Thomas the Tank

An unfortunate side effect of being a busy parent, is your child watches a lot more television than you'd like. Lauren is no exception to this, and at the very least we try to limit her television to PBS shows, Dora, Diego and Kai-lan. While PBS doesn't have commercials, it does have "sponsorships", so there's no avoiding some type of commercialism in television. One of the recent sponsors of PBS was the touring production of "Thomas & Friends: Live on Stage", featuring of course Thomas the Tank Engine. Lauren caught the sponsorship segments on PBS and asked if we could go see the show.

I was a little leery of taking her for a few reasons. The first was that while she enjoys the Thomas show, it's really not one of her favorites. The second was the price of the tickets, which cost almost as much as going to see a touring Broadway musical. We've taken Lauren to shows where we've sat in the middle of the audience and near the back as well. So, when she asked if we could go, she also made an explicit request that we sit in the front, all the way in the front, so she could see better.

So I looked for tickets online, but didn't find anything suitable, until the week of the show, when it appeared they opened up another time slot for the show. I was able to get row "A" seats, which were supposed to be front row for the show. When I told Lauren about the tickets, she got so excited she screamed out "Good job Daddy!"

On Saturday, the day of the show, Lauren was so excited she couldn't take a nap. The show started at 6:30 pm and I knew we were in for trouble when she didn't get any rest prior. She was quite excited to be at the show, but once the show started I don't think it was as entertaining as she was hoping it to be. She also got tired and restless and by intermission she was asking to go home. I agreed and took her to the aisle where she saw a lot of kids playing. I think that somehow got her energized, since she immediately looked up and told me she wanted to stay. In the middle of the second half she got really tired and I told her to rest on my shoulders, which she did and fell asleep 10 minutes before the show ended.

Overall the show was probably not ideal for little kids, but seeing the trains themselves on stage was of course the highlight. For Lauren, I think being so close to stage was the best part for her, as some of the actors came up and interacted with her during the show. Although we had front row seats, we weren't really the "front" row, as they added two rows of folding seats in the orchestra pit that were in front of us, and those seats actually had better interaction with the cast. I think if this had been a Dora show or Disney Princess show, Lauren would have been more excited during the show, but overall I think she thought it was just okay.