Kissing the girl under the sea
Or, guess who saw The Little Mermaid last night?
This was the annual show Avery does, and she'd sent an email saying she was playing several roles, including a grasshopper, a seagull, and…seaweed? When your friend says she's playing seaweed, you kinda want to know what it's all about. Also, I kept thinking she'd written a crab or lobster instead of grasshopper; not sure how I got those confused. But the only crab in the show is Sebastian, one of the main characters, and no lobsters, plus I picked her out amongst the 'hoppers. But more on that in a bit.
First, I had to get tickets. You can buy them online, since it's through her park district and you're essentially registering for a class. However, not only do I prefer to pay cash, but the price was $12, up from $10 in the past. I wasn't sure if that was an online fee or if the price had gone up. I wanted to go to the park district admin building on Monday between work and band, but the weather was so cruddy that I didn't feel like driving more than necessary…plus it was MLK Day, so I doubted they were even open. So, on Tuesday, I head on over there, only to discover a large sign in front of the door saying, nope! Actually, it said you could no longer register for activities there, so here's a list of the three buildings in which you can do so. Luckily one of them was down the block and across the street, so it's not like I had to drive miles and miles to get there. And, yes, the price has gone up to $12. Oh well.
So, last night, what to do to kill time. I hadn't run errands Monday and needed a few things, so once I got off work (an hour late) and had something to eat, I headed over to Target and wandered for a while. Mom likes to say "Hello, love!" and when I found a couple items with that saying on them in the Valentine section, I had to take pictures and text her. Yeah, I was one of those last night. I first saw it on a bag (and subsequently made that picture into her contact icon on my phone), and then an aisle or two over, it was on a shirt covering a little bird statue, aw, since you know how we are about birds over here. I wandered a bit more and got to what amounted to the Juniors section, I believe (it was adjacent to the purses and accessories, but not really with the rest of the women's clothes), and spotted shirts based on Stranger Things. Turns out there's a character with my grandmother's name, apparently. And when I went to investigate further, I found another shirt…and apparently another character has my grandfather's name, as the shirt basically said "Papa is the new grandma." Holy crap. You can bet I sent her a picture of that as well. Super weird. I also texted my father to say, if you guys are bored tonight, have mom check her phone. She did. She was amused. :) The only bummer is that it took a really long time for the texts to send. I don't text that many pictures so I don't know if it was because I was in the depths of Target at the time, or if the wifi sucked, or what. But, yeah, it helped pass the time.
I'd checked the website and there were over 500 tickets still available for the Friday night show, so it wasn't surprising to get there and find the auditorium not filled. No matter. It was kind of nice not having very many people around me--someone else joined me in the back row, and in the second act some of the ushers sat in the row in front of me, but otherwise there weren't any other audience members for another few rows. It was kind of nice. Laura has come to one or two of these shows, and I'm thinking when her daughter's a little older, perhaps she might enjoy them too; there were a lot of little ones in the audience. One girl, I'm guessing about six, was standing in front of her seat and dancing a few times, especially to the more romantic numbers, like she was imagining dancing with her prince. It was pretty sweet, actually. She was down a number of rows and to my left, so she wasn't necessarily distracting, which was nice, and there wasn't anyone behind her for a number of rows.
Having been to multiple shows in recent years, I'm starting to recognize some of the actors, at least by name. I'm actually not super familiar with the story, but I know the main characters like Ariel, Eric, Sebastian, Flounder, Ursula, and Triton. I was at an odd age when the movie came out, where I was a bit old for being the prime age to watch it, yet not old enough to go see movies with my friends like I did in high school. I've never really seen Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin either for that reason, only parts, yet by junior year of high school my friends and I started going to them and saw The Lion King, Pocahontas, and I believe The Hunchback of Notre Dame before I stopped watching movies with that group of people (around when I graduated from high school). So, I mean, I knew the gist of the story, but not the whole of it, nor do I know if anything's been added for the musical version or if it's all based on the movie. Anyway, the girl who played Flounder had been the little kangaroo in Seussical, and Scuttle, the main seagull, had been the big kangaroo with the pompom-style hairdo. Owing to his alliterative name, I'd recognized the man who played Eric from before as well. Overall I think people did a nice job. I think as the little kangaroo, the girl was kind of on the annoying kid actor side, but she did a nice job as Flounder. Ariel had a suitably nice voice, as did some of her sisters. I was really impressed with Flotsam and Jetsam, Ursula's hench-eels (what, they're not henchmen), who sounded really good together and the one of them especially has a rich voice. The only issue I saw with the main characters was Scuttle. The woman who played her clearly has the second-banana, comic-relief thing going on, but she was too over the top here. Like, dial it back a couple notches. It was really bothersome during "Kiss the Girl," which is a very sweet song where Eric and human Ariel are attempting to make a connection, and you have Scuttle being obnoxious and just ruining the mood. I get that she was trying to sing in character, which likely isn't easy, but not only was she screechy, she was also off-key. It was really bad. (The only thing that made it better was the little audience member dancing. She clearly wasn't bothered by it.)
