The magic of the theater

Posted in Mom Stuff
by Shaun Bennett

I can’t imagine the looks on the faces of Peter, John and James as they watched Jesus Christ’s ascension into Heaven, but the one exhibited by my daughter Stephanie when she witnessed the event was absolutely priceless.

I took Stephanie to the stage performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar” for the third time Wednesday night. The first time was by a regional group at the Lorain Palace Theater, and the second time she was asleep midway through the second act.

So though her eyes were about as wide as I thought was humanly possible and her mouth could have held about five or six dozen flies it was so wide open as she watched Ted Neely, reprising the role he made famous in the 1973 film, gasp for breath as he died on the cross, she apparently had new depths of surprise to show me.

When Neely finally takes his final breath, his body lifts off the cross and slowly floats upward until his feet slide behind the uppermost curtain at the top of the theater.

The genuine shock this gave my daughter couldn’t have been stronger had she walked into her bedroom to discover Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in the midst of a fistfight.

“Daddy,” she nearly yelled. “Did you see Jesus go up to Heaven!! Did you see that Daddy!!!!”

I had to stop myself from laughing.

“Yes honey, I saw it,” I assured her. No, she wasn’t going crazy.

Luckily, my daughter is a smart cookie and she immediately let me know that she wasn’t going to be duped into believing Neely had some magical powers or that possibly the real Jesus Christ had somehow found his way inside the Playhouse Square Theater.

“How did they do that?” she immediately asked with the same amount of awe in her voice.

She instinctively knew that she had witnessed an illusion, something that has become a point of interest in our household over the last couple of years.

My daughter has seen magic shows at Cedar Point, Geauga Lake, Disney World, Dorney Park (in Allentown, Pa.) and the Cleveland Zoo. The result has been her begging us to get her the little magic kits they sell at the end of such shows, which we have obliged once or twice.

Then, last Christmas, we bought her a huge magic kit with over 500 tricks, and she received two more smaller kits and was in complete magic-loving paradise.

She has patiently learned dozens of tricks and loves to get the family together to put on her own little show.

So the fascination with the final scene of the musical wasn’t that the actor floated to the ceiling, but how in the world did they manage the feat?

I couldn’t explain the details to her, I’m sure it’s a closely guarded secret, but I told her it was “the magic of theater.”

She bought that and immediately moved “JCS” to the top of her list of plays seen. She also offered to go again if the tour hit Cleveland again next year.

Then I told her we’d probably go see “Mary Poppins” in July when it came to Cleveland, and that the famed nanny pulled off a similar feat when she flew to and from the stage using her magical umbrella.

I was rewarded with one final wide-eyed, open-mouthed look before a content smile spread across her face.

–Shaun Bennett