Everyday the Hope Gets Harder

Where do you get yours?

My oldest child is now eleven years old and spends about ninety percent of his time thinking about musical theatre.

I’ll be clear, this did not come from me. It seems to be deeply embedded in his personality. When he was three years old and we started having occasional family movie nights he always requested a “movie with singing”. We watched Disney princess movies (he loved them) and Mary Poppins (ditto) and Muppet movies (loved these too until he watched the one where Kermit has an evil doppelganger named Constantine which frightened him to an inexplicable degree and dampened his enjoyment of Muppets in general). But eventually we ran out of those movies and, in keeping with the demand for singing, I showed him the musical version of Hairspray.

By that time, he was already enrolled in a class called “Broadway Babies” on the weekends and was just about to start a Broadway summer camp where he’d be performing as one of Cinderella’s birds (see above). Hairspray amped up his passion for Movies with Singing into another dimension. He watched it repeatedly, and insisted on listening to the soundtrack every time we were in the car. It was his first, big musical theatre love and that passion just hasn’t let up.

Now there are Hamilton songs sung while he’s doing chores. There are allowance dollars contributed towards our National Arts Centre’s five-show Broadway On Tour package. And there are Broadway Nights Youth musical theatre singalong events.

Broadway Nights was originally created for grown up theatre kids who wanted to gather and sing songs from musicals once a month. The events were so popular they repeatedly sold out. They moved to a new, larger venue. And then they started youth nights. The first youth night sold out quickly and was so popular they did a second one several months later. Now the youth events happen on a monthly schedule and kids are lined up outside the doors half an hour before they open, hoping they’ll get to sign up for the song they want to sing.

When the doors open everyone tumbles inside, all the tweens and teens in their fascinating outfits, followed by their slower-moving herd of parents. I have learned to bring a book with me, so I sit off somewhere to the side and wait until my son gets through the sign up line so he can come tell me if he got the song that he wanted. His song choices are planned weeks ahead of time. He always has a few back up options, in case his first choice is taken.

The doors open about 45 minutes after sign up and the show itself starts soon afterwards. I sit at the back and try to guess which musical each song is from, since my knowledge, while increasing as my son’s obsession flourishes, is no where near that of most other people in the room.

Some songs I know because they are sung without fail at each event. For some others I can infer their origin from context when they’re from musicals based on movies I’ve seen or stories I know. My son always sits with his friends, so I can’t even ask him as the night unfolds. I have to save my questions for our drive home.

“What show was that song “Michael in the Bathroom” from?” I’ll ask, steering our car through the dark city streets while my son, still buzzing with excitement, holds my phone and ruins my Spotify algorithm with his drive home song choices.

“It’s from Be More Chill.” He answers without hesitation.

“Ah yeah, like that one the girl sang two times ago? What was that one?”

He remembers everything. “I Love Play Rehearsal.”

I nod. We listen to something from Hamilton as we get closer to home.

One of the rules of Broadway Nights- which is repeated by the hosts at each event before a single bright-eyed youth has taken the stage- is that everyone cheers for everything. Forget your lyrics? People will cheer! And someone will run up to you with the lyrics sheet on their cellphone screen so you can finish strong. Miss a note and get red in the face? People will cheer! And everyone will sing along (except me because I usually have no idea what the song is) to get you back on track. Get so nervous you decide to sing with your back to the audience like Natalie Merchant in the late 80s? People will cheer! And then tell you that you were brilliant when you’re finished.

It’s so wholesome. It’s more bright eyed and optimistic than anything I ever did during my teen years in the 90s, when it was cooler to be unenthusiastic about nearly everything (except for maybe The Smiths). I secretly would have enjoyed monthly meet ups with people who loved what I loved, but what I loved was mostly reading dense literary fiction that I was too young to understand and buying patchouli-scented second hand sweaters from Courage My Love on Kensington Avenue. There were no pleasant group events to celebrate those things.

At Broadway Nights I have cried, silently, in my folding chair in the dark when a slightly awkward fifteen year old girl belted out “Heart of Stone” from the musical Six. I have tackled my kid with a giant hug after he bravely killed it with his rendition of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from Little Mermaid. And I have admired the organizers, not only for their unbridled enthusiasm for the whole venture, but for the times they have gone above and beyond the call of event organizer duty and managed tense situations between kids, making sure everyone is welcome and everyone feels safe.

