Daddy Weekend

Andrea was out of town for the weekend so I had my first extended (i.e. more than one night) solo parenting job in a few years. Things were significantly easier this time around; it's a lot less exhausting to take care of a four-year old than a 20-month old.

Saturday we mainly stayed around the house and had a visit from Poppa and Grandma (which gave me a chance to move the car in that great New York game of finding a spot that will be "good for Monday"). Sunday we took the subway down to Soho (and walked through 40mph winds!) to go see Hansel and Gretel at the Manhattan Children's Theatre.

Fiona's seen a few plays now and has had a great time at each one. Last month she went to see Max & Ruby with her Mommy at Theatreworks, which is probably the main children's theater in the city. She had a blast at that one, and came home talking about all the silly things that Max did. But she knows Max & Ruby from the Rosemary Wells' books and the cartoons on Noggin. When I asked Fiona if she wanted me to read Hansel & Gretel to her (I once had a writing teacher who said that there are four must-have books for a writer, one of which is Grimm's Fairy Tales), she didn't want it; she didn't want to know too much before she saw the play (other than that there was a boy and a girl and a bad witch). So I didn't know how much to expect Fiona to understand about the play.

The play started... and it wasn't very good. Now, I think there are two primary rules for criticism:

1. does the piece accomplish what it's trying to do?
2. was it worth doing?

#2 comes into play less than you'd think, and generally only with stuff on the real fringes. But #1 is incredibly important, so when I say that the play wasn't very good, I'm talking about as a piece of theater for children, not in comparison to Streetcar Named Desire or anything like that.

The book writers set the play in Appalachia and put a weird framing device on the play where the brother & sister characters heard half the story of Hansel & Gretel in the very first scene, and then the framing device was more or less dropped. The rest of the scenes moved fairly ploddingly through the story points, without trying for any devices that might involve the (generally young--Fiona's was about the average age) audience. There were no lazzis involving bread crumbs or candy, the witch didn't do anything to spur jeers from the kids... to my mind, when you have a room full of four-year olds in your audience, the last thing you should be doing is training them that theater is all about sitting quietly in the dark and not connecting to what's up on stage. And the audience at the play was quiet.

So I was expecting Fiona, who's never been shy about sharing her opinion, to tell me that the play was a little boring. But she said she loved it, and when I asked her at the end of our weekend together what her favorite thing had been (I figured it was going to be our trip out to Fatty's for dinner), she said it was Hansel & Gretel. And she definitely understood what had happened in the play when I asked her questions about who had done what (even if she didn't always understand why).

Now, it's two days later and I don't still hear her talking about the play, so I think I'm right that the play didn't wind up leaving a great impression on her the way Max & Ruby did. Kids remember what they really like: you can show a group of kids Beauty and the Beast and My Little Pony's Minty Christmas and they'll swear they love both, but the Disney classic almost always winds up getting the real love. But it's clear Fiona thinks there's something great about sitting in an audience watching live people sing and dance and act out stories. Now if only we could figure out where on earth she gets that from.