SW: Tomato Plant Girl
Suki Wessling
suki@santacruzparent.com
05/22/09
I took both of my kids today to a showing of
Tomato Plant Girl by the West End Studio Theater in Santa Cruz. It was a fun and educational time. My six-year-old was entranced. I feared that it was too young for my ten-year-old, but then he started laughing hysterically, so that answered that!
The three actors in the play are all teachers at the theater, which offers classes and summer camps. All three were charming and embodied their roles well. The story was fun and lively, and had a good, strong moral you didn't have to dig too deep to get. The people at this theater clearly know kids.
Unlike the fancier but sometimes inappropriate offerings that I've taken my kids to at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, this was a play made by educators who are clearly in love with kids' theater. The set was simple, but the kids were drawn in by it, discussing it before the play started. Many of the questions the kids asked after the play were in the variety of "how did you do that"?
This wasn't a play of pyrotechnics; its magic came through simple old-fashioned theater tricks. One of the most impressive to the kids seemed to be the dirt that two of the characters clearly ate during the show. "Did you REALLY eat dirt?" asked one of the audience members after the show. Apparently actors may suffer in some ways for their art, but eating dirt wasn't one of the ways. I won't tell you what the dirt was; your child can ask the question him/herself!
The theater is small and friendly, and the only hitch is that it's not actually on the road that its address is on. After you've wandered around Kelly's and the various wine-tasting rooms, you will find out that 402 Ingalls is actually on Swift Street. Or you can just remember that I told you so!
They have evening and weekend performances for the next couple of weeks, so check it out.