If you were to ask me if I am a musical theatre fan, I would still say no. I have now seen so many musicals in the theatre with my kid and my reaction is generally to be amazed and excited for the first three or four songs and then to lapse into a daydream for most of the rest of it, slightly bored and easily distracted. But I am a fan of seeing my kid and his peers so wildly excited about something, so positive and vulnerable and enthusiastic. It brings me hope in a world that sometimes feels hopeless. And I know that very soon my son won’t need me at events with him, he will take friends to Broadway Nights or to the musicals at the National Arts Centre. And I’ll miss it. Not the music itself necessarily, but the opportunity to be in a room with so many people who are sharing that kind of joy. Nice work, theatre kids.

September 2024 - Songs

The musical Six is a HUGE deal to this current generation of theatre kids. It started as a show at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now a massive Broadway hit. Every Broadway Nights, someone inevitably sings the absolute earworm that is “Don’t Lose Your Head” (the whole musical is about the six wives of Henry the 8th so the head loss is literal) and every single person in the audience (including me, I know this one, due to endless playing of it in my home and car) sings along. The song that made me cry, “Heart of Stone” is also from Six, but it’s a ballad, and it still gets me every time.

Hamilton, as you probably know, is also big with the kids. As with many songs from musicals there are pieces of certain songs that I enjoy, even if the rest of the song may stray too far from my guitar and feelings taste. “The Schuyler Sisters” is a favourite of my son’s and I find myself mostly indifferent to it, but I do always get goosebumps when they sing “look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now…” And since I’ve become a theatre mom I can’t get enough of Jonathan Groff (his Tony Award acceptance speech made me sob*) (“Jennifer, are you SURE you’re not a musical theatre fan because now you’re talking about crying during the Tony Awards…” “Shhhhhh.”) especially since my son performed his version of “You’ll Be Back” for a recital.

* “Even if they didn’t always understand me, my family knew the lifesaving power of fanning the flame of a young person’s passion without judgement”. I mean, come on.

And here’s the song “Hope Gets Harder” by Martha, who have not much to do with musical theatre at all, that gave me the title for this piece.

September 2024 - Feelings

A pair of pink-covered feminist non-fiction bookd this month! Beginning with Miki Berenyi’s memoir Fingers Crossed which is not available in Canada (sorry!) but which is worth tracking down if you’re interested because it absolutely blew my mind. My friend Megan brought it back from their trip to Scotland as a birthday gift for me, and that was just such a stellar friend move. Berenyi, for the uninitiated, was the lead singer of the British band Lush who received more than their fair share of brutal criticism and pre-internet trolling as they gained popularity in the 90s. I had no idea about all that until I read this book. My only knowledge of the band came from listening to their albums as a high schooler, and thinking that the Berenyi was the coolest looking person I’d ever seen. In this book, not only does she give a fascinating and detailed account of her time in the band, she also tells the story of her childhood which was at times harrowing. In both halves of the book she does a fantastic job of chronicling the complexity of both childhood and a career in music, resisting the temptation to paint people as all evil or all good. This is a refreshing, brutally honest, well-written book.

The Time of My Life by Andrea Warner is the latest in ECW press’s Pop Classics series and is focused on the story of Dirty Dancing. This was an immediate must-read for me, since the movie came out when I was an impressionable, suburban tween and was where I first learned about both classism and abortion. A real one-two-punch of enlightenment. Warner covers every possible aspect of the movie in this slim volume, imparting fascinating stories about how a movie like this even got made in the first place (seems that all that horny dancing really took the edge off the whole abortion sub plot). She also ranks the songs on the soundtrack with an admirable amount of detail, and discusses the movie’s lasting influence on culture. Absolutely worth reading if you’re a fan of the movie.

My own book, Make Me a Mixtape comes out in ONE MONTH, and is currently available for pre-order at whatever bookstore you enjoy hanging out in. You can also request copies on NetGalley for review if you do that sort of thing, and/or add it on Goodreads.

Thanks for reading! See you next month.

J.W.

Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites

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