Children Will Listen

In recent Broadway forays, I have observed lobbies well-populated with excited children, mostly but not exclusively girls, typically dressed up a little, under the charge of parents and grandparents. It is interesting to consider the kind of show that draws this demographic.

Let me distinguish what I'm not speaking of here. Somewhat older children, tourists in the world of more adult theater, may come in self-organized packs or be brought by teachers, and might worry about being thought immature if they came to the shows under consideration.

Nor is this kind of show which goes under the label "children's theater," a repertoire filled with bowdlerized versions of adult shows, and/ or shows written or adapted for juvenile performers as well as audiences. (Most grownups attend these only because their children require supervision or an audience.)

The shows I'm addressing now, however, are ones that adults might well attend without their kids, but which they enjoy experiencing en famille. In terms of what's playing on Broadway as I write, this would certainly include the Disney musicals The Lion King and Aladdin, and Wicked and Anastasia.

Until I read Changed for Good, Stacy Wood's interesting feminist take on Broadway musicals and in particular Wicked, I had not seriously considered what it means to take a child to a show and share the experience—let alone what it means in today's connected world where young people can then ruminate on the experience among one another. After reading that book, I realized there was a lot to think about.

When you walk into a theater with a child, whatever else occurs, you are telling the child that the world depicted in the play or musical encompasses possibilities, if not in literal reality, then at least in someone's imagination. Continuing with Wicked for a moment, no child is going to be confused about whether Oz exists or ever did—but the child will know, without anyone explicitly saying it, that the human transactions depicted there (ostracism of unusual children, racism, hypocrisy, caste systems in the schoolyard, but also countervailing forces like the love between friends, the transcending of social barriers, and rebellion) are potentially real. Children will inevitably realize in consequence, if they had not done so before, that these things are up for discussion.

This can be powerful information for a child. My own parents, who threw me in the deep end of the theatrical pool before I was 10, thus made me aware that there were such things as madness and straitjackets (Strindberg's The Father), alcoholism and self-defeating tendencies (Odets's The Country Girl), and countries where priests were shot (Greene's The Power and the Glory)—not to mention all the myriad things that one could witness in Shakespeare or could infer of the Victorian world by reverse-engineering the parody in Gilbert and Sullivan. It wasn't that I understood all the context or depth of these works at eight or nine, but whatever I could make out of their contents was open for consideration and discussion. And I certainly did consider and often discussed.

As Stephen Sondheim emphasized in his key song in Into the Woods, "Children will listen."

So what are we usually welcoming them to listen to? The key element, I think, is what Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism called mythos, the reduction to story form of socially agreed insights into the processes of life. Mythos is seldom presented pure in any art form, but these days the shows to which children are taken tend to mash together several of them to what I would consider an unprecedented extent, precisely because we are increasingly torn about what we impart to our children.

Frye supplies the nomenclature for two of them prevalent in these shows, what he called "the mythos of spring" and "the mythos of summer." The spring mythos, as Frye describes it, runs like this:

What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the...