Blackbeard the Pirate

Tonight our 10 year old was in a play put on by Missoula Children's Theatre.  Each year they come to town and put together a production in a single week, starring around 50 kids from Kindergarten through high school.  Their system is pretty amazing to watch - how they select kids, how they practice so they're ready for the production, and so on.  

 Some sweet brotherly love before the show.

Bugga and Papa made it to the show. I love the little arm around her.  His other arm was around me too.  Dad came straight from working 14 hours and made it just in time for the show too.  We weren't sure he'd make it, so that was a real treat.

And of course there was a little goofing off before the show too.

 Here are the beach bums.  Ours is in the brown on the far right.

One of the guys from MCT was in the show, and the other was the director.

These were the pirates.

This scene was a beach party (hence the beach ball).  The orange things are crabs and the girls by the wall are mermaids.  Then next to the crab is a crocodile.  They had a boy and a girl - called "crocoguy" and "crocogirl" and their parts were hysterical.  They basically sounded like a married couple always taking what the other one said in the wrong way.

Then there were the parrots.  Each part was divided up by age or size and the parrots were the youngest crew. There were 15 of them!

Here are the beach bums digging for treasure.

The whole cast.

Our son is in the back row on the left, behind the seaweed creatures :)

Their group photo - holding their certified lifeguard badges.

And the obligatory goofy pose.

I know this doesn't make much sense without the story line, but I'm tired, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was a good show with an interesting story, and the kids did a great job.  Our son really enjoyed his first experience with acting and definitely wants to do it again.  He'll have plenty of opportunities too, since these guys come around every year, and we also have a community theatre group that does more involved productions (our oldest was in The Sound of Music with them 5 1/2 years ago.  I remember that date because I had our five year old the week of their production and only got to go to the first night's performance because of that).