Strike the Set

I made Mo sit through Annie again. Final performance, and while she grunted 'No no' when I asked if she wanted to see it again, I wanted to.

And she sat so well for it last week, I figured she dug it even if she isn't saying so.

Once again, she sat transfixed in uncharacteristic silence. A couple times, toward the end, she groaned, but she did better than a couple of babies in the back. Babies at shows are a pet peeve with me, I think of them as guns on airplanes or teenagers behind the wheels of cars, it's a thing that doesn't belong and nothing good can come from it.



Then I discovered at intermission that two of the babies in question are related to me and only there because an aunt and uncle wanted to support Em by coming to her play. I still haven't decided how I feel knowing that, because I love that they came, and I know they probably had few babysitting options because the main one was also there to see the show.

And the people in my row who crinkled cellophane for an improbable period of time (every time the stage sounds got quiet, crinkle crinkle crinkle, and I was like, Really, you still haven't finished whatever it is you're unwrapping or eating or whatever?)



But a great show. I'd almost got 'NYC' to stop running around in my head from last week's matinee and now its back despite listening to two CDs including the Spamalot soundtrack to seek another catchy tune to displace it.

The set is struck, though I did wonder if the orphans planned to keep their bunk beds since they were hanging out on them instead of dismantling them.



Wonder what Gardner Community Theater will do next year. I'll bet it's not Starlight Express (how, even at the professional level, do you find a full cast of Broadway caliber singer/dancer/actor types who can also do stunts on roller skates?) or the Rocky Horror Show (though I hear a community theater in Emporia did it last year).

Sweeney Todd would be my pick except it's a relatively small cast, and one of the great things about Annie is it has lots of smaller roles to share the warmth a little more widely. Yeah, Warbucks, Miss Hannigan, and Annie are on stage a lot, and not everyone who wants to do community theater is going to want (or be able to) to carry that much weight, but there are a lot of parts in Annie that allow a person to focus on one or two songs and plenty of in-between like the orphans who have a few numbers but not hours of material to cover.

What about Hair?