marvels and muffinheads

Yesterday, during the second session, we made it through the whole show except for the last two and a half scenes.  That was in just an hour (and with "Little Mermaid" you really do need to do a music rehearsal- there is way WAY more music than in "Red Riding Hood" where we usually just started a run of the show first thing on Wednesday).  The kids are not our best kids ever.  They are not the MOST expressive or the funniest.  But they know their lines, their blocking, and the words to their songs.  Even the seasiders rocked out their lines, more or less!  So we were very happy with the work the kids did in the second session.

The sea horses...yikes.  I think all of the awesome went into the kids ages eight and up.  Let's just say that the sea horses have one of the easier parts in any Missoula play and I had to simplify it for these kids.  And cut the seahorse solo.  We'll just leave it at that.

We did three improv workshops yesterday with varying degrees of success.  The grade four and fives were fun, better than a lot of kids we've worked with in that age group.  They got through the object game (where you have to pretend that a pen is any object in the world, act it out and everyone guesses) quite quickly.  The grade sixes were NOT having it at first, but they warmed up eventually and we got to play "Mighty Sphinx" which is a really fun, and pretty relevant improv game.

Then there were the grade sevens.  If all of the kids I ever did workshops for could be like those kids, my life would be fabulous.  Those kids got through the object game in two minutes (that's the goal time that nobody every accomplishes), each team got like twelve people/objects/activities in character slam, answered I think four or five questions in Mighty Sphinx, and even had one hilarious round of party quirks in which one of the part guests, at the suggestion of a kid, hated his shoes.

Playing Mighty Sphinx with the grade sevens though got a little crazy.  Five students make up the sphinx and answer any question about life one word at a time.  So they have to think fast and work together to create a cohesive sentence.  Well one of the kids asked "Is there a God?"  And for a moment I let the five kids start to enter before I jumped in and declared the question inappropriate.  I mean come on kids, separation of church and state!  Do they have that in Canada?

Oh yeah and once I had declared that question inappropriate, some other kid tried to ask some crazy religious question pertaining to whether or not their was a greater power/afterlife.  Yikes.  At least these kids aren't self centered like the grade sixes who all wanted to know "why they were short" or "didn't like vegetables"!