Artist Profile: Mira-Rose J. Kingsbury Lee ’24 on Storytelling and ‘Atalanta’

Storytelling was always natural for Mira-Rose J. Kingsbury Lee ’24. As a child, she spun elaborate tales to entertain her younger sisters on long hikes with her family through the New Zealand woods. She soon decided to write a song for the first time, and she continued writing ever since.

Kingsbury Lee credits “Billy Elliot: The Musical,” for sparking her interest in theater. While watching the show, she looked around and saw “the audience completely in tears” during a touching musical number.

“I had the idea that like, ‘Oh, I can do that, too,’” she recalled.

At eight years old, she began developing the musical that later became “Atalanta.” Her primary inspiration for the show came one day when she saw a window cleaner washing the window of a skyscraper and wondered what would happen if the cleaner were an assassin.

She was also influenced by the autobiography of Katharine Graham, the president and publisher of The Washington Post during the time of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal.

“I adapted her story, and actually, it fit surprisingly well into the story I had already crafted,” Kingsbury Lee said.

The vivid image of the window cleaner and Graham’s book gave rise to the different characters that make up “Atalanta,” which remained constant during the show’s development over time, even as the plot, settings, and music changed.

After privately working on “Atalanta” for almost a decade, Kingsbury Lee realized in high school that she needed to show it to someone else if she wanted to see the musical come to life. She collaborated with a guitarist to write the music for a 2020 production of “Atalanta.” Although the Covid-19 pandemic foiled their original plans of a live, springtime performance, the musical premiered online in August 2020 — and Kingsbury Lee finally shared her creation with others, which made her dream seem more like a reality.

“I never let anyone else see it before. I carried around these little notebooks for my entire life, basically, and would write in those and keep them very private,” Kingsbury Lee said. “But the first time I printed out a script and handed it to the actors, we all sat around in someone’s living room in the Upper East Side and they actually sang out loud. It was completely revelatory,” Kingsbury Lee said.

At Harvard, she set “Atalanta” aside and undertook other projects, such as the First-Year Musical and a musical called “The Milk Made” for the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players. In Kingsbury Lee’s junior year, however, her mother’s birthday wish was for her to try to bring “Atalanta” onstage — in person. Thus, Kingsbury Lee assembled a team that grew to approximately 50 people, and she began reworking her first musical.

There were significant alterations between the high school and college productions of “Atalanta.” The names of the characters changed, the dark and heavy music became livelier and jazzier, and the second act was revised.

Kingsbury Lee’s greatest challenge in revising the show was rewriting its final scenes.

“I was always so bad at writing an ending because I never really thought about it as having an end,” Kingsbury Lee said.

“That was a big difficulty and also it was a source of frustration for my team, not having an ending going into the production process,” she said.

With a finally completed ending, “Atalanta” sold out at the Loeb Experimental Theatre in April 2023. When a reviewer wrote that Kingsbury Lee should show her musical at a festival, she decided to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world's largest performance arts festival — and “Atalanta” became the first Harvard show to run at the Fringe.

Kingsbury Lee said that her whole life can be found in the words and music of “Atalanta.” Bringing “the closest [she] can imagine to a passion project” to The Fringe in August, where the show received an honorable mention, was “a complete dream.” Now, Kingsbury Lee is searching for her next story.

When asked about the impact she hopes her work has on others, Kingsbury Lee answers that she would like it to empower people, just as “Billy Elliot” empowered her so many years ago.

“I really think anyone can move people and do interesting things and accomplish things — and even if they think that they’re completely incompetent and not well-suited, or that they don’t have a choice, that they always have a choice, and they always have something to move toward,” Kingsbury Lee said. “And if they don't, they have the power to do that too.”