There were a number of characters, major and minor. You had a group of six girls acting as Ariel's sisters, plus another six girls who were their attendants, then later as maids in Eric's castle. The maids were comic relief, walking with this purposefully bouncy step, which couldn't have been easy to do the whole time, especially since their torsos were pitched forward. It was an interesting visual, though, and overall it worked. You had all sorts of critters, like a small school of fish, and seahorses, and…I'm not entirely sure what all was in Ursula's cadre. However, there were a couple of groups of people who ended up being living scenery. This would be how Avery played seaweed. First, seeing how early scenes take place on Eric's boat, there were nine girls playing the water, holding blue fabric and swishing it back and forth. My goodness, that must be tiring. They were onstage for the first few scenes and I was relieved when they were only there for the top of the water bits; under the sea, or fully on land, they went away. Of them, eight were perfectly fine, and all swished alike, and had smiles on their faces. The ninth was the girl second from the left, who did not smile that I saw, and just kind of twisted her torso left to right, which was completely unlike anyone else and therefore stood out when she wasn't supposed to stand out at all. Uh…has anybody bothered to tell her that? They had shows last weekend; has she been doing this the whole time? I get that it's not super exciting and it's probably pretty tiring, but still. If you can't or don't want to do it, I'm sure someone else will take your spot.
The other main group involved three people playing, you guessed it, seaweed. They got to stand there, sway, and undulate their arms to simulate gentle underwater breezes while the scenes unfolded around them. Not especially exciting. However, it did mean they were onstage for multiple scenes in a row--at one point more than some of the main characters, since you'd have an Ariel scene, then a Triton and Sebastian scene, then an Ursula scene, that sort of thing--so this may well have been the most on-stage time Avery's ever gotten. That's pretty cool for her. The other two seaweed people were grouped together at the front of the stage, and Avery was opposite them toward the back, along with two people whose costumes included these vests with green lights that glowed and faded, glowed and faded. They ended up being Flotsam and Jetsam, and I didn't realize they were supposed to be eels until the second act when someone called them out. It wasn't until after the show that I went, duh, they're *electric* eels, hence the glowing, and they were hiding in the seaweed to spy on the others. Ah. Yeah, I'm a little slow. And, again, some people's costumes were obvious; some weren't. And I wasn't familiar with Flotsam and Jetsam already, but I liked them a lot thanks to the terrific actresses.
Avery was seaweed for the entirety of the first act. During intermission (when I checked my phone and got mom's texts), toward the end, I heard what sounded like people imitating the seagull out in the lobby. A minute or two later, here come four other gulls into the auditorium and walking down the steps to the sides of the stage. (Funny aside, the musical gives shout-outs to other Disney shows, including a one-liner relating to Mary Poppins and, with the gulls, having them go "Mine! Mine! Mine!" a la Finding Nemo's gulls.) There are still a few minutes until the show starts back up, and a grandfather and grandchild walk over and take a selfie in that corner, and the gulls start hamming it up in the background. Soon after, another adult and child go over for their selfie, and the same thing happens. At this point other people realize what's going on and soon enough there's like 20 people there with their phones--I wouldn't doubt they were the gulls' friends and family for the most part--and the gulls are having a ball. I'm guessing this was somewhat planned, especially given what the gulls were doing when they weren't photobombing people (pratfall-type stuff), but it was surprisingly amusing. And, better, when act two started and the other gulls entered, I got to see Avery in a different costume. This was how she ended the show. She did go back and forth to seaweed as well, and was a grasshopper during the "Kiss the Girls" scene (I'm thinking all three seaweed girls became grasshoppers, as there were three of them). Some of the other costumes included water-type flowers and coral. Avery would later tell me the costumes are made in-house, essentially, so all the headpieces and stuff were custom made for everyone. Wow. The one coral girl was really pretty, totally the costume I'd want, with a fancy pink headpiece and outfit. Flounder was pretty cute, too, as her headpiece involved this blue and yellow mohawk that continued onto the back of her costume. The mermaids had tails that attached to their skirts, like the bottom folded up to touch the waist, and clearly had a lot of sequined detailing. I think only Ariel's tail detached, so that when she was on a rock at the water's surface, her tail could hang over the side like a "real" mermaid's would. It was a cool effect, though. And, and, she had to undergo several onstage changes, including from a mermaid to a human, and from a human in basically a nightgown to a human in a beautiful dress. People and objects were strategically placed to facilitate that happening, and the first time I didn't get what was happening right away because the "water" was swirling around her (and, truth be told, I was looking for that unhappy water girl). I think there were inner and outer layers of water, churning to show her transforming. Later, when she changes into the formal gown, there's an actual screen set up next to her bed and the maids kind of stood around it talking as she changed. She had to have had something on under all her outfits but it wasn't obvious, so nice job on the choreography to make all that happen. She even had to get into character shoes, and that was made obvious by her not tucking in the straps to the shoes, which then stood out from her feet. But I know what a pain it is to get into character shoes, and given that she only had a couple minutes to entirely change, and on stage mind you, I'm not going to fault her. Speaking of shoes, the seagulls open the second act with a tap number.
