Stardust in Their Eyes
Jun. 30th, 2018 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947Ten minutes ago, I saw you
I looked up when you came through the door
My head started reeling
You gave me the feeling
The room had no ceiling or floor.
Ten minutes ago, I met you
And we murmured our “How do you do’s?”
I wanted to ring out the bells
And fling out my arms
And to sing out the news
“I found her, she’s an angel
With the dust of stars in her eyes
We are dancing, we are flying
And she’s taking me back to the skies”.
(Ten Minutes Ago: Rodgers & Hammerstein – 1957)
An offer from Meg and Lou Samaniego to accept their tickets for the touring Broadway musical Cinderella at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre would have been tempting on its own merits – but offering 6 tickets so as to include our daughter Teresa (Prisa), her husband Joe, and their two girls, made it a necessity. Nothing can compare with the joy of exposing young people to their first taste of live musical theater, and the prospect of actually observing my two granddaughters experience it was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. Kathy quickly accepted the wonderful gift and immediately called our daughter Prisa to arrange the logistics of the evening. I merely sat back in my chair and allowed the waves of anticipated happiness to sweep over me. This would be a chance to relive the glorious magic of watching a quality musical through the first-time eyes of children.
I’d already witnessed Sarah’s reactions to animated musical movies by Walt Disney since she was 3-years old, watching Frozen for the first time. Her response was visceral and it was hard to keep her in her seat. She seemed to project herself onto the screen and was soon mimicking the actions and songs of the two lead female characters in the story. In the course of that year she watched the movie multiple times and memorized all the songs and actions. Other animated movies were watched over the years, but I couldn’t help wondering how she reacted to LIVE musical theater. Her mother and Kathy had taken her to see the Broadway productions of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, but I had missed out on those occasions. Sarah’s younger sister, Gracie, on the other hand, hadn’t yet seen a musical play, and had responded differently to the animated movies she saw.
There is an inherent curse and blessing in being the second child in the family. On the downside you will never be the FIRST to experience anything, because your sibling has already seen it and done it. The second difficulty is always being compared to your elder, and his/her development and achievements. On the upside, the second child has the gifted advantages of observation, assessment, and the choice to be DIFFERENT and UNIQUE from her sister. This is Gracie in a nutshell. She has never been “a little Sarah”. I stopped comparing them when Gracie was two years old, and she was foiling all the strategies and practices I employed and perfected with Sarah. I had to watch and re-learn with Gracie. It was as if she were doing it on purpose, all the while thinking: “If Sarah did this – I will do that”. It was confusing and sometimes annoying. So I was curious how she would respond to live theater for the first time.
I fell in love with live musical theater when I was 16 years old and a sophomore in high school. Oh, I’d seen musicals before, but they were always movie versions of Oklahoma, Carousel, and West Side Story. It wasn’t until a creative English teacher arranged to take the class to a local production of Meredith Wilson’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown that I was transported into the magical world of live theater. In a storefront space, accompanied solely by a piano player and drummer, a small company of singing actors transformed a tiny stage into multiple locales and settings with a rousing score of songs. I loved it, and never forgot the feelings and sensations I experienced. I stuck with local theater productions through college, seeing them at Royce Hall in UCLA or in Hollywood, like the Fantasticks at the Las Palmas Theatre. While dating Kathleen, I remember going to countless local musical productions directed by her sister Debbie, which included her son Jeff. I really didn’t pay much attention to touring Broadway shows until after the L.A. Music Center was completed in the late 1960’s, and more and more Broadway shows were presented there.
Marrying Kathy brought a whole new dimension to theater going. While I thought I enjoyed live theater, Kathy was passionate about it. She went beyond merely dreaming of seeing Broadway shows and waiting for them to appear in movies. She wanted to see them NOW – despite the ticket cost. If Kathy suggested a show we might see, and I mumbled back, “Sure, that would be great. Whatever you want” – she would have tickets ordered within the week. The first one I remember seeing after we were married was Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line, when it toured L.A. at the Shubert Theatre in Century City in 1976. A touring hit Broadway musical is a stunning production, and A Chorus Line didn’t disappoint. That evening Kathy and I talked about our responses to the play and promised each other to continue going. We also imagined, for the first time, the wonderful experience of taking our yet-unborn children to see a quality musical production while they were still young.
