"Suessical - The Musical" - CSU, Sacramento

Left: Set at the top of the show. Note all the circles! There were several circular stages, the foremost of which was tilted towards the audience.







Left: Natasha Scott (Mayzie La Bird) takes a bow at the end of the show.

Excellent show, featuring three friends (Andy Hyun, 'The Cat In The Hat'; Michael R.J. Campbell, 'Horton The Elephant'; and Brad Bong, a 'Wickersham Brother') plus a host of talented people.

Two people in particular merit mention: Stephanie Zito (Gertrude McFuzz) and Natasha Scott (Mayzie La Bird). Very energetic players both! Zito's winning manner on stage was wonderful to see!

There were also fine character sketches: Mr. Amyor (Ed Dyer) and the hunched-over old woman. Vlad Vladikoff (Ryan Harbert), with his juggling skills, was a welcome addition!

Andy Hyun is getting more and more animated in general as his stage career develops. His hands were a marvel to watch in this show.

The music was loud, but appropriately so, given the cartoonish nature of "Suessical - The Musical".

The front, tilted stage was worrisome to me. Not only was the tilted stage a slipping hazard all on its own, but there were times, such as when a rippling sheet simulating water was draped across the stage, when the circular edges of the stage were obscured, when accidents were even more likely to occur. I understand that Christopher Carlson (Jojo) has actually slipped twice into the orchestra pit during the run of the show (but not on Friday, when I was there).

The costumes were great. I wondered a bit about perfect circles for the stages (ovals anyone?), but it all worked well....

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I had read that Ted Geisel (Dr. Suess) was a political cartoonist at one point, but I had thought he was a conservative. The anti-war nature of some his writing thus might have been consistent with an 30's isolationist bent, but according to Wikipedia, Geisel was a New Dealer with pacifist tendencies once the Nazi danger had passed.....

Selections from Wikipedia regarding "Dr. Suess":

Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 - September 24, 1991) was a famous American writer and cartoonist best known for his classic children's books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. ... Ted's father was a parks commissioner in charge of Forest Park, a huge park that included within its borders a zoo and was located three blocks from a library. ... Being an immigrant from Germany, the name "Seuss" would have been pronounced "zoice", the standard pronunciation in German. ... Geisel also used the pen name Theo. LeSieg (Geisel spelled backwards) for books he wrote but others illustrated.

He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, intending to earn a doctorate in literature. At Oxford he met Helen Palmer Geisel, married her in 1927, and returned to the United States without earning the degree. The "Dr." in his pen name is an acknowledgment of his father's unfulfilled hopes that Seuss would earn a doctorate at Oxford.

... He became nationally famous from his advertisements for Flit, a common insecticide at the time. His slogan, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" became a popular catchphrase.

...As World War II began, Dr. Seuss turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily newspaper, PM. Dr. Seuss's political cartoons opposed the viciousness of Hitler and Mussolini and were highly critical of isolationists, most notably Charles Lindbergh, who opposed American entry into the war. Some cartoons depicted all Japanese Americans as latent traitors or fifth-columnists, while at the same time other cartoons deplored the racism at home against Jews and blacks that harmed the war effort. His cartoons were strongly supportive of President Roosevelt's conduct of the war.... In 1942, Dr. Seuss turned his energies to direct support of the U.S. war effort. First, he worked drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board. Then, in 1943, he joined the Army and was commander of the Animation Dept of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he wrote films that included Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II, Design for Death, a study of Japanese culture that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1947, and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films....

...After the war, Dr. Seuss and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. Returning to children's books, he wrote what many consider to be his finest works, including such favorites as If I Ran the