OHHHHH....Klahoma!

I am sure I have mentioned in the past that my mother raised me on many the Broadway Musical.  My childhood was filled with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Cats and The King and I and The Fantasticks and West Side Story and....the list goes on.  And on and on.  So many that we just loved.  Being a very serious Spotify user, I created a playlist of some of my favorite songs from my favorite musicals.  I started with the basics - Oliver, The Music Man....and pretty soon I had a playlist with over 300 songs on it and it's still growing.  I have loved musicals, that is for sure. When I found out that a nearby junior high school was going to be performing Oklahoma, I had the immediate desire to go see it, despite the fact that it was a Jr. High production.  I had heard that the annual musical coming out of this school was pretty darn impressive compared to most Jr. High material.  And as it turned out, we knew several of the kids performing in the show, in fact the son of some of my closest friends had a leading role and they had extra tickets one night.  I talked Bitty into going with me.  Cap had already seen the play - his sixth grade had been invited to attend as a field trip and he didn't really want to see it again.  I have high hopes of Bitty following in my footsteps as a musical-fan, so I talked her into joining me.

The show really was very well done and I was quite impressed with the young singers.  Of course, they really were quite young so those singing pipes had a ways to go, but we really had a good time.  I love going on dates with Bitty, partly because she just blossoms when she gets one-on-one time with a parent.  I think I've mentioned that before.  It's such a treat.  And she followed the story and listened to the music a lot more closely than I expected her to.  In fact, as we were driving home she was asking about some of the songs and I felt it was time to let her know that Hugh Jackman, Wolverine Himself, had performed the part of Curly.  At first she thought I meant that that very evening Hugh Jackman had been there singing and she asked me, "Does he even GO to that school?" I quickly let her know that Hugh Jackman is a bit older than her father and is from Australia.  No, we did not see him sing that night.  What I meant was that he sang that role at one point.  In 1999 in London, not to put too fine a point on it.  I found the soundtrack on Spotify and let her listen to Hugh belting out about beautiful mornings as we drove home.  She ate it up.

I decided that she might enjoy seeing the video of that 1999 London production, and it turned out to be harder to get my hands on than I thought.  I was very happy to find a used copy of the play on DVD through Amazon and quickly bought it.  When it arrived I put it on for Bitty and even though I knew she enjoyed the music I wasn't expecting her to sit through the entire play and then sit through it again a couple of days later.  Even Cap was drawn in and watched much of it, and both of them have been heard singing bits and pieces of it from time to time.  Bitty even has a few whole verses memorized.  It is SO awesome.  At least I think so.  I'm sure not everyone would think that finding out your kids are fans of an old musical is that awesome but I sure do.  One person who definitely does not?  That would be Skippidy.  Every time she hears the first strains of "There's a bright golden haze on the medder....." she rolls her eyes and groans and begs us to turn it off.  So I do...and plot what musical to next introduce them to.  Into the Woods?  Peter Pan?  Fiddler on the Roof?  So many choices, so little time!