If You Give A Llama A Drama

Yesterday, my husband and I took the girls to the Arts Center’s children’s theatre to see If You Give A Mouse A Cookie based on the book by Laura Joffee Numeroff. It was a really cute and well-staged production with lots of physicality and visual humor to entertain both the children in the audience and their parents.

There’s only one problem. It frightened our youngest daughter and made her cry.

Now for those of you who are familiar with If You Give A Mouse A Cookie – or any of the others in the series, such as If You Give A Pig A Pancake and If You Give A Moose A Muffin – you know this is not a scary story. It’s much more Dr. Seuss than Stephen King.

However, we sat on the front row to ensure our girls could see the play, and I guess being that close to the action on stage was just too much for our little one. The props and set were greatly oversized in order to make the mouse (portrayed by a full-grown woman) seem very small. When the mouse tried to lift a giant straw and began swinging it around, our daughter thought it was going to hit her in the audience and began crying to the point we had to take her out of the theatre.

Our older daughter – who in general is much more logical – totally understood that these people were actors and the props were overdone simply for effect. She laughed and participated throughout the performance. Our younger daughter, however – the one with the huge imagination (remember from a recent post how she loves to role play and pretend?) – could never quite separate art from reality. Perhaps her imagination is TOO big, which allowed her to completely believe the story – a story which ultimately scared her.

Fortunately, our youngest decided she could watch the rest of the show safely from a distance in the back of the theatre, and she’s been talking about how much she liked the production all day. But I guess Robin Williams was right when he talked about taking his young son to Disneyland and seeing the terror on the child’s face when he met the theme park’s most iconic character.

Williams wisely noted, “Mickey Mouse to a three-year-old is a six-foot *%#$@&* rat!”