It’s Hard to Be Objective at a Children’s Pageant

Terror and pride do not generally join forces in a single body at the same time. But most parents know these duel feelings, especially parents who have attended school holiday pageants. There they have seen a tiny speck of a child--prim, earnest and dressed like a tulip--struggling on an expanse of stage to remember the words to a poem.

Or held their collective breath while a tangle of Sugar Plum fairies lurched from stage left to stage right, attempting to avoid the sort of incident that proves the domino effect.

During such times parents hustle to school auditoriums and try to stay calm, cool and parental. They will not, they tell themselves, mouth the words, hum the tunes or leap from their seats during the performance. They want to get into the spirit of the event, but it’s sometimes hard to express “Joy to the World” when one is sick with fear and anxiety.

What is often forgotten is that the children have been working on these productions for days or weeks. Sometimes there are even months of preparation, as in the case of one local production of “The Nutcracker,” the subject of our cover story.

Free-lance writer Leo Smith spent more than a week at El Rancho Structured School in Camarillo, as teachers and students prepared for a full-scale presentation of the Tchaikovsky classic.

“I joined them on the first day of their full rehearsals,” Smith said. “I could see a definite shift in their attention a few days later when the kids really focused on putting together a good show.”

Theater directors often say kids get a lot out of a theatrical production because a child’s imagination is switched on so much of the time and because children don’t differentiate between work and play the way adults do.

Of course, these same directors admit there are some problems that come from working with folks, especially the littlest among them, with somewhat shorter attention spans. Then there’s the old-fashioned rowdiness factor.

“There is always that anything-can-happen element when you are working with kids,” said Smith. “Karlene Hamilton, the director of the school’s fine arts program, told of a backstage fight between a couple of young performers during a performance of ‘The Sound of Music.’ She said one of the nuns beat up one of the Nazis.”

No fights broke out during “The Nutcracker,” though there was a bumped head and a tear or two. Smith found that the main problem in doing the story wasn’t with the kids but with himself.

“It was hard to be objective,” he said. “You kind of get emotionally involved and, like the parents, you want to see the kids succeed.”