Kathy was already a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber before we were caught up in the excitement over the Broadway sensation Cats in 1982. We’d seen a production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Universal Theatre, and loved the music from Evita, but it was the arrival of the touring company of Cats in 1985 that got us thinking about taking the kids. We prepared them by playing a cassette version of the Broadway musical for a month until they knew the songs by heart, and then we bought the tickets. In those days, going to the theater was a special event. We “dressed up” in formal attire, dresses, coats and ties, and scheduled dinner at a nice restaurant near the Shubert. After the meal, we walked to the theatre, anticipating with growing excitement the story we would see that accompanied the songs we had learned. Tony at 7-years of age was more talkative, speculating freely, while Prisa, at five, was more subdued. Normally a girl who scoffed at dresses and “dressing up”, she was very acquiescent to our sartorial wishes that evening and had been remarkably receptive to learning the songs from the play. At first, Kathy and I had debated taking her, thinking her too young. But Prisa was always sensitive to disparate treatment over such special occasions, so we didn’t risk leaving her out. It remained to be seen how she would actually respond to her first exposure to live theater.
We were pretty high up in balcony seats (what Kathy would call “the nose-bleed section”) when the house lights dimmed and then went out, leaving only a single spotlight on stage to illuminate the vast darkness. As the Overture began there was a muffled murmur from the seats below and then a sudden, sharp yelp from Prisa, who was sitting in the aisle seat. Two red eyes danced in front of her, soon revealing a costumed catwoman kneeling by her side. Once the surprise of having two disembodied eyes floating next to you wore off, the costumed cats scampered away on all fours, letting the audience slowly return their attention to the stage. Kathy and I worried for a while, checking on Prisa to see how she recovered from her original shock, but eventually stopped when we saw how the songs, dancing, and actions on stage soon absorbed her attention. From that point on I stopped observing the reactions of the children and became equally absorbed by the play. That first theatrical experience with the kids was a tremendous success. They couldn’t stop talking about the music, the costumes, and those eyes. The only way we could quiet them down after we drove home and prepared them for bed was promising we would do it again. That happened 3 years later, when I took them to see Les Miz.
In 1988 when Kathy learned the dates of the Les Miz L.A. tour, she bought the Broadway album and made plans for tickets. However nothing prepared us for the power of the actual drama in combination with its music. I’ve rarely experienced such an overwhelming sensory and emotional musical production. We were literally speechless for a long time before we started talking about it. We also discussed whether or not the kids were ready for this level of dramatic involvement. We decided they were and then moved on to the next question of who should take them. Surprisingly (I thought at the time), Kathy insisted that I take the kids alone and make a special night of it, with dinner and the theater – just them and me. I reluctantly agreed. Kathy is the bon vivant, the talker in the family. She loves to chat, ask questions, and share opinions with her children, family, and strangers. I prefer listening, without volunteering too much information. I had mixed feelings about the evening. On the one hand, I wanted to share this powerful musical with our children so I could watch and measure their reactions; but on the other, I would be solely in charge of conversing and entertaining them on the car rides and dinner without Kathy. It was the first of many future opportunities I would learn to cherish and treasure all my life. That time together became a timeless memory of a fleeting moment in the lives of two children who were both growing up too fast. I tried “morphing” Kathy’s behaviors all night. When we dined at Harry’s Bar and Grill next to the Shubert Theatre, I talked about the play and started asking personal questions about them, what they were doing in school, about their friends, and their plans. It was a wondrous prelude and postscript to one of the finest musical productions of all time. What I didn’t do enough of during the actual play was to watch their faces and their reactions. I only regretted it later when Kathy and I recalled that experience and wondered about their thoughts and their memories of the evening. It was a regret I did not want to repeat with my granddaughters.
Sarah was literally bouncing with excitement when she spotted me walking through the lobby of the W Hotel, across the street from the Pantages Theatre.
“Poppy!” she exclaimed, running and giving me a hug. “We’re going to see Cinderella together.”
