In Performance at the National Arts Centre

Hello Everyone,

I haven’t been writing much, here or elsewhere, but I do miss it. I’ve been avoiding it mostly because I want to protect the munchkin’s privacy, but then I got out of the habit of writing posts featuring Arthur (about whose privacy I am much less concerned). I’m hoping to do some more of the latter soon, but in the meantime, I thought I would relate a recent adventure with the munchkin. A week or so ago, we had tickets to the hottest show in town. Not Beyonce, not Taylor Swift, but children’s entertainment superstar Raffi, at the National Arts Centre.

The show was 60 minutes long, which is approximately 57.5 minutes longer than the attention span of the target audience. About three songs in, the munchkin says to me “I’m done, Daddy.” Keep in mind, those songs are short. There was a lot of show left. After this, she spent a good part of it crawling around on the ground, under and between the seats. I cling to the idea that the NAC does a good job cleaning the floors in the amphatheatre.

Raffi did his best to keep the crowd focused, with a lot of audience participation. However, you’d be surprised at how hard it is to clap to a beat at a children’s concert. So many of them were clapping at random intervals, it really messes with you.

Pretty soon, the crowd was a roiling mass of movement in the seats and aisles. The very professional staff of ushers at the NAC had to politely inform the kids that they couldn’t climb on the stage or the equipment near it. Or each other. Also, they couldn’t block the aisles, or run in the aisles, and maybe shouldn’t really be in the aisles at all. Despite these issues, I suspect that if you’d asked the ushers, there were slightly fewer tantrums at this event than a usual performance at the venue.

It’s probably more accurate to say that most of the crowd was a roiling mass. The adult portion of the audience (the median member of which probably has a Master’s degree and a family income of about $250,000), were dutifully singing and clapping along. Basically, a bunch of adults paid decent money to go sing at a children’s concert.

Raffi has a deep catalogue of hits, with favourites in our home being “Wheels on the Bus” and “Baby Baluga”. I’d say about half of the audience grew up singing the latter. (I just looked it up and the whale that the song is based on died in 2012 at the age of 46, in case you wanted to feel old). He also made several jokes about the banana phone song. My favourite was when he held up a bunch of bananas to his ear and said it was a conference call. If you want another reason to feel old, consider that for kids now, phones don’t look like bananas anymore. The song made sense when phones had curved receivers, but I’m not sure that the munchkin will quite understand the reference.

While she did get to hear her favourites (I’m assuming she could hear them from her perch under her seat), at this event, the munchkin mostly liked “Shake Your Sillies Out”, because it involved moving around. Like her old man, she’s got a lot of sillies to shake out. The rest of the time, the performance was mostly lost on her.

The after party was the real hit of the day though. It turns out that the NAC is an amazing kids venue. A lot of wide open spaces, a staircase/stadium seating area that is super fun/sketchy to climb, artsy but combursome chairs that make a lot of sense to kids but no one else, and studio spaces with floor to ceiling windows looking out on Elgin. A lot of families let their kids run around, who quickly formed packs and roamed the place, burning the energy that had built up during the show. As much as I enjoyed watching an icon of children’s entertainment, watching kids run around with abandon, giggling and laughing is hard to beat. That was my favourite part too.

Another reason the NAC is a good venue? They know their audience – the snack bars had a variety of minimally crumbly options, with a selection of juices for the kids and wine for the parents.

Well played, NAC. Well played.

Wes

Some flowers I grew this summer, in a vase a friend brought back from Japan.