Once upon a time there was a young man named Bob Bowen. who
was then the city's recreation coordinator, who got this crazy idea for
something for Davis children to do over the holiday vacation. He
happened to see an issue of “Women’s Day” magazine and an article about how
to put on a production of The Nutcracker for pre-school or elementary
school children. A lightbulb went off in his head. “It was a pared down
version. It didn’t involve copyright so I could rewrite it (which I did a
lot). It doesn’t take full orchestra. It’s just a little stage production.”
He decided to produce the Davis Children's Nutcracker. Anybody who
auditioned would be in the show and he would find roles for everyone.
70 kids showed up for that first show, and everybody was cast was something.
How do you produce a show with 70 excited, inexperienced
children? They were divided into groups by character. There was
the clown group, the Russian dancer group, the snowflake group, and so on.
Each group had its own directors. They rehearsed independently and
then two days
before the big show, they all got together at the 325-seat Veterans Memorial
Theater and put it all together.
Amazingly, it came off beautifully.
Well, if not "beautifully," at least it was impressive, the parents were
thrilled and when 70 kids spread across the stage for their bow, it was
really something.
That first show took two weeks to rehearse and only one
performance was scheduled. Bowen didn’t know if he could sell all 325 seats,
but he actually over-sold seats and had to turn the mayor away at the door
because she had no ticket and had no child in the production.
Four of our five children were in that first production.
You had to be at least 5 and David was too young (he joined the cast the
following year).
It was so successful they immediately started planning for
the next year. Now, 40 years later, they are rehearsing the 40th
production of the Nutcracker. It has been a huge part of our lives.
While they were young, all of the kids acted in it.
When
they were too old to be in the cast (they aged out at 12), some of them went
on to become group leaders or to work on the tech crew. Ned worked on
the tech crew it seems like forever with his best friend Greg, whose son
Brycen went through the cast, moved on to group leader and now is on the
tech crew like his father for so many years. (Greg is on the right in
this photo, with both of his sons...since Greg's mother had worked on the
earlier versions, his kids are the third generation of the family to be a
part of the Davis Children's Nutcracker.)
Nutcracker was a big part of our lives. When we had a
surprise 50th birthday party for Walt at the theater, we sat him on the big
chair Ned and Greg had built for The Nutcracker.
Jeri and Phil put a picture of the two of them sitting
inside the sugar plum they had built for The Nutcracker many years
before on their wedding invitation.
Our kids and their best friends were on the tech crew and
always tried to make the next production better than the last. "We
were insane,” said Jeri. “We had the run of the place and we had
Bob Bowen who trusted us and was willing to go along with anything we wanted
to try” (like drilling holes in the stage floor and filling tubes with flour
that they could blast through the holes when a canon supposedly went off).
In the 10th year, the thing had grown so large they couldn't
include all kids who want to perform--it had become a Davis institution and
too many kids applied, so now they have to fill out an application and they
are chosen by lottery. They have set a cast limit at 200.
With 200 in the cast, there weren't enough groups to
accommodate them. In 1977 there were 8 groups of clowns, mice, soldiers,
Russian dancers, etc. In 2006 there were 18 groups, including some that
Tchaikovsky never envisioned, like country line dancers, bees, birds and
insects, and gnomes.
When I interviewed Bob for an article about The Davis
Childreln's Nutcracker in 2009, he said, "This has become a crazy institution
that is part of growing up in Davis. It has become a shared experience
between parents who once performed in the show and kids who are in it now.
Maybe that's my enduring legacy. That's pretty cool."
Last night, we attended a party celebrating the 40th
anniversary of the Davis Children's Nutcracker. The halls of the
theater were decorated with posters from each year.
It was fun to see how many people showed up.
Ned, Marta and another veteran from the first production
chatted with Bob Bowen, who long ago resigned as the head of this Davis
tradition.
When they began dating in high school, Ned and Marta
discovered they had both been members of the clown group in 1978, where they
first met. They have now been married more than 25 years. Their
wedding cake, which I decorated, had a clown theme.
I had a show to review in Sacramento, so we couldn't stay
for the slide show, but we left the party thinking how incredibly lucky
we--and all our family--were to have been a part of this very special Davis
event for so many years.
I’ve always enjoyed Christmas stories, but until I became a critic
and started reviewing stageshows, they
were all movies. I don't remember the first Christmas movie that I ever saw,
but it was probably Miracle on 34th Street, which remains to this day
my favorite Christmas movie. It had everything, especially magic that may or
may not have been real. I still get chills at the end when they find the
cane by the fireplace. The newer made for TV version just can’t hold a
candle. (For one thing, it doesn't have Natalie Wood!)
There is one called The Christmas Gift, though, which stars John
Denver, the only reason I watch this movie. I do like John Denver, even
though his acting talents were somewhat iffy. In this movie, he played a
widowed New York City architect who takes his young daughter on a Christmas
vacation and ends up in a small mystical town in Colorado where everyone
belives in Santa Claus. That's the IMDb definition. Actually, this is just
another version of The Christmas Story, where Denver's boss (the Scrooge
figure) sends him to buy up property in the little town, which will change
it into some big metropolis which will make big bucks for the boss. There is
a guy whose house is going to be foreclosed (the Bob Cratchit character).
With the help of Jane Kaczmarek, who is certainly the ghost of Christmas
present, Denver magically gains a spine, stands up to his boss, falls in
love with Jane, and decides to settle down in the little town. And, like
Scrooge's transformation, the whole thing takes place in 2 days. Magic.
The grandaddy of them all, of course, is A Charlie Brown Christmas,
which has to be on everybody's favorite. (Ironically, this is the only
movie which touches on anything Biblical.) I believe this was the first of the Peanuts movies and I wasn't
sure how I felt about having actual voices put to the characters I knew so
well from the comics, but fell in love with it. And who can pass by a
scraggly Christmas tree, left on an old tree lot without thinking that if
you wrapped a blanket around it and gave it a lot of love, it would
magically become a beautiful tree? God bless us every one.
This
is what he looked like the last time I saw him, when I was pregnant with
Tom, in 1970.. I had been referred to him by my San Francisco dentist
when I moved to Berkeley
We
had a minor potential disaster. The keys to all the apartments at
Atria are on these stretchable key chains, which everyone wears on their
wrist. We have had far too many cases of my mother losing her keys,
which she usually keeps in the kitchen, but they have been found in
her purse (which is stored in a different place each time), at the front
desk, in the linen closet, and even once inside the grandmother clock!
I was happy to see she was wearing it on her wrist, where it should be, when
I picked her up. She had it on her wrist when we were in the exam room
and when I got out of the mammogram room, she didn't have it. She
didn't even know what it looked like and didn't remember ever having it.
I took her purse and looked through it, but no keys. I asked her to
check her jacket pockets and she didn't know what she was checking for, but
the pockets were empty. I checked the purse again. Twice.
I was about ready to go back to the exam room to see if she had dropped it
somewhere, when I found she had pushed it up her arm so that it as around
her bicep instead of her wrist. Crisis averted.