Avery had let me know she'd be in the lower level lobby once the show ended. It took a couple minutes to get down there, and I was looking for her--she's petite, which doesn't help--and I could see this arm waving in the back of the crowd near the hallway to the backstage area. Eventually I saw the face that went with the arm and…well, there you go. Hello! She asked me if I'd noticed the scary situation at the start of the show. Yes, it was hard to miss--part of the flying scenery had come down somehow and ended up being at head level for the actors in that part of the stage, meaning it was clearly too low to be correct. Some of the actors in front of that area had no idea what had happened, and I think I was too busy searching for Avery to have seen it getting lowered from the rafters, but the reactions of the audience--and the actors, even--made it clear this was not supposed to happen. Avery said the actors were supposed to be making "happy chatter," but there was a bit of surprise in there as well. This was at a level where people could get hurt, so I asked if anyone got hit; one woman was hit in the shoulders, and a boy was hit in the head. I think they're okay, though. She wondered if someone pulled something incorrectly, at the wrong time, what have you. They still had four more shows to do (two today, two tomorrow), so hopefully it won't happen again. We got to talk for a while, but most people were gone when we said our goodbyes so I figured I should let her get changed. It was nice to see her, and it was a good show, so I had a nice time. And, well, I've had "Kiss the Girl" in my head more often than not today. :)
This was the annual show Avery does, and she'd sent an email saying she was playing several roles, including a grasshopper, a seagull, and…seaweed? When your friend says she's playing seaweed, you kinda want to know what it's all about. Also, I kept thinking she'd written a crab or lobster instead of grasshopper; not sure how I got those confused. But the only crab in the show is Sebastian, one of the main characters, and no lobsters, plus I picked her out amongst the 'hoppers. But more on that in a bit.
First, I had to get tickets. You can buy them online, since it's through her park district and you're essentially registering for a class. However, not only do I prefer to pay cash, but the price was $12, up from $10 in the past. I wasn't sure if that was an online fee or if the price had gone up. I wanted to go to the park district admin building on Monday between work and band, but the weather was so cruddy that I didn't feel like driving more than necessary…plus it was MLK Day, so I doubted they were even open. So, on Tuesday, I head on over there, only to discover a large sign in front of the door saying, nope! Actually, it said you could no longer register for activities there, so here's a list of the three buildings in which you can do so. Luckily one of them was down the block and across the street, so it's not like I had to drive miles and miles to get there. And, yes, the price has gone up to $12. Oh well.
So, last night, what to do to kill time. I hadn't run errands Monday and needed a few things, so once I got off work (an hour late) and had something to eat, I headed over to Target and wandered for a while. Mom likes to say "Hello, love!" and when I found a couple items with that saying on them in the Valentine section, I had to take pictures and text her. Yeah, I was one of those last night. I first saw it on a bag (and subsequently made that picture into her contact icon on my phone), and then an aisle or two over, it was on a shirt covering a little bird statue, aw, since you know how we are about birds over here. I wandered a bit more and got to what amounted to the Juniors section, I believe (it was adjacent to the purses and accessories, but not really with the rest of the women's clothes), and spotted shirts based on Stranger Things. Turns out there's a character with my grandmother's name, apparently. And when I went to investigate further, I found another shirt…and apparently another character has my grandfather's name, as the shirt basically said "Papa is the new grandma." Holy crap. You can bet I sent her a picture of that as well. Super weird. I also texted my father to say, if you guys are bored tonight, have mom check her phone. She did. She was amused. :) The only bummer is that it took a really long time for the texts to send. I don't text that many pictures so I don't know if it was because I was in the depths of Target at the time, or if the wifi sucked, or what. But, yeah, it helped pass the time.
