When I was very young, my Mom wanted to do something fun with her girls to balance the fact that Dad liked to take the boys to Twins and Vikings games and they golfed together. Dad would have been delighted to take his daughters to any of those events but we weren’t remotely interested. I did go to a Vikings game once at the old Met stadium. I think it was in late October, I remember leaves on the ground…I also remember being frozen during most of the game and drinking cocoa out of a thermos. I was a purple blooded Vikings fan in those days but decided that I preferred my football on television, at home where I could see the action and not freeze to death.
Golf lessons (even on one of the prettiest courses in the metro area) left me with the same impression.
Anyway, Mom wanted a girl’s night out so she took me and Margy to the Chanhassen Dinner Theater to see My Fair Lady. We were blown away. Live theater seemed like the coolest, most fun thing a human being could do. Everything from the sets to the lighting to the actors was fascinating to us. Mom took us back every year. Katie joined us when she was old enough to sit through a play without asking questions and freaking out (about 12). We made the yearly pilgrimage to the wilds of the western suburbs for years. Eventually, Margy went off to college and I got married but by then we had found all sorts of other things we could do together so our yearly trips to the theater ended. We’d seen Brigadoon, Camelot, Anything Goes, and Guys and Dolls. I have blurry memories of Finian’s Rainbow, West Side Story and Man of LaMancha but I’m not sure I saw them at TCD. I’ve seen WST and Man of LM so many times I can’t remember where and when I saw them all.
In the 70s, the theaters in downtown Minneapolis were ramshackle affairs. The Orpheum and State weren’t refurbished until sometime in the late ‘80s or so. I did see Annie for the first time at the Orpheum in ’77, some Beatles tribute show in ’78 and the Boomtown Rats in 1980 and I remember it all as being very dark and sinister. Not all gilded, glitzy glamour like it is now. You wouldn’t want to see the Boomtown Rats at the refurbished Orpheum; it would be like seeing Bernie Sanders in the Hamptons; wrong in every way. I think it may have been the opening of the Ordway in St. Paul that spurred Mpls to keep up. Sibling rivalry is not all bad. I’ve seen many shows over the river, too; Chicago, Rent and Phantom of the Opera.
Many years later, my sister Katie and I took our daughters to see Beauty and the Beast in Chanhassen. The theater itself hadn’t changed at all since we were kids. The show was wonderful, just the way we remembered it. The biggest difference was that there were now highways to get one from the city of Minneapolis to the town of Chanhassen. Back in the day, Chanhassen was a small rural town waaaay out in the country. There probably weren’t any actual dirt roads but it sure seemed like there were miles of them when I was twelve. I swear it took over an hour to get there from our house on Lake Harriet. Now, the city and rings of suburbs have grown to the degree that you can’t tell you’ve ever left town and suddenly there you are: At the Dinner Theater!
Last night it took me seventeen minutes from my garage to the theater.
I had been invited to see Camelot with my daughter in law and her mom and sister in law who were visiting from South Dakota.
It had been over forty years since I last saw King Arthur’s musical (the movie’s nowhere near as good) but I remembered that I loved it. When we were very little, Margy and I both preferred Arthur to Lancelot. We didn’t understand Guenevere’s choice, at all. Watching it now, as an old grandma, I still prefer Arthur. I’ve read accounts that portray G. as everything from a harlot to a young lady who simply fell for a kid more her age. Either way, she was a woman who betrayed a husband whom she loved and who was always good to her. Boo, Guenevere.
Lancelot can best be described as a boob.
Yeah, yeah, he brought a guy back to life but then he betrayed his best friend and started a war. Next time, keep it in your pants, Lance.
The theater was already decked out for Christmas with trees, greenery, twinkle lights etc. It was also packed, which was fun. The show was everything we’ve come to expect here in the Twin Cities, which is to say: great. There’s so much talent here, it’s insane.
All the voices were fabulous but what I loved the most were the costumes. I don’t remember so much richness and color before. Nimue and her dancing fairies were particularly imaginative and beautiful. I found myself wishing I could dress like Guenevere. Those fabrics! Those sleeves! Sure, they’d get in the way while I was painting or baking cookies but I’d look marvelous!
I’d forgotten that the play ends before the final battle. I got all choked up when Arthur sang his last song, made his last speech and exhorted the boy to “Run!”
And then the lights came up.
I can easily imagine the crowds going nuts when that first played on Broadway. It opened the same year Kennedy was elected president, so you can easily understand why Jackie compared her brief, shining moment in the sun to the hit musical. No one actually referred to the Kennedy administration that way until she did, after the assassination. Like Le morte d'Arthur, it was a tragedy and a study in myth making.
Just like now: Obama is trying to teach his adherents that they can move on without him so that he can sit under his own vine and fig tree, a moment alone in the shade, at home in the nation we've made...
I couldn’t help but wonder last night how long it would be before I could see Hamilton while eating my towering chocolate cake.
Somehow, I don’t see them doing The Book of Mormon in Chanhassen.
But you never know.