While this Thanksgiving holiday I have spent tons of time cooking, eating, drinking and enjoying my family, there is one thing that has been on my mind in a perpetual loop: this 40-second clip from the upcoming “Matilda” movie musical featuring the most gifted and expressive and enthusiastic children I’ve ever seen.
I’ll wait while you watch a second/third/fourth time.
I’m pre-disposed to be obsessed with this as it combines three of my great loves: a large scale dance scene, Roald Dahl (”Matilda” being in my top 3 books of his) and a beret (red no less!). At the same time, when I see children this talented performing, I immediately reflect on my own childhood experiences in musical theater where I learned that despite a lot of acclaim in my family talent shows, I actually was… just not a very good actor/singer/dancer.
It is unfortunate that in early years, you are either an artsy kid or an athletic kid. There are certainly other options but when it comes to activities in elementary school there are only so many directions to go in. I learned very quickly that I was not an athletic kid due to: low coordination, fear of getting hit in the head, generally slow speeds and also not caring that much. My own psychotic levels of competition take a back seat once I’m terrible at something. I also lacked visual arts skills and, if I had any, they were kept at bay by an elementary school art teacher who hated me for genetic reasons: my oldest brother threw her beloved puppet in the kiln.
Our local theater had a children’s program that my other brother participated in and when you’re bossy and like to sing and crave attention (see: Leo), theater can seem like a good fit. Unfortunately, none of those things actually relate to talent. Layer on top not knowing in fourth grade that theater (or at least ours) has a hidden caste system (pun INTENDED) and it’s a recipe for things that would negatively affect my self-esteem for years. Which is why now, 27 years later, I am processing the ways in which I was humbled by productions I participated in between 4th and 10th grade.
It’s very easy now, decades later, to see the actress playing Hortensia (red beret girl) in the above clip and say “ahhhh… that’s what real talent and natural charisma looks like” but in 4th grade when I was playing the role of “Unnamed Lost Boy” in “Peter Pan” — and accidentally memorized all of Peter’s lines and mouthed them on stage and was chastised — I thought I was being held back. The next year in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” I was an Oompa Loompa and while I was, fortunately, a Singing Oompa Loompa (vs one just working in the background), I have been told by a friend that there was still a subset of even better Singing Oompa Loompas who got extra singing time. I don’t remember but the PTSD may have blocked that for me. Moreover, that is when classmates started getting lead roles and I learned the true hierarchy of parts:
Lead roles (all double cast so twice as many kids could play them… there was an A Cast and B Cast but I do think they split the talent evenly such that one wasn’t better than the other)
Featured roles (you had some lines and/or solos and might be double cast but… we all knew you weren’t a lead)
Soloists — either dance or vocal
Whatever group roles were dancing the most
Other group roles created largely so they didn’t have to reject you from the show.
These kinds of rankings are not specific to the world of musical theater and live in many places. In my experience, while you’d ideally be great at acting, singing and dancing (I believe the term is triple threat), you could get a better ensemble part if you could dance.
For example, in a seventh grade performance of “Bye Bye Birdie,” I (then 5’6”) was put in the “Adult Chorus” and all my friends were in the “Teen Chorus” or the “Children’s Chorus.” The order was clear to all: Teen Chorus was the best because they could sing and dance. Children’s Chorus was likely second best because they could sing marginally well but not dance whereas Adult Chorus was the same but presumably by the time you were of “Adult Chorus” age/height you would have realized you were not talented enough to ever get a real part and would have quit.
I would say I was embarrassed but I’d honestly been so humiliated the year prior that just standing as a 12 year old playing a dowdy 1950s mother who couldn’t dance meant little; at least I was on stage. The year prior for “Oliver” is when I was smacked in the face with the reality that my inability to do a bell kick would permanently deflate my self-confidence. In normal productions of “Oliver,” the teens cast as Fagin’s Gang also perform the opening number of “Food, Glorious Food” as random orphans. However, in an effort to give out more parts and to keep the bad dancers out of Fagin’s Gang, our production made these two different groups and almost all of my friends were in Fagin’s Gang while I was an orphan in a part where most of the choreography was performed seated and once our lone number was finished, we were banished to the third floor and told we could watch movies up there so that we didn’t disturb the real actors (not their words, but an accurate interpretation).
I’d love to tell you I was able to direct this frustration and disappointment into a renewed focus and energy toward learning choreography more complex than a box step but I already spoiled the next year’s results.
Once I transferred to an all-girl’s school, I thought… surely now the parts will be rolling in as there are NO BOYS and I was tall enough at this point that I was a natural fit for any “adult male” parts. Alas, it was quite a mixed bag; high points included an impressive turn as a Helga, Queen of the Trolls, in a middle school play and the narrator in a homegrown musical (which I think was my best performance ever — I really loved the sense of authority that came with narration). Low points were very low: a random mom in “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” and an undertaker in some other play where I had to bind my chest and we weren’t allowed to take a curtain call because the theater director thought it went against the artistic direction she’d chosen.
In spring of 10th grade, I finally got the memo about my dramatic future after being cast as the Tin Man’s understudy in the student-faculty production of “The Wizard of Oz.” Our theater director gave 13 out of 15 speaking parts to faculty and, as a result, I watched my history teacher (and amateur local folk musician) perform and shadowed him. He never got ill so I ended up as both a munchkin and a citizen of Emerald City. That was the last time I graced the stage in a theatrical production (minus a turn as a chicken in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” that was done for local children in college) and I don’t anticipate ever returning.
In the years that have passed, I have accepted that the kids who got better parts than I did weren’t just the kids whose parents built the sets and made the costumes while my mother did the bare minimum amount of volunteering in the ticket office. They were just much, much, much better than I. I have seen them go on to perform on Broadway and get nominated for a Tony award and win major musical theater composition prizes. I’ve seen music videos they’ve produced and one even sang “Ave Maria” at my mother’s memorial. The truth is: I just wasn’t that good.
So now I can watch “Matilda” and be in awe of the talent and love that we live in a world where I get to watch Emma Thompson play Miss Trunchbull and children parkour off walls while singing and a girl in a red beret can inspire me to be a more polished version of myself. Thank you Netflix for this upcoming Christmas gift. And no thank you to the theater teacher at my high school who cast Mr. [Redacted] as the Tin Man. I have come to terms with some limitations and choices but I refuse to believe that that was the right thing to do.
A note: Despite my penchant for asides, it would have been too much to go down this road above. However, I recently made Jeff watch the movie of “Bye Bye Birdie” which… if you haven’t seen in a while (or ever) is INSANE. First, I had conflated the theater production and the movie in my mind so didn’t realize that Chita Rivera wasn’t in it and therefore Rosie became Italian and, second, didn’t remember that the movie makes Albert a former chemist (instead of English Teacher) thus removing that song and introducing a subplot where I think he invents meth and drugs both a turtle and a Russian ballet conductor? If you told me it was actually Ann-Margret’s only turn in surrealist theater, I’d believe you.
You’re going to need to give me therapy on this. I’m still waiting for my break.
I think the same is true on the jock side. As others have observed, if you live in a competitive suburban town, and you want to play basketball, or soccer, there are a vanishing number of sports - 5 to 12, say.