I'd checked the website and there were over 500 tickets still available for the Friday night show, so it wasn't surprising to get there and find the auditorium not filled. No matter. It was kind of nice not having very many people around me--someone else joined me in the back row, and in the second act some of the ushers sat in the row in front of me, but otherwise there weren't any other audience members for another few rows. It was kind of nice. Laura has come to one or two of these shows, and I'm thinking when her daughter's a little older, perhaps she might enjoy them too; there were a lot of little ones in the audience. One girl, I'm guessing about six, was standing in front of her seat and dancing a few times, especially to the more romantic numbers, like she was imagining dancing with her prince. It was pretty sweet, actually. She was down a number of rows and to my left, so she wasn't necessarily distracting, which was nice, and there wasn't anyone behind her for a number of rows.
Having been to multiple shows in recent years, I'm starting to recognize some of the actors, at least by name. I'm actually not super familiar with the story, but I know the main characters like Ariel, Eric, Sebastian, Flounder, Ursula, and Triton. I was at an odd age when the movie came out, where I was a bit old for being the prime age to watch it, yet not old enough to go see movies with my friends like I did in high school. I've never really seen Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin either for that reason, only parts, yet by junior year of high school my friends and I started going to them and saw The Lion King, Pocahontas, and I believe The Hunchback of Notre Dame before I stopped watching movies with that group of people (around when I graduated from high school). So, I mean, I knew the gist of the story, but not the whole of it, nor do I know if anything's been added for the musical version or if it's all based on the movie. Anyway, the girl who played Flounder had been the little kangaroo in Seussical, and Scuttle, the main seagull, had been the big kangaroo with the pompom-style hairdo. Owing to his alliterative name, I'd recognized the man who played Eric from before as well. Overall I think people did a nice job. I think as the little kangaroo, the girl was kind of on the annoying kid actor side, but she did a nice job as Flounder. Ariel had a suitably nice voice, as did some of her sisters. I was really impressed with Flotsam and Jetsam, Ursula's hench-eels (what, they're not henchmen), who sounded really good together and the one of them especially has a rich voice. The only issue I saw with the main characters was Scuttle. The woman who played her clearly has the second-banana, comic-relief thing going on, but she was too over the top here. Like, dial it back a couple notches. It was really bothersome during "Kiss the Girl," which is a very sweet song where Eric and human Ariel are attempting to make a connection, and you have Scuttle being obnoxious and just ruining the mood. I get that she was trying to sing in character, which likely isn't easy, but not only was she screechy, she was also off-key. It was really bad. (The only thing that made it better was the little audience member dancing. She clearly wasn't bothered by it.)
There were a number of characters, major and minor. You had a group of six girls acting as Ariel's sisters, plus another six girls who were their attendants, then later as maids in Eric's castle. The maids were comic relief, walking with this purposefully bouncy step, which couldn't have been easy to do the whole time, especially since their torsos were pitched forward. It was an interesting visual, though, and overall it worked. You had all sorts of critters, like a small school of fish, and seahorses, and…I'm not entirely sure what all was in Ursula's cadre. However, there were a couple of groups of people who ended up being living scenery. This would be how Avery played seaweed. First, seeing how early scenes take place on Eric's boat, there were nine girls playing the water, holding blue fabric and swishing it back and forth. My goodness, that must be tiring. They were onstage for the first few scenes and I was relieved when they were only there for the top of the water bits; under the sea, or fully on land, they went away. Of them, eight were perfectly fine, and all swished alike, and had smiles on their faces. The ninth was the girl second from the left, who did not smile that I saw, and just kind of twisted her torso left to right, which was completely unlike anyone else and therefore stood out when she wasn't supposed to stand out at all. Uh…has anybody bothered to tell her that? They had shows last weekend; has she been doing this the whole time? I get that it's not super exciting and it's probably pretty tiring, but still. If you can't or don't want to do it, I'm sure someone else will take your spot.
The other main group involved three people playing, you guessed it, seaweed. They got to stand there, sway, and undulate their arms to simulate gentle underwater breezes while the scenes unfolded around them. Not especially exciting. However, it did mean they were onstage for multiple scenes in a row--at one point more than some of the main characters, since you'd have an Ariel scene, then a Triton and Sebastian scene, then an Ursula scene, that sort of thing--so this may well have been the most on-stage time Avery's ever gotten. That's pretty cool for her. The other two seaweed people were grouped together at the front of the stage, and Avery was opposite them toward the back, along with two people whose costumes included these vests with green lights that glowed and faded, glowed and faded. They ended up being Flotsam and Jetsam, and I didn't realize they were supposed to be eels until the second act when someone called them out. It wasn't until after the show that I went, duh, they're *electric* eels, hence the glowing, and they were hiding in the seaweed to spy on the others. Ah. Yeah, I'm a little slow. And, again, some people's costumes were obvious; some weren't. And I wasn't familiar with Flotsam and Jetsam already, but I liked them a lot thanks to the terrific actresses.
