April 26, 2006

Children's theatre

The Jinker Boy and I went on a double date yesterday with his friend E. and E.'s mum, C., to see a performance of a piece of musical theatre based on a popular children's series. The children seemed to enjoy it; they were asked to participate throughout and the little girl behind us yelled hellos to the various characters for the full hour and a half. Our two boys enjoyed it as well, though at five they were too cool to dance in the aisles.

The problem was that C. and I could barely stand it. First and foremost, the main actress, a woman of at least thirty, was playing a little girl. It was bad enough that she was jumping around, arms overhead, with her unbound B-cups bouncing. (Petty-minded and crass of me I suppose, but it was disconcerting. Whatever happened to the time-honoured tradition of binding ones breasts for such occasions?) Not only that, but her voice: she was channelling Bernadette Peters channelling Barney.

Second complaint: apart from the aforementioned, every, and I mean every sound was canned. There were various characters in big fluffy animal costumes, but they were lip syncing. Or they would have been, had they had lips. The talking, singing trees were not even afforded the dignity of having a silent person inside; they were just empty props (and don't get me going on how one of the tree-characters was doing Elvis. Yeah, kids love Elvis. And such sly and topical humour for the parents). The set was minimal, the plot was uninspired, and a good chunk of the songs — the singable ones — were not original.

Television shows and movies cannot get away with this nonsense or they would have few repeat viewers, but a theatrical piece has been and gone before one can even write a crabby blog post.

All that aside, kids were, as I said, dancing in the aisles. But does that mean that we cannot aspire to more for them? If they find warmed-over schlock appealing, think how magical a really good production would be.

Scribbled at April 26, 2006 12:10 PM AST | Permanent link to this post | More? art/kultur, parenthood

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://webteam.unb.ca/mt/asdf23wer234msadf.cgi/2332