They say that March comes in like a lion, but in our fair state, March isn’t just any lion. Jersey March is a drunk, angry lion, driving a 2004 Ford Taurus littered with Lotto scratch-offs, ready to ruin Sunday gravy with yet another loan request. It’s as cold as February and as wet as April and it doesn’t even have the decency to be as short as those months.
So, while we wallow in the ice-flecked mud of another miserable March, let’s try to focus on one of its very few bright spots: March is the beginning of spring musical season at the various high schools in South Jersey.
I’m a theater dad, which was not something I ever expected to be. See, my wife is a champion athlete, chock full of all the genetics necessary for producing muscle, processing oxygen and having limbs that actually listen to what her brain tells them to do. And me? I’m a comedian, which means most of my talent lies in being able to nap easily at select mid-budget hotels around the country.
So, the fact that our DNA produced at least two children with the acting bug is a genetic mystery. It just should not be, and yet, every March we find ourselves seated in a middle or high school theater, watching our kids sing, dance and act.
There is a particular set of joys and challenges to raising theater kids that my wife and I, as first-generation theater parents, are experiencing fresh with each new musical our kids audition for.
First, let’s talk about those auditions. Inside of every theater kid are two wolves, one named Preparation and the other named Panic, and they fight with each other every night, usually while you’re trying to help them memorize their audition sides. You have to stay strong: When they ask you for the 974th time if they’re auditioning for the right character, it will take all your willpower not to punch the outline of the tragedy mask into your drywall. But that’s when you smile, say “yes,” and go back to listening to them try out 400 different ways of how their character might pronounce “hello.”
Then there is the emotional rollercoaster of the time between auditions and the release of the cast list, a period during which your kids will swing from dark fatalism to ecstatic confidence with the same jittery caprice as a squirrel being subjected to Fourth of July fireworks. Your job? Soothing their insecure souls at the same time you affirm, as much as your personal ethics will allow, all the catty comments they’re making about the other kids who auditioned.
Once they have gotten their part, it is rehearsal time, when your afternoons will be gobbled up by hours of idle waiting in school parking lots, looking up and down the line of cars in front of you, wondering which one holds the parents of the conniving snake who got the part your perfect angel wanted.
You will also be driving to local businesses, where your kids will be hard-selling the management to buy Playbill advertising with all the subtlety of the third hour of a time-share pitch inside the conference room at a Ramada in Jacksonville.
And don’t forget about the Playbill shout-out that you’ll be buying, which has to tiptoe on the razor’s edge of being both sincere and not totally embarrassing for your kid. These two simple sentences require so much caution and editing that they make the wording of an international treaty look like a pancake description on a Denny’s menu.
But then, after all the anxiety, and the effort, and the anxiety, and the late nights, and, also, the anxiety: it’s show night and every single second of it becomes instantly so worth it as you watch your son, a kid who once almost burned down your house by microwaving a marshmallow on high for two full minutes, become a German scientist, or a rapper, or even Shrek, in front of a packed house.
It’s glorious. It feels like how I imagine my own father would have felt about me if I was better at throwing a baseball.
Living through March is like eating a big bowl of your least favorite cereal, dry, with a fork … so why not warm up your soul by checking out some local high school productions?
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Published and copyrighted in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 21, Issue 11 (February 2025)
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