Avery was seaweed for the entirety of the first act. During intermission (when I checked my phone and got mom's texts), toward the end, I heard what sounded like people imitating the seagull out in the lobby. A minute or two later, here come four other gulls into the auditorium and walking down the steps to the sides of the stage. (Funny aside, the musical gives shout-outs to other Disney shows, including a one-liner relating to Mary Poppins and, with the gulls, having them go "Mine! Mine! Mine!" a la Finding Nemo's gulls.) There are still a few minutes until the show starts back up, and a grandfather and grandchild walk over and take a selfie in that corner, and the gulls start hamming it up in the background. Soon after, another adult and child go over for their selfie, and the same thing happens. At this point other people realize what's going on and soon enough there's like 20 people there with their phones--I wouldn't doubt they were the gulls' friends and family for the most part--and the gulls are having a ball. I'm guessing this was somewhat planned, especially given what the gulls were doing when they weren't photobombing people (pratfall-type stuff), but it was surprisingly amusing. And, better, when act two started and the other gulls entered, I got to see Avery in a different costume. This was how she ended the show. She did go back and forth to seaweed as well, and was a grasshopper during the "Kiss the Girls" scene (I'm thinking all three seaweed girls became grasshoppers, as there were three of them). Some of the other costumes included water-type flowers and coral. Avery would later tell me the costumes are made in-house, essentially, so all the headpieces and stuff were custom made for everyone. Wow. The one coral girl was really pretty, totally the costume I'd want, with a fancy pink headpiece and outfit. Flounder was pretty cute, too, as her headpiece involved this blue and yellow mohawk that continued onto the back of her costume. The mermaids had tails that attached to their skirts, like the bottom folded up to touch the waist, and clearly had a lot of sequined detailing. I think only Ariel's tail detached, so that when she was on a rock at the water's surface, her tail could hang over the side like a "real" mermaid's would. It was a cool effect, though. And, and, she had to undergo several onstage changes, including from a mermaid to a human, and from a human in basically a nightgown to a human in a beautiful dress. People and objects were strategically placed to facilitate that happening, and the first time I didn't get what was happening right away because the "water" was swirling around her (and, truth be told, I was looking for that unhappy water girl). I think there were inner and outer layers of water, churning to show her transforming. Later, when she changes into the formal gown, there's an actual screen set up next to her bed and the maids kind of stood around it talking as she changed. She had to have had something on under all her outfits but it wasn't obvious, so nice job on the choreography to make all that happen. She even had to get into character shoes, and that was made obvious by her not tucking in the straps to the shoes, which then stood out from her feet. But I know what a pain it is to get into character shoes, and given that she only had a couple minutes to entirely change, and on stage mind you, I'm not going to fault her. Speaking of shoes, the seagulls open the second act with a tap number.
Avery had let me know she'd be in the lower level lobby once the show ended. It took a couple minutes to get down there, and I was looking for her--she's petite, which doesn't help--and I could see this arm waving in the back of the crowd near the hallway to the backstage area. Eventually I saw the face that went with the arm and…well, there you go. Hello! She asked me if I'd noticed the scary situation at the start of the show. Yes, it was hard to miss--part of the flying scenery had come down somehow and ended up being at head level for the actors in that part of the stage, meaning it was clearly too low to be correct. Some of the actors in front of that area had no idea what had happened, and I think I was too busy searching for Avery to have seen it getting lowered from the rafters, but the reactions of the audience--and the actors, even--made it clear this was not supposed to happen. Avery said the actors were supposed to be making "happy chatter," but there was a bit of surprise in there as well. This was at a level where people could get hurt, so I asked if anyone got hit; one woman was hit in the shoulders, and a boy was hit in the head. I think they're okay, though. She wondered if someone pulled something incorrectly, at the wrong time, what have you. They still had four more shows to do (two today, two tomorrow), so hopefully it won't happen again. We got to talk for a while, but most people were gone when we said our goodbyes so I figured I should let her get changed. It was nice to see her, and it was a good show, so I had a nice time. And, well, I've had "Kiss the Girl" in my head more often than not today. :)