Paul F. Olson

A Journal of Miscellany and Disorder

Because of what I got to do last weekend, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about expectations. What I got to do was run lights for the Missoula Children’s Theatre, one of my favorite annual activities. This was the fourth year in a row that our local Kiwanis Club hosted a visit from MCT, although my experience with the company dates back much farther, to the days in the early 1990s when I worked at a performing arts center in Illinois.

If you’re not familiar with MCT, you can learn a lot more by going to their Web site, but in a nutshell, here’s how it works: On Sunday night, a two-person MCT team arrives in your town with a complete children’s show — sets, makeup, costumes, scripts and scores — loaded into the back of a ridiculously small pickup truck. On Monday, they hold auditions for local kids, casting up to sixty or so of them in a musical production. The kids rehearse all week long, and on Saturday they put on two performances for the public. On Saturday night, after the second show, everything goes back into the pickup and the team is back on the road to the next town. No, the shows are not Shakespeare. They may not even qualify as truly top-notch children’s theatre. But they’re fun, cute, quick, entertaining little musicals. They are, in short, what they are: decent material produced decently, a blast for the cast, enjoyable for the audience, nice to see in any community and especially important in areas like ours, which are, to put it nicely, starving for the arts, theatre in particular.

The reason all of this makes me think of expectations is because of the reactions MCT invariably gets from the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts of the cast members — and a few of the cast members themselves, come to think of it. They’re understandably skeptical about the whole approach. They look at this mob of five dozen unruly kids, ages six to eighteen, and think to themselves, “There is no way in the world they’ll be able to do it. Learn an entire show in a week? Dialogue? Songs? Dances? Entrances and exits? My kid’s never even been in a play before. He doesn’t know backstage from a back door. He’s going to learn all of this in five days? Uh-uh. No way. Not happening.” And then, the next thing you know, it’s Saturday afternoon at three o’ clock, the house lights dim, the music starts, and everything falls magically into place.

Kids are good at an awful lot of things, and above all, they’re amazingly good at meeting the expectations set for them. They have an uncanny, sometimes unsettling ability to rise or fall depending on just where we decide to set the bar. Set it low, and they’ll invariably sink to meet it. Set it high, and they’ll clear it just about every time.

Yes, I know that’s all a bit simplistic. We’re all familiar with the kids who melt down under the pressure of expectations raised too high, and those on the other end of the spectrum, the ones who inexplicably never reach the goals we’d like to see them achieve. But those extremes don’t change the fact that most kids, most of the time, will do exactly what we expect them to do, what we challenge them to do, no matter how difficult or even impossible it might look at the outset.

Inside that overloaded MCT pickup, along with all the sets and costumes, are a couple of things you can’t see: high expectations and confidence. MCT says to kids, “You can do this. You will do this. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. You’ll work hard and we’ll help you and you’ll be great.”

And then, quite naturally, they are.

A proud Rumpelstiltskin cast after last Saturday’s shows. (Photo by Christi Ryan)

For many years now, I’ve enjoyed reading — and very occasionally posting — at what is arguably the most famous Internet forum for theater fans and professionals: All That Chat.

Many of the people who post there live and work in New York, and many are in the theater business, so it’s not surprising that the site became a trembling, buzzing hive of communication on September 11, 2001, as folks scrambled to find the latest news and searched frantically for any word on their families and colleagues.

One year later, on September 11, 2002, the regular chat board shut down for the day, replaced with a forum for people to post their thoughts, feelings and memories on the first anniversary of the attacks. That special page stays hidden in the “All That Chat” archives, but once a year, on 9/11, the moderators post a link so that we can pay a brief visit and be reminded of those two specific days: a day that everything changed and a day twelve months later that we looked back.

My own contribution to that forum described where I was on September 11, which just happened to be a theater full of people with very close ties to New York City. Spending that day, and that entire week, in their company was traumatic, exhausting, heartbreaking, terrifying — but also a bittersweet gift that I will never forget.

This is that first-anniversary forum post, edited just a bit to rerun here:

On September 11, 2001, I was at the Rozsa Center in Houghton, Michigan, working on the local crew for Big League Theatricals’ national tour of Titanic. We were in the middle of tech — two weeks of load-in and set modifications, prop building, costume alterations, sound and lighting adjustments and rehearsal. In fact, the first two full dress rehearsals were scheduled for that fateful Tuesday.

Of course, all of us Michiganders were shocked, dismayed and saddened by what happened out east, just as the rest of the country was. But being surrounded by the Titanic cast and crew, so many of whom were from New York, brought the tragedy even closer and made it more real.

We kept TVs and radios going in the green room all day. We kept Internet connections open. We tried to comfort the tears of cast and crew. We tried to reassure them when they were unable to get phone calls through to New York to check on loved ones. We did what we could to help, but at the time it felt like no one could do enough.

In the best show business tradition, both that day’s rehearsals did proceed — and the entire cast and crew performed exceptionally well. The rest of the week went smoothly. On Friday night, opening night, the cast, tour crew and local crew gathered just prior to the half-hour call, meeting in the parking lot outside the loading dock for a candlelight vigil, with songs and prayers. Then they went in and blew the audience away with the first performance of the show. As you can imagine, already emotional songs such as “We’ll Meet Tomorrow” and “Still” and the finale with its reunion between the living and the dead carried a little extra weight that night. The audience could barely walk out of the theater by the time the show was over, and those of us backstage were not doing much better.

In a bizarre sort of way, I’ll always feel blessed that I was able to share that tragic day, and terrible week, with nearly 50 New Yorkers — all of us so far away from what was happening, but also so very close.

A gut-wrenching moment — “We’ll Meet Tomorrow,” the lifeboat scene — from Big League Theatricals’ 2001-2002 national tour of Titanic. This picture was taken at a media photo call one day after the September 11 attacks and several days before the tour opened at the Rozsa Center in Houghton, Michigan. Click the picture to see the full-size version.