I Heart Children's Theatre!

There. I said it. For all my can-we-please-just-do-this-right cynicism, I'm finding it an absolute blast to guide kids as they discover the world of the stage.

I'm in the middle of rehearsals for The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a mainstage production for an all-ages audience. The cast's age range is 4-18, plus a couple of adults. The littlest ones don't quite know how to focus, but they're having fun. The teenagers, luckily, have already discovered they love acting, and are willing to work hard without any teenage attitude.

One of them has hair I spent way too much time trying to achieve in 1987, and her parents let her dye it black. Teenage-me is jealous!

I'm not a teacher, but I have lots of opportunities to teach. When they ask how something works, I tell them about it. When I can, I involve them in little projects to give them more ownership and connection to the show (see also "I'm learning to delegate"). I'm trying to promote good rehearsal/backstage behavior, and that can take creativity. A certain six-year-old will now have a spike mark of his very own, because he's so good at staying on it.

We've just started playing a game called "Quiet Backstage Said The Stage Manager." If the room goes dead silent when I use my stage manager voice, they get a point. Five points will get a treat for everyone, and continued points through the run will get them another treat on closing day. Sure, it's a bribe. It's a group exercise, too: in order for it to work, everyone has to commit. It's also Pavlovian training (okay, Pavlov Lite), and they'll stay on the good side of stage managers they work with in the future.

Sometimes it's hard not to laugh at the things I'm trying to get them to not do. Last week, two Rats were about to tie their tails together. Not as a bit in character, but as kids being kids. I could barely choke out "Bad idea!" Because we don't want to break the costumes. And that would definitely have happened. And it would have been really funny, and laughing would just encourage it.

I'm working with another project called First Saturday Players. Four times a year, a small ensemble of middle-schoolers puts up a show designed for preschoolers. The Players do a few sing-along songs, and present a couple of short, but complete, stories. It all lasts about half an hour... and it's damn cute. The Players take their work seriously (but not overly so) and enjoy being on the grownup side of things, and the li'l punkins in the audience are just too much! I still don't want to see (or hear) much of them in a grownup audience, but when the show is just for them, they really do engage. And they'll probably be really good in grownup audiences when they get older, or want to try acting themselves, because they're learning to love theatre on their terms.

And you've gotta love it when a toddler says, during the interactive intro, "I saw The Nutcracker! In a real theater!" FSP is in the blackbox...