The Hills Are Alive, Well, With The Sound of Music

Pshew! Well, that was quite a week or so there. I've spent many hours now, watching my son Alex perform in a local summer musical theatre production of The Sound of Music. At least I wasn't involved with costume making this time around, so it was pretty hands off except for all the driving around, and finding dress black pants, shoes and socks at the last minute. It is amazing how quickly this show went together, they had 74 kids ranging in age from 6 to 16, and did four rotating casts all within 3 weeks. They did 8 performances over the last two weekends, and I saw 4 of them, oh yes I did.

I'm hoping to have the Lonely Goatherd song out of my head soon...

Alex's main role was Rolf, the seventeen year old, telegram delivery boy/oldest daughter's love interest/ and oh yeah, Nazi Youth. The best part was seeing him up there on stage singing and dancing to "I Am Sixteen, Going on Seventeen." Such a romantic song and scene, he really was acting too, and just going for it, which was great to see, I was really proud of him. No, beyond proud of him. A mother's prerogative, right?

After taking drama as his elective last year in middle school, it looks like he's got the theatre bug. Cool! I hope that he gets into it in high school, drama kids are always so much fun to hang out with.

Who would think my half-Jewish son would be doing this particular salute? Oh Irony how you do test us so!

Oh, and an aside, thanks so much guy in front of us, for setting up your giant videorecorder with its nice bright screen, so my camera can focus on it since it is the closest brightest thing...grrrr...

At least Rolf gets to make the right decision in this version of the stage play, and let the Von Trapp family escape from Austria over the border to Switzerland.

The relieved Rolf and Liesel take their well-deserved bow at the end of the show. Alex asked me why the grown-ups in the audience seemed to like this couple so much. The audience reaction of ahhhh and so on didn't compute for him. I told him that we were all remembering our first romances, the first promising blush of love to come, etc. and that was of course, skating a bit too close to TMI for him. So I stopped blathering about that and just said, we grownups were just remembering what it was like to be a teenager. He is of course a teenager, but a young one, and he is not yet 17 going on 18 like his character.

It is amazing to think of what just a few years does at this age. Terrifying too. Time to burst into a song you sing when you're too worried "when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things...etc..