“Yes we are”, I replied, catching sight of Gracie who was joining us, followed by her parents. Inspecting the two girls, who were already bubbling over with anticipation, I saw that they were prettily “dressed up” for the theater. They were both wearing sleeveless dresses that evening, and abandoned the popular fad of wearing Disney-inspired princess costumes to storybook productions. Sarah wore a black dress covered with sparkling sequins of differing colors, while Gracie had on a dress with a pink chiffon skirt and black top, highlighted with a large sequined star in the middle. The only real difference was Sarah’s proclivity for adding stylish accessories to complement the occasion or setting – this time eye-catching rainbow sunglasses to crown her blonde hair. There is nothing more contagious than the excitement of children experiencing something new and novel, and their desire to share their feelings about it. They studied the sights, storefronts, and people who were making their way to the theatre, taking special note of other children and how they were dressed. I just listened and watched, taking photos with my cell phone and asking them leading questions to gauge their reactions. Holding out tickets, which Kathy had handed each girl, we entered the theatre and made our way to a private reception area that came with the Samaniego package. From that point on, the evening played out like a kaleidoscope of scenes, expressions, and heightened emotions. Sarah and Gracie sometimes look about as if they were entranced, or they would break into animated conversations with the other adults and children who joined us in the room. Once seated in the theatre, Gracie, sitting between Joe and Prisa, stared, wide-eyed at the stage and set, while Sarah looked around and began talking to the children or adults sitting behind or in front of her. Once the play started, they were both spellbound, rarely taking their eyes off the stage.
It’s a sad fact of adulthood and growing up, that we learn to generalize our experiences and forget them. We forget what it felt like to see and feel things for the first time – the first time we saw a blooming flower, a bird in flight, or the ocean, and wondering if the waves ever stop. With age comes our need to define, generalize, and categorize the things that we saw and made comprehensible, normal, and mundane. Yet by doing so, the events lost their wonder and uniqueness. I’ve discovered that the only way to recall these lost memories is to watch the open faces and expressions of children as they participate in those experiences for the very first time. Once the musical started I kept looking at the faces of Sarah and Gracie and tried to read their feelings and reactions. Their eyes were fixed on the actors, costumes, scenery, and staging. They gasped at the smoke-puffing dragon chasing the prince, laughed at the interactions of Cinderella with her stepmother and stepsisters, and were stunned by the sudden costume changes and transformations on stage. They also followed the plot line closely, and were able to describe to me at intermission where this Cinderella story deviated from the traditional one.
“Poppy”, Gracie exclaimed in worried tones at intermission, “Cinderella didn’t lose her slipper at the ball! She picked it up!”
“Did you see how the pumpkin turned into a carriage?” Sarah asked me. “It was like magic!”
This must have been the way Tony and Prisa felt and reacted when they watched Cats for the first time in 1985. Adult reality was suspended for a magical moment, and they were transported to a theatrical realm where youthful wonder and imagination prevailed. At the close of intermission I took Sarah and Gracie’s hands, and together we returned to our seats in that magical realm to watch the end of the play.
I looked up when you came through the door
My head started reeling
You gave me the feeling
The room had no ceiling or floor.
Ten minutes ago, I met you
And we murmured our “How do you do’s?”
I wanted to ring out the bells
And fling out my arms
And to sing out the news
“I found her, she’s an angel
With the dust of stars in her eyes
We are dancing, we are flying
And she’s taking me back to the skies”.
(Ten Minutes Ago: Rodgers & Hammerstein – 1957)
An offer from Meg and Lou Samaniego to accept their tickets for the touring Broadway musical Cinderella at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre would have been tempting on its own merits – but offering 6 tickets so as to include our daughter Teresa (Prisa), her husband Joe, and their two girls, made it a necessity. Nothing can compare with the joy of exposing young people to their first taste of live musical theater, and the prospect of actually observing my two granddaughters experience it was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. Kathy quickly accepted the wonderful gift and immediately called our daughter Prisa to arrange the logistics of the evening. I merely sat back in my chair and allowed the waves of anticipated happiness to sweep over me. This would be a chance to relive the glorious magic of watching a quality musical through the first-time eyes of children.
I’d already witnessed Sarah’s reactions to animated musical movies by Walt Disney since she was 3-years old, watching Frozen for the first time. Her response was visceral and it was hard to keep her in her seat. She seemed to project herself onto the screen and was soon mimicking the actions and songs of the two lead female characters in the story. In the course of that year she watched the movie multiple times and memorized all the songs and actions. Other animated movies were watched over the years, but I couldn’t help wondering how she reacted to LIVE musical theater. Her mother and Kathy had taken her to see the Broadway productions of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, but I had missed out on those occasions. Sarah’s younger sister, Gracie, on the other hand, hadn’t yet seen a musical play, and had responded differently to the animated movies she saw.
There is an inherent curse and blessing in being the second child in the family. On the downside you will never be the FIRST to experience anything, because your sibling has already seen it and done it. The second difficulty is always being compared to your elder, and his/her development and achievements. On the upside, the second child has the gifted advantages of observation, assessment, and the choice to be DIFFERENT and UNIQUE from her sister. This is Gracie in a nutshell. She has never been “a little Sarah”. I stopped comparing them when Gracie was two years old, and she was foiling all the strategies and practices I employed and perfected with Sarah. I had to watch and re-learn with Gracie. It was as if she were doing it on purpose, all the while thinking: “If Sarah did this – I will do that”. It was confusing and sometimes annoying. So I was curious how she would respond to live theater for the first time.
