Feel · Try
Twinkle
The big feeler
She sees the finished thing before she has the skill to make it, and she would rather do it herself and get it wrong than wait and get it right.
She says“Let me do it.”
A Vital character world · in development
Twinkle
She knows exactly
how it should go.
Twinkle is a little girl with enormous ideas and the feelings to match. The wings are what her imagination looks like from the outside. From Katharine Holabird, who gave the world Angelina Ballerina.
Illustration by Sarah Warburton
Sat · Sep 26 · Cancelled
Festival cancelled
The Chappaqua Children's Book Festival has been cancelled.
The organisers have cancelled Saturday's festival because of the weather, so Twinkle will not appear on September 26. We're sorry to miss meeting everyone in person — Twinkle is in development for a New York stage in 2026/27. Join the Vital Club and you'll be the first to know when tickets go on sale.
Child first
Twinkle is a little girl. The wings came second.
She is not a fairy who happens to have feelings. She is a child you already recognise — the one who can picture the finished thing long before she has the patience or the skill to make it — and the fairy world is simply where that inner life becomes visible.
She wants something
Something specific, and she can already see exactly how it ought to turn out.
She acts
Before she has entirely worked out the consequences. Usually with a wand in her hand.
It goes wrong
Reality declines to cooperate. So she pushes harder — and it gets bigger, funnier and messier.
She changes
Not the world. Herself: her approach, her expectations, or what she'd been counting as winning.
Magic can change the circumstances.
Magic cannot do the growing.
Twinkle is the doorway. The ensemble is the world.
Four children. Four completely different ways of being four.
Every child in a room already knows which one they are. One charges in. One has a plan. One checks that everybody's included. One simply cannot sit still. Give a child a character to claim and you have the beginning of everything else.
Think · Do
Pippa
The capable planner
She likes a plan and she is usually right, which is wonderful until the plan fails or somebody declines to follow it. Then she is in genuinely new territory.
She says“I know how.”
Connect
Lulu
The connector
She reads the room before anyone speaks, and wants everybody in. Her hard lesson is the one where she finds out she can't make everyone happy at once.
She says“I'll do it with you.”
Move
Scruffy
The wild one
Not a pet and not a mascot — the child whose body moves before the thinking catches up. Running becomes rocketing, noise becomes BANG. Underneath it: can you still love me when I'm a lot?
He says“I want to GO!”
And two grown-ups, who do not solve it for them
Guide
Miss Flutterby
The teacher who sees you
She notices how each child learns and hands the problem back to them. She demonstrates and reframes. She does not rescue.
She says“You can figure this out.”
Possibility
Fairy Godmother
The special grown-up
Her magic is for occasions — wishes, ceremonies, the rare chance. She opens a door and lets what happens next reveal who walked through it.
She says“Something bigger is possible.”
Sparkle Tree Forest
The imaginative rehearsal room of childhood.
An ordinary problem starts it — the kind a four-year-old has on an ordinary Tuesday. Then a song carries them somewhere the problem gets big enough to see, and they come home having handled it differently.
-
01
It starts here
A real child, a real Tuesday, and something that has gone wrong enough to matter.
-
02
Then the song
The same song every time. Children learn it, wait for it, and eventually sing it before it starts.
-
03
And they're in
Not different people — the same people, enlarged. The wings are the personality made visible.
-
04
And they come back
To the ordinary Tuesday, with the ordinary problem, which they now handle a little differently.
You can get it wrong here.
You still belong. You can try again.
Where she came from
Katharine Holabird already did this once.
Thirty-odd storybooks. A mouse in a ballet skirt called Angelina Ballerina, which became an award-winning book series, an animated television series, and two Vital Theatre Company musicals.
Twinkle is her newest character, drawn by Sarah Warburton — and deliberately a child fairy rather than an adult one, who gets her spells wrong and has feelings far too big for her. Four picture books already exist. So this world doesn't start from nothing: it starts on shelves families already own, with an author whose name a parent knows before we say a word about a theatre.
- Twinkle
- Twinkle Thinks Pink!
- Twinkle Tames a Dragon
- Twinkle Makes a Wish
Angelina Ballerina
Twinkle
And then she's real
You can read about her. It is a different thing when she is standing in the room.
Twinkle The Musical is in development at Vital for 2026/27. Twinkle has been on a New York stage before, and she is coming back to one — this time as the centre of a world children will already know before they walk into the theatre.
In development for 2026/27
Twinkle The Musical
- Book
- Katharine Holabird & Cara Lustik
- Based on the books
- The Twinkle picture books
written by Katharine Holabird, illustrated by Sarah Warburton
Made for ages 2–7 — and built to Vital's usual shape: one act, no intermission, and the cast comes out to say hello afterwards.
The original musical Twinkle Tames a Dragon: The Musical played the Theater at Blessed Sacrament on the Upper West Side, opening January 2016 and returning the following season.
The Vital Club · free
Be there the day they walk out on stage.
There's nothing to buy today. Join and we'll send Twinkle's stories, songs and things to make — and you'll be the first to know when she's back on a stage in New York.
- Twinkle stories
- Songs from the show
- Draw your own Scruffy
- Behind the wings
- First word on tickets