Last Friday, we talked about the marvelous 40-minute musical Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark Kids that Jenny Laird, Randy Courts and Will Osborne crafted from Mary Pope Osborne’s first Magic Tree House installment. But this week, let’s look at the company that brought it to Manhattan: Kidz Theater, under the auspices of owner and artistic director Kristen Caesar.

Caesar started her business 17 years ago while living in San Diego. That a theater company has survived that length of time is, of course, extraordinary; it’s said that only 3% of theaters manage to stay around for even ten years.

But the fact that Caesar is around the age of 30 is what really makes the achievement all the more astonishing.

The numbers are not typos. But, you ask, how can anyone who’s circling 30 have possibly started a business 17 years ago? She would have had to have founded the company when she was 13.

And, in fact, she did.

Did her parents say “Wonderful!” or “You’re crazy” or the even more expected “You’re too young!”? Says Caesar with a smile, “All three, actually. But because I was the type of kid who plans things out, they had to say yes. My stepfather had a gymnastics company, and I had a plan on renting rehearsal space from him. I figured we could perform on his big gymnasium floor.”

And they did. Caesar charged $40 per child and made a go of it all through high school. She expected to close the theater when she came to study musical theater at NYU, but when she returned home after freshman year, she started it up again, as she did after sophomore year, too.

The next two years Caesar performed with Theatreworks USA. After she was graduated from NYU in 2004, she worked for a few years with Cryer and Ford’s The American Girls Revue at The American Place Theatre. “I was a child supervisor, which meant I was a cross between a teacher and wrangler,” she says. The last-named occupation is the accepted name for the parental figure who ensures that kid performers are where they’re supposed to be during a performance – and that they manage to get their school homework done, too.

But in 2007, Caesar revived Kidz Theater, which she’s now done full-time for the past six years. If anyone doubts her commitment to the medium, there’s the master’s degree she got in educational theater at NYU in 2009. She’s also picked up a number of fans along the way, including Drew Cohen, the president of Music Theatre International.

Recalls Caesar, “Drew came to see Rent: School Edition and liked what he saw. He’d been talking to people at Magic Tree House about doing a musical, and thought our summer intensive would be a good place to start it, because we had kids the right age: eight to 17. So Drew got me in touch with everyone, and here we are.”

Yes, after Caesar rehearsed 30 kids for eight hours a day six days a week. If it all seems too harrowing, all that Caesar is doing is preparing her performers for real life – real theatrical life, that is. “We are a professional training program, so I’m strict,” she admits.

Caesar may not be as tough on her kids as Captain von Trapp was with his before he met Maria, but she’s no-nonsense. “I have been known to fire kids if they’re not doing the job, or if their attendance isn’t good. You can’t holding back the others. Oh, we have to juggle when parents call us and say ‘My kid has an audition’ or a callback. That we’ll gladly allow for.”

She also keeps them busy when they’re off-stage. “I give them homework assignments,” she says. “They must create biographies for their characters. When we did Rent -- with all high schoolers, of course – I sent the kids to the East Village so they could actually see the types of places where the characters had lived. And because Roger and Mimi are HIV-positive, we had the kids do research on AIDS, too.”

For this more benign show, Caesar had her kids research dinosaurs. “But,” she says, “I still asked them tough questions, too, like ‘Why does your character come on stage for this scene?’”

And woe to the kid who says in a smart-aleck voice “Because the script says to.” Caesar shakes her head back and forth to indicate that no student would ever do that. “I’m proud of all our kids,” she says, “but I must commend Jack Sawula, a young teenager who played Henry the dinosaur. From the day he was cast, he was so excited and asked me so many questions about his character. Jack put so much care into every movement and sound that by the end of the show the audience fell in love with him. It’s not that big a part, it doesn’t have that many lines,” she admits, “and it could be a throwaway. That didn’t happen because he put so much care into it.”

Sawula heard about Kidz Theater from a friend who showed him a video; he was so impressed that he knew he had to be a part of it. “Dealing with the dinosaur mask was kinda hard,” he admits. “I figured that with hard work and dedication and strong acting choices that I’d be able to overcome the challenges.” It was the first time he’d ever played a non-human – “although I did once play a clock,” he says.

He had another role with this company: mentor. “We do have the older kids mentor the younger ones,” says Ceasar. “On this show, we had 15 mentors teaching 15 mentees.”

But Anna in The King and I isn’t the only one who discovered that “by your pupils, you’ll be taught.” Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark Kids had mentors for whom Broadway is still a dream mentoring young kids who have already been there.

Both Mavis Simpson-Ernst and Luka Kain, who played the siblings who discovered the Magic Tree House, had been in recent Broadway revivals. She was one of the “Santa Evita” kids while he was Jerome in South Pacific.

Says Micaela Diamond, “Mavis taught me a lot about time management. Before she went into Evita, she was only going to have two days of rehearsals, so before she got there she already started thinking about what acting choices she wanted to make.” Adds Sawula, “I learned a bit more about professionalism when I saw how intensely Luka Kain was taking notes.”

One might think that a lad who was a Broadway veteran at nine might consider Kidz Theater the smallest of potatoes. But Kain says, “I like that everyone here is younger than the cast of South Pacific. It’s nice to not be one of the few kids in the show. And people here are just as talented and professional.”

Says Caesar, “Kidz Theater is a family and a place where people can find love. We sometimes deal with kids who have myriads of issues and family problems. What we concentrate on is if the kids have the drive. If they do, we want to help them reach the dream. Our grads have gone to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Carnegie Mellon, Boston Conservatory, NYU, Ithaca, Syracuse and the University of Hartford. They sometimes get scholarships which I honestly believe wouldn’t have been offered if they hadn’t been with us.”

Needless to say, every kid who does an MTI show doesn’t have these goals. Some just like performing for fun, and already are planning other careers. Fine – but one can learn from Kristen Caesar that 13 isn’t too young to start planning what you think you’d like to do with the rest of your life.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com and each Friday at www.kritzerland.com. His book, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks – a Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award is now available at www.amazon.com.