Yopp!

Tonight me, Jarrod, and my mom and dad went to The Muny to see Seussical.

When The Muny announced their 2014 season earlier this year, I was excited to see this show in the lineup. However, I saw it was at the end of July, which meant it would probably be miserably hot so I didn't want to buy tickets until later, maybe even day of, waiting to see how the weather was. We have had some incredible weather, turns out, and tonight was no exception. I meticulously picked which show we would go see based on the forecast on Monday. I think it barely reached 82 today, was cloudy most of the day, with low low humidity. It was an AWESOME night to spend outside!

Seussical is a show near and dear to my heart for many reasons. First of all, it was my last high school theater show. Our school always did a play in the fall, a smaller play during the winter, and a musical in the spring. Throughout my high school theater career, I was in every show in some manner in tech or on stage, but in reality I only was on stage in the musical my Freshman year (and the second time, when we took that show to the State Conference) and my Senior year.

When I was a Freshman, we did Schoolhouse Rock, which was fantastically fun. It is a play full of all of those educational songs I knew from my childhood, which would air promptly at 10:57 am right before Looney Tunes at 11 am on Saturday morning cartoons (don't get me started on how much better those cartoons were than the ones kids are stuck with these days!) I was part of the ensemble and also had my own song as the "Figure Eight" girl.

Senior year we did Seussical, which is also a super fun show. If you're unfamiliar with it, it is many, many Dr. Seuss stories squashed into one musical. And I really mean that... I've discovered more and more stories that are in there since then, even if it's just for one line. It's quite impressive, the writing that went into it. I was cast as Jojo, the boy who thinks too many thinks in Whoville. Yes, I was a boy. I fooled some people, too, into thinking I was a boy (the bonus part is my name could be either a girl or a boy's name, so just reading my name in the program didn't give away my gender either! [best joke on the audience ever.])

Tonight's production also had me excited because it starred John Tartaglia as the Cat in the Hat. I saw him on Broadway in the original cast of Avenue Q back in 2008, and he was so good. Plus he's been on Sesame Street often, and we all know I have a soft spot for anything Sesame Street or Muppets-related.

He didn't disappoint and was superb as the Cat. He worked in so many original little jokes too, about Oprah, about Lindbergh, about The Muny. But the show overall was so much fun, they did a really great job.

I picked out some great seats too because, turns out, they were right underneath the fans. It's been a while since I've been to The Muny, but they replaced the fans there! The new ones don't make any noise like the olds ones did, so these can stay on the entire time. So not only was it cool air, we also had a steady breeze. We had no one sitting beside us, we were on an aisle, no one was in the row directly in front of us, but unfortunately we had a couple noisy ten-year-olds behind us.

They started out being cute. Before the show and during intermission, they were making me almost laugh. During intermission they were talking about time travel, almost word for word: "...It would have to be two times the speed of light! In theory it takes the same amount of energy to go into the future as it does to go in to the past, but in reality it takes more energy to go into the future." Do you remember the nerd kid from Boy Meets World, I think his name was Stewart? That is exactly how this one kid talked. Unfortunately, these two would not shut up even during the show, and the mom gave up trying to quiet them after Act 1. It would have been easier to overlook if they weren't ten, but they were well of the age to know how to act in a theater. So that was unfortunate, because they really ruined some moments of the show that were heartfelt.

But, it was still a great show. It brought back so many memories, and it was really, really hard not to sing along (Jarrod jokingly left open his page of the program that went over theater etiquette, and one of the points said Please do not sing along with the show. Haha!)

Hat's off!

PS—The "Yopp" title is a special word Jojo thinks up to save the Whos. It's a very big moment in the show, and I got to yell that word! It's fun.