From the page to the stage

What children’s books have you seen adapted to the stage?

There have been plenty of classics such as The Magic Pudding or The Water Babies, but what about shorter picture books. What does it take to make the leap from bedtime story to stage show?

The English production of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt recently toured Melbourne. The popular story can be read in a few minutes, but on stage it becomes a raucous, physical journey that is helped by crowd interaction and fun songs that keep it romping along at a good pace. A simple story perfectly reworked for the theatre, there should be more of it.

What other picture books would you like to see on stage?

Thin red line

Found this thin red line hidden at the bottom of a summertime garden.
Accident or design? We had wind and rain this week, so I like to think it was nature doing the yarn bombing this time.

Yarn Bombing

The street art movement of yarn bombing has spread worldwide in the last few years. Recently it filtered through to the school around the corner. The local kids may not knit or crochet, but they made up for that with imagination and flair as they stormed their school with wool.

The Preschooler School of Modern Art

Smith studied the 20th century Avant Garde at design school. Meanwhile Baker steadily amassed a personal collection of paintings to rival Peggy Guggenheim. We are both fans of sorts, so let’s get one thing straight: The old ‘my child could have done that’ cliché has no place here, all those crazy paintings are fine by us.

However, while looking through a box full of artwork by our prolific young girls the other day, I couldn’t help but notice that some images recalled the signature styles of certain modern masters.

So for bit of fun, here is the artist paired with their soul buddy plucked straight from the overflow of our fridge door gallery.

Dubuffet

Rothko

Warhol

Matisse

Klee

Twombly

Stella

Schlemmer

Cooking up a story

An exhibition at the Museum of Sydney has engaging displays about our relationship food culture through the ages. My favourite bit is a wall inviting people to ‘share thoughts, fondest food memories or a favourite recipe’. Drawings of cupcakes and declarations of love for one recipe or another sit side by side. There are shout outs for mum and there is disappointment at not being able to replicate a taste as experienced in the note writer’s land of their youth. Rich memories, the ingredients for cooking up a tale. What’s your favourite food story?

Telling tales

Six-year-olds learn about main characters and recognising problems and solutions in stories today. When I was six I was busy creating problems, not analysing text. Here is our six-year-old muse’s first attempt at a story arc:

One day the monster came.
He came on a sunny day.
He came from a castle.
He was fun.
He was a Dad.
But he was a monster.
It was his birthday.
But he was near road works.
He fell in a hole.
The end.

We’re off to see the wizard … again!

Each morning, after I ponder what shirt to wear for the day (10 seconds) and what to eat for breakfast (0 seconds) my attention turns to a more pressing problem – how many productions of The Wizard of Oz are being staged at any given moment? I began to wonder recently after attending an impressive production by a grammar school that takes music and drama seriously. Our six-year-old reminded me she had already played a witch, last Christmas (tick that one off) and got to throw apples at the only little boy in the ballet performance (that’ll teach him). Yesterday, I asked a father what he was doing that evening, ‘Off to see the wizard … Xavier has a part as one of nine scarecrows’. I pondered how many munchkins this might equate to as I drove past yet another primary school with boards displaying a stage production of the famous yellow brick road for ‘Four Nights Only!’

A friend recently remarked, ‘I never could understand why Dorothy bothered going back to Kansas’. Well, if he had bothered to read book six in L. Frank Baum’s 26 book series just like I hadn’t he would know that Dorothy did return to Oz, along with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, escaping the old dustbowl and Almira Gulch, the cranky windbag after the tornado left them mortgaged to the eyeballs. They were economic refugees, compassionately granted residency status in Oz by Princess Ozma and confronted new characters such as the paranoid Flutterbudgets and the anthropomorphic pastries of Bunbury. But I digress, the next time, like me, you wake up wondering exactly where the Land of Oz is geographically located, remember that’s it’s probably not somewhere over a rainbow – it’s somewhere around the corner.

A twisty tale

Neighbours used to pop next door and deliver one another home baked goods and the like, not so much anymore. Who bakes these days? What with all the food allergies floating about it’s hardly worth it. We’re lucky. Our friendly neighbour runs across the road and gives us balloons twisted into the shape of a snowman, or twisted into an oversized bracelet sculpted as an illuminated alien. I’ll take these offerings over surplus yo yo cookies any day. It does leave me wondering what kooky idea she will twist out of thin air next. Can’t wait to see it, better find out. Watch this space.

Seashells I’m sure

Many headed to sun soaked coasts or snowfields. Smith did a bit of rugged up fossicking on a winter beach during school holidays instead. A great place to find some quiet and let the imagination run.

Us

‘We aren’t family, but we come a pretty good second’ a kindergarten teacher told me.

We first meet flesh and blood, in the approximate order of: mother, father, sister, brother, grandma, grandpa, cousins big and small. Then we go on to meet Sophia and Mia, Hugo and Lexi, Morrissey, Remi, Benny and Tom. And our cohort becomes an extension of family, the only relations we know. This is a drawing by our favourite 6-year-old. It’s all 21 classmates drawn and labelled in a kind of family tree, albeit one with a very flat hierarchy. We are all brothers and sisters when we are six.