. Far from it. Klise’s boyfriend is Roger Kaza, principal horn at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Metropolitan Orchestra of St. Louis. And that opened a different door, a musical one. “I’ve been increasingly interested in the last few years in new ways to tell stories,” Klise says. “And there’s some stories that I feel just cry out for another emotional layer, which this one did.”
Klise recalls listening to Peter and the Wolf as a child. “I don’t feel like books are the only way to tell stories,” she says, adding that she noticed some limitations with Prokofiev’s classic children’s fable: “I always found the story felt more like a math equation. Like, OK, Bird equals flute. Where’s the story? I never really connected with the story . I prefer Jesus Christ Superstar, frankly.”
She hired St. Louis–based composer Stefan Freund to one-up Prokofiev and write an orchestral accompaniment to How Mr. Silver Stole the Show. The Metropolitan Orchestra now plans to debut it on May 17 at the 560 Music Center.
Now is perhaps the time to acknowledge that when Mr. Silver makes his musical debut, I will also be playing a role. Klise reached out cold to me almost a year ago, asking if I’d be willing to provide some narration to the orchestral version. Unbeknownst to her, I’d also grown up to Leonard Bernstein voicing Peter and the Wolf—without, I should note, her complaints about the material—and, in 2025, my family had just adopted two cats. I couldn’t say no. So, I’m now lending my vocals to the part of Miss Marcella Duffy, the real-life hotel hostess who adopted a former alley cat in 1947 St. Louis.
I asked Klise why she chose me. She said she liked listening to the radio show I hosted on St. Louis Public Radio throughout the pandemic. She also liked that, like her, I didn’t grow up in St. Louis. “I think that is the genius of a character like Miss Marcella Duffy,” Klise says. “She’s the one who’s saying, ‘Are we still talking about pedigrees, who your parents are, and where you went to high school?’ She’s the voice of reason.” That was good enough for me.
Klise mentions that, just as she owes the idea for this book to the Post-Dispatch, she owes her career as a children’s author to the Post-Dispatch.
“I was writing a column for the Post-Dispatch years ago,” she says. “And my editor said, ‘This isn’t working out. Your writing lacks warmth.’ I sent the letter to my sister Sarah in California, like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And she said, ‘Let’s do what we’ve been wanting to do forever.’” Two careers in children’s books were born. And from there, Mr. Silver. And now How Mr. Silver Stole the Show, the orchestration. It is quite a story.
