Doin' it for the kids

I apologise for the lack of bloggage recently, I've been working hard to bring the magic of theatre into the lives of children on the North Shore by dressing up as a tree, river, fish, dancing flower and baby bear. I also jiggled a soft toy bunny with a Welsh accent behind a bush. Here's a photo of me as baby bear with the actual set in the background. I look a bit like what you might get if that horrible man Jay Kay from that horrible band Jamiroquai rooted a horrible raccoon.

I've done a lot of children's theatre. My first show was a variation on the traditional Goldilocks story called 'Goldilocks and the Three little Rumpelstiltskins'. I can't remember much about it except that it was done on a budget and I played all three bears with a different type of fur coat to indicate which bear I was. The brown fur coat was for the grizzly bear who was angry, the white fur coat was for the polar bear who was cold and the black fur coat was for the black bear who was...black. He entered to hip hop music and sounded like what you might get if Flavour Flav had rooted Chris Rock while Gary Coleman stood by with a turkey baster and a pipette of his own duck butter. You can imagine how a skinny white guy pretending to be a bear of African American origin went down in early 1990's Christchurch...they loved it.

I'm still amazed we didn't receive any complaints. A few years ago I was playing the Hare in 'The Hare and the Tortoise' and I based my accent on Al Pacino in 'Scent of a Woman' and said 'Hoo-ah!' whenever I couldn't remember my next line. After the show an American woman came up to me while we were being bum-rushed by the kids in the foyer and whispered in my ear something like, "Black people can be good people to, you shouldn't reinforce racial stereotypes to small children." I stammered something like, "I'm a hare, not a black person and I'm meant to be Al Pacino", but she had gone before I could finish. You could hardly call the hare a bad person either, sure he was boastful but he got his comeupance and apologised to the tortoise at the end and joined in on the final song. The kids loved the hare as well, I was swamped with sticky children wanting to pull my tail and sign their stubs.

Children are great fun to perform to. It's just like performing to a bunch of really drunk adults. They yell stuff out that makes no sense, scream and cry for no reason, start talking when they are bored, wet themselves and fall asleep. They have no concept of how one should behave in a theatre which is fantastic. I've been to so much dreadful theatre where the audience sits in silence bored beyond belief, gives the cast a big clap at the end, tells their friends they came with afterwards how wonderful it was and then returns home feeling miserable having wasted $50 on two hours of self-indulgent thespwank. Children are brutally honest. Some memorable criticisms of my performance include, "You can't sing.", "You're dumb.", "You look like a girl." and "My daddy wants to kill you."

What children possess in abundance is imagination and a wonderful ability to completely suspend disbelief. If you've got the acting chops you can put on a different wig and you are instantly a different person. They just go along with it. I made what is possibly the worst prop in the history of New Zealand professional theatre, a giant hand painted on floppy cardboard glued to two bamboo sticks that I jiggled onstage while yelling 'Fee Fi Foo Fum' and the kids shat themselves. The management of the theatre also shat themselves and gave us a professional props person from then on so it was all worth it.

I did have a bit of a moment last week when I realised I was 35 years old and playing a baby bear. This was followed up by another moment when I was waving blue fabric up and down being a river while bubbles fell on my head. This was followed up by yet another moment when I was dressed as a tree who looked like he was giving a blowie. You cannot help but question your career choice at moments like these and ask things like, "What am I doing?", "Where is my life going?" and "Why do I look like I'm sucking cock?". But then you remember that you are getting paid to work with fantastic people to make kids laugh and you're not working at McDonalds or a call-centre selling wine.

At those moments I also think of the best moment of my acting career so far. I was the Big Bad Wolf in 'The Three Little Pigs'. He was an East London wide-wolf but sang like an asthmatic Elvis Presley. This is no way implies that people from East London are big or bad. My big number was about how much I loved eating bacon sandwiches however by the end of the show I remained hungry. We were in the foyer afterwards signing and hugging when this wee boy, maybe 4 or 5 years old, came up and handed me four small bacon sandwiches with their crusts cut off wrapped in glad-wrap. His grandmother explained that he had been to see the show yesterday and was very upset the wolf never got his dinner. That night he rang her to make some bacon sandwiches and bring him back the next day so he could give them to me. My jaded old luvvie heart melted and I gave him a big hug and felt better about everything. Hoo-ah!