Thanks to the money saved up from a bit of blogging and the desperate plea of someone who works for us and who really wanted to see it but was too shy to go without kids in tow, we went to see Annie today 🙂 It’s a bit of a special one for all of us; I saw it on stage when I was little, the girls love the film and they’ve performed various of the songs at their dancing school talent shows over the last few years. Which they’ve done very well, but it made me appreciate today’s performance even more.
It was a really fabulous production, slick from beginning to end; we had the cover Daddy Warbucks but the rest of the main cast and it was just so perfect that it felt flawless and wonderful in every respect. The girl playing Annie was just incredible, a beautiful little actress and the most amazing voice and all the kids were brilliant. It looked gorgeous too, from the Broadway street backdrop like our house pictures to the fabulous internal sets.
There were a few things that struck me, as ever. We were at a performance filled with schooled kids and if there is one thing that proves, it’s that it isn’t home ed kids who don’t know how to behave in public. Grrrr. I spent far too much time politely asking the kids behind me to shut up and stop kicking my seat. I’d have been ashamed of my girls if they’d behaved like that.
The stage show is quite different to the film, with much more emphasis on the depression and the New Deal and the misery of 1930’s America. It’s interesting for it, but I did laugh at how the girls frame some of their history knowledge now.
“What’s Hooverville?”
“You know, a bit like in Doctor Who, the one with the Daleks and the Pigs, when they are all living outside in the parks because they don’t have jobs or homes….”
“Why did that happen to them then?”
“They had a credit crunch then too….”
Yeah well. Pretty much covers it 🙂
Do you think their behaviour was poor because they were schooled or because they weren’t with their parents?
Well, I don’t know. But I absolutely know my kids would not be chatting in normal pitch voices well into the first song of a theatre show, regardless of whether they were with me or not.
They were not terribly behaved, and I did scare the bejeezus out of one of them with a teacher voice straight out of my schooled days, but they were not behaving appropriately really. High spirits before hand is good, I like that, but chatting and kicking chairs in a show is thoughtless.