Jaxon's 6th Grade Play Extraordinaire

I promised several posts about Jaxon and what he's been up to, but it's taken me a while to get this one posted because I knew it would take me a long time to upload all the photos and video.

The last week of school, his 6th grade class put on a play - The Pirates of Penzance. It was directed by a mother of one of the 6th graders who has had A LOT of theater experience and she did a truly amazing job with these kids. The costumes were great, the music was so fun and the acting was even pretty good. She approached me before casting and told me that she wanted to cast Jaxon in the part of the Major General and wanted to know if I thought he was up to a lot of memorizing and a solo. I told her he would be all over that and not have a bit of problem with the memorization.

He did so well, it was really a delight to watch. This acting business is really his thing, and I have no idea where he got that from. (I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than be in a play - and I'd rather light myself on fire than sing a solo on stage.) But nevertheless, we were very proud of him, and all the class - they were amazing.

As we were getting the costumes together, Mindy, the director told me that he needed red knee high socks for his uniform. I didn't know where in the world I was going to find red knee highs, so I asked if they could be another color and she said, "Nope! they have to be red!"

Well, she was right. Red made the costume.

Here's Jaxon's big solo:



They had two performances - in the first one, he didn't wear much makeup:

and it was almost easier to see his great facial expressions.

In the evening performance, he had on a big mustache, which was pretty cute:


Here he is getting his makeup done (he was a pirate for the first scene):


When you have such a small class, sometimes you have to double up on parts, and sometimes you have to recruit kindergarten and first grade kids to play the cops:


Yep, that's my other boy in the middle, he got to be a cop. They had a really cute little dance number and we had almost as fun watching Mindy, the director, down in front coaching the little cops on their dance as we did watching them do it. Too cute.

I literally took 700 photos and about 2 hours worth of video between the two performances. But I couldn't include them all, here are a few of my favorites.









It really was a great play. I put a whole bunch more pics up on Flikr for the kids to use, if you'd like to see or download more play pics, go to:

6th grade play - Pirates of Penzance