Sweeney Todd

Every night for the last two or three weeks, James has been going to school at six o'clock in the evening and staying until ten.

Why?

Because he's playing bass in the Orchestra for Sweeney Todd, of course! (And they've been rehearsing for the past three weeks.)

I didn't know Sweeney Todd was a high-school level musical. Did you? I thought it was more on the level of Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera, not Oklahoma! or Bye Bye Birdie or The Music Man. You know. Extremely difficult scores, ridiculously operatic singing, computer-controlled megawatt-range lighting, complicated sets requiring hundreds of stage crew to manage. That kind of thing.

Apparently, I was wrong.

We went to the opening night performance, and it was everything we could've hoped for. Extremely difficult scores, ridiculously operatic singing, computer-controlled not-quite-megawatt-range lighting, complicated sets ...

Wait a minute. Scratch that lighting thing. Change it to "computer crashed an hour before the show and lost all the programmed lighting sequences". Yep. If you an imagine that. The director got up on stage right before the show was supposed to start and announced that they had been scrambling to recover some of the lighting cues, and asked us to be patient because the show was going to have some glitches.

Some glitches. Yeah, right.

Actually, there were quite a few glitches, but we didn't really care. We were there to see our children in the show, and they could've lost the music, their voices, and all their memories, and we would've been happy to see them regardless. They are our children! They are perfect!

If you've ever seen the show on Broadway, or the movie version with Johnny Depp, you know how difficult of a show it is. The syncopation of the music is definitely not trivial. The actors really have to keep track of the beats and the counts and everything, all the while staying in character - complete with accents! Oh, and there's also stairs to contend with, since Sweeney's barber shop is above Mrs. Lovett's pie shop.

The cast did an amazing job, even if an occasional lighting cue went awry. They didn't let the opening night disaster freak them out. And the audience was completely blown away by how wonderful it was.

And Cheryl resisted the urge to shout, "There's my Jimmy!" when James was kickin' on bass.^[1]

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^[1]That's a line from The Music Man, of course!