Harold and the Purple Crayon @ GBPAC

I took the kids to the performing arts center at UNI today for a live production of Harold and the Purple Crayon. This book happens to be one of my favorite childhood books and has become one of Violet's. She has heard us read the book to her so many times that she can recite almost every single word on each page, down to the "hungry moose and the deserving porcupine" and the "trim little boat". She was looking forward to this day for so long, and I gotta say, I'm glad its over. It was just OK. The play was creative and mostly accurate to the whole story, in fact, Harold in the play acted out the whole book with animations in the background that helped make it feel more real. But at the end of the book when Harold gets in his bed and "drew up the covers", that wasn't the end of the play. It kept on going, and going, and going. Harold ended up in the middle of many other adventures. Violet was so confused why the story kept going. She kept saying things like "Why didn't Harold go to bed? Why did he have a bad dream? Why don't we have this part of the story? Why does Harold keep going to bed and waking up? Why does this keep going? Why this, why that..." it didn't end. She was so inquisitive about this Harold story. Calvin sat on my lap the whole time and just stared, he didn't seem to be that affected by the story. There were some very scary parts to the play, when the drawing of the dragon under the apple tree became real, and many other things. Every time she got scared she had to jump in my lap and verify with me that it was just a person under there dressed up in a costume pretending, and that it wasn't real. We went to the production with some friends, and the conclusion was the same...not so good. The beginning was great and fit the book, but the play just went on and on and didn't seem to have a point or an end. All the kids got pretty scared, but while we were eating lunch with everybody at McDonald's after wards, Violet told me that she wanted to go back and see Harold again. When we walked back to the van after lunch, she sighed, buckled into her car seat, and said "Well! That was really fun. I want to go see Harold again! When can we go see Harold again mom?" I was happy to say we probably couldn't go back because they weren't going to play it again. And she would be just as happy reading the book over and over and over again to herself.