A Trip to the Theatre

Over the weekend our family went with some friends to a little children's community theatre production of "Narnia"; a musical adaptation of C.S. Lewis's book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was....well...comically bad. I hate to even say it, because we all THOROUGHLY enjoyed ourselves (Evy especially, this being her "maiden voyage" into theatre.) but all of the adults spent most of the show stifling very inappropriate laughter. For instance, near the end of the story the fierce lion Aslan, the hero, lies dead on the stone table having sacrificed himself in place of another. When he was put on the table, his lion head almost completely fell off. (Did I mention it was a high school mascot lion???) Then, as he lay dead, someone left the knife on his belly (a somewhat substantial one) and we watched it...up...down...up...down with every breath the dead lion took. Our daughters were mesmerized and we were hiding our faces in our coats trying to keep quite lest the parents of the lion happened to be sitting behind us.
Evy, though, noticed none of the, shall we say, less polished moments. She was enrapt from start to finish. she wanted to know everything. She called out "What are those, squirrels?" and a hearty "Hello Squirrels!" when Mr. And Mrs. Beaver came on stage. She then leapt up from her seat and joined in as they did a bit of a tap dance.
She yelled "Nock it off!" when the White Witch was picking on her dwarf. She declared "I'll stop her! I will save the day!" when it looked like the white witch might triumph. And, all our favorite, when Aslan the lion hadn't yet made his appearance into Narnia she wondered (very loudly) "hey mom, where's Asthma?"

So, pretty much the entire performance was spent concealing giggles of one kind or another. When we met the cast, after the show, Evy's curiosity and inquisitiveness continued. She met Mrs. Beaver by standing inches from her beaver belly and saying "I'm EVY!" She walked up to the White Witch and asked, "You're not really that mean, right?" And finally, when we found Aslan sans head, she wouldn't even talk to him. With a disdainful look on her three-year-old face she turned and said, "Oh Mommy, that's NOT Asthma."

It was probably the worst play I've ever seen, but quite possibly my very favorite!