One hundred and fifty years after the Great Chicago Fire, a strangely knowing tour guide dressed as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow welcomes us to the site where it all began. He launches into the story everyone knows: a woman, a lantern, a cow, and a city in flames. But his version is a bit different than the one we’ve all been told…

It’s 1871 and life is good for Catie O’Leary. She’s come a long way from the 18-year-old girl who fled hardship and famine in Ireland for the unknown in the States. She’s clawed and scraped her way to where she is today: thriving as a thirty-something mother and small business owner in a real up-and-coming town called Chicago, where she and her husband recently purchased a small wooden house, a small wooden barn, and several hefty cows to start a milk delivery business. Her sons are enrolled in school, her daughter is dating the child of a police captain, and she just bought a ridiculously enormous and ornate new hat. Everything’s coming up Catie!

Then, one balmy October night, Catie awakes to a strange glow out her bedroom window. She runs outside to find her beloved barn already engulfed in flames — flames that soon spread for miles. The next morning, as she helps her neighbors clear the ashes, she wonders what could have caused the blaze. Delinquent teens? Her rowdy tenants? A spark carried on the wind? 

But when her son James picks up the latest copy of the Chicago Times, she learns that the town already has its answer: it was her.

Based on the facts of Catherine O’Leary’s life and the myth that threatened to destroy it, The Most Hated Woman in Town is a dark, rich, satirical musical about fake news before it had a name, the irresistible power of a good story, who becomes collateral damage as history is written, and how to rebuild after devastation. The score mixed contemporary musical theater with the folksy twang of 1800’s Chicago.