The musical “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” performed Monday, tells the audience about how her family’s influence helped her eventually become a writer.  

Loosely based on the book series written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the musical “Laura Ingalls Wilder” takes historical events from Wilder’s life and tells the story of how she became a writer.

The musical is told in the style of a Broadway musical and has a cast of four: Ma, Pa, Mary and Laura.

Ma and Pa are Laura’s parents, and Mary is her blind sister.

Laura’s family had an impact on Laura’s writing career later on in her life. Laura’s mother was a schoolteacher and encouraged Laura to write her experiences down.

Her sister, Mary, wanted Laura to be able to describe things to her since she could not see them for herself.

“As a little girl she travels across America with her mother and father and older sister Mary and they were in a covered wagon and they went from Wisconsin to Iowa to Minnesota [and] the Dakotas,” said Greg Gunning, ArtsPower’s artistic director. “She wrote down all her experiences as a little girl and those experiences are very popular books to this day.”

Wilder’s books are based on her pioneer family, which moved frequently across America’s Midwest. Laura, like her mother, became a schoolteacher at the age of 15. Laura didn’t become a writer until later when her daughter Rose encouraged her to write about her childhood.

Her first book “Little House in the Big Woods” was published in 1932.

The musical “Laura Ingalls Wilder” is aimed at grades two through six.

“We love to take books that we hope are still popular with young audiences and books that are still on the shelves and are on recommended reading lists for schools,” Gunning said. “The whole Little House on the Prairie series is still very big.”

Study guides for the show were offered to teachers for their classes.

The “Laura Ingalls Wilder” tour ends in the first week of June this year.

The total attendance for the show was about 2,600 children and adults from various counties.  

“It is so rewarding to see the excitement on the faces of the kids when they walk into this great auditorium with anticipation,” said Sara Compton, outreach coordinator at Stephens Auditorium. “They are eager to see the story they have read and studied come to life on stage, with costumes, staging and songs that spark their imagination of what life was like so long ago as families like Laura’s began settling on the prairies.”