I fell in love with live musical theater when I was 16 years old and a sophomore in high school. Oh, I’d seen musicals before, but they were always movie versions of Oklahoma, Carousel, and West Side Story. It wasn’t until a creative English teacher arranged to take the class to a local production of Meredith Wilson’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown that I was transported into the magical world of live theater. In a storefront space, accompanied solely by a piano player and drummer, a small company of singing actors transformed a tiny stage into multiple locales and settings with a rousing score of songs. I loved it, and never forgot the feelings and sensations I experienced. I stuck with local theater productions through college, seeing them at Royce Hall in UCLA or in Hollywood, like the Fantasticks at the Las Palmas Theatre. While dating Kathleen, I remember going to countless local musical productions directed by her sister Debbie, which included her son Jeff. I really didn’t pay much attention to touring Broadway shows until after the L.A. Music Center was completed in the late 1960’s, and more and more Broadway shows were presented there.
Marrying Kathy brought a whole new dimension to theater going. While I thought I enjoyed live theater, Kathy was passionate about it. She went beyond merely dreaming of seeing Broadway shows and waiting for them to appear in movies. She wanted to see them NOW – despite the ticket cost. If Kathy suggested a show we might see, and I mumbled back, “Sure, that would be great. Whatever you want” – she would have tickets ordered within the week. The first one I remember seeing after we were married was Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line, when it toured L.A. at the Shubert Theatre in Century City in 1976. A touring hit Broadway musical is a stunning production, and A Chorus Line didn’t disappoint. That evening Kathy and I talked about our responses to the play and promised each other to continue going. We also imagined, for the first time, the wonderful experience of taking our yet-unborn children to see a quality musical production while they were still young.
Kathy was already a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber before we were caught up in the excitement over the Broadway sensation Cats in 1982. We’d seen a production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Universal Theatre, and loved the music from Evita, but it was the arrival of the touring company of Cats in 1985 that got us thinking about taking the kids. We prepared them by playing a cassette version of the Broadway musical for a month until they knew the songs by heart, and then we bought the tickets. In those days, going to the theater was a special event. We “dressed up” in formal attire, dresses, coats and ties, and scheduled dinner at a nice restaurant near the Shubert. After the meal, we walked to the theatre, anticipating with growing excitement the story we would see that accompanied the songs we had learned. Tony at 7-years of age was more talkative, speculating freely, while Prisa, at five, was more subdued. Normally a girl who scoffed at dresses and “dressing up”, she was very acquiescent to our sartorial wishes that evening and had been remarkably receptive to learning the songs from the play. At first, Kathy and I had debated taking her, thinking her too young. But Prisa was always sensitive to disparate treatment over such special occasions, so we didn’t risk leaving her out. It remained to be seen how she would actually respond to her first exposure to live theater.
We were pretty high up in balcony seats (what Kathy would call “the nose-bleed section”) when the house lights dimmed and then went out, leaving only a single spotlight on stage to illuminate the vast darkness. As the Overture began there was a muffled murmur from the seats below and then a sudden, sharp yelp from Prisa, who was sitting in the aisle seat. Two red eyes danced in front of her, soon revealing a costumed catwoman kneeling by her side. Once the surprise of having two disembodied eyes floating next to you wore off, the costumed cats scampered away on all fours, letting the audience slowly return their attention to the stage. Kathy and I worried for a while, checking on Prisa to see how she recovered from her original shock, but eventually stopped when we saw how the songs, dancing, and actions on stage soon absorbed her attention. From that point on I stopped observing the reactions of the children and became equally absorbed by the play. That first theatrical experience with the kids was a tremendous success. They couldn’t stop talking about the music, the costumes, and those eyes. The only way we could quiet them down after we drove home and prepared them for bed was promising we would do it again. That happened 3 years later, when I took them to see Les Miz.
In 1988 when Kathy learned the dates of the Les Miz L.A. tour, she bought the Broadway album and made plans for tickets. However nothing prepared us for the power of the actual drama in combination with its music. I’ve rarely experienced such an overwhelming sensory and emotional musical production. We were literally speechless for a long time before we started talking about it. We also discussed whether or not the kids were ready for this level of dramatic involvement. We decided they were and then moved on to the next question of who should take them. Surprisingly (I thought at the time), Kathy insisted that I take the kids alone and make a special night of it, with dinner and the theater – just them and me. I reluctantly agreed. Kathy is the bon vivant, the talker in the family. She loves to chat, ask questions, and share opinions with her children, family, and strangers. I prefer listening, without volunteering too much information. I had mixed feelings about the evening. On the one hand, I wanted to share this powerful musical with our children so I could watch and measure their reactions; but on the other, I would be solely in charge of conversing and entertaining them on the car rides and dinner without Kathy. It was the first of many future opportunities I would learn to cherish and treasure all my life. That time together became a timeless memory of a fleeting moment in the lives of two children who were both growing up too fast. I tried “morphing” Kathy’s behaviors all night. When we dined at Harry’s Bar and Grill next to the Shubert Theatre, I talked about the play and started asking personal questions about them, what they were doing in school, about their friends, and their plans. It was a wondrous prelude and postscript to one of the finest musical productions of all time. What I didn’t do enough of during the actual play was to watch their faces and their reactions. I only regretted it later when Kathy and I recalled that experience and wondered about their thoughts and their memories of the evening. It was a regret I did not want to repeat with my granddaughters.
Sarah was literally bouncing with excitement when she spotted me walking through the lobby of the W Hotel, across the street from the Pantages Theatre.
“Poppy!” she exclaimed, running and giving me a hug. “We’re going to see Cinderella together.”
“Yes we are”, I replied, catching sight of Gracie who was joining us, followed by her parents. Inspecting the two girls, who were already bubbling over with anticipation, I saw that they were prettily “dressed up” for the theater. They were both wearing sleeveless dresses that evening, and abandoned the popular fad of wearing Disney-inspired princess costumes to storybook productions. Sarah wore a black dress covered with sparkling sequins of differing colors, while Gracie had on a dress with a pink chiffon skirt and black top, highlighted with a large sequined star in the middle. The only real difference was Sarah’s proclivity for adding stylish accessories to complement the occasion or setting – this time eye-catching rainbow sunglasses to crown her blonde hair. There is nothing more contagious than the excitement of children experiencing something new and novel, and their desire to share their feelings about it. They studied the sights, storefronts, and people who were making their way to the theatre, taking special note of other children and how they were dressed. I just listened and watched, taking photos with my cell phone and asking them leading questions to gauge their reactions. Holding out tickets, which Kathy had handed each girl, we entered the theatre and made our way to a private reception area that came with the Samaniego package. From that point on, the evening played out like a kaleidoscope of scenes, expressions, and heightened emotions. Sarah and Gracie sometimes look about as if they were entranced, or they would break into animated conversations with the other adults and children who joined us in the room. Once seated in the theatre, Gracie, sitting between Joe and Prisa, stared, wide-eyed at the stage and set, while Sarah looked around and began talking to the children or adults sitting behind or in front of her. Once the play started, they were both spellbound, rarely taking their eyes off the stage.
It’s a sad fact of adulthood and growing up, that we learn to generalize our experiences and forget them. We forget what it felt like to see and feel things for the first time – the first time we saw a blooming flower, a bird in flight, or the ocean, and wondering if the waves ever stop. With age comes our need to define, generalize, and categorize the things that we saw and made comprehensible, normal, and mundane. Yet by doing so, the events lost their wonder and uniqueness. I’ve discovered that the only way to recall these lost memories is to watch the open faces and expressions of children as they participate in those experiences for the very first time. Once the musical started I kept looking at the faces of Sarah and Gracie and tried to read their feelings and reactions. Their eyes were fixed on the actors, costumes, scenery, and staging. They gasped at the smoke-puffing dragon chasing the prince, laughed at the interactions of Cinderella with her stepmother and stepsisters, and were stunned by the sudden costume changes and transformations on stage. They also followed the plot line closely, and were able to describe to me at intermission where this Cinderella story deviated from the traditional one.
“Poppy”, Gracie exclaimed in worried tones at intermission, “Cinderella didn’t lose her slipper at the ball! She picked it up!”
“Did you see how the pumpkin turned into a carriage?” Sarah asked me. “It was like magic!”
This must have been the way Tony and Prisa felt and reacted when they watched Cats for the first time in 1985. Adult reality was suspended for a magical moment, and they were transported to a theatrical realm where youthful wonder and imagination prevailed. At the close of intermission I took Sarah and Gracie’s hands, and together we returned to our seats in that magical realm to watch the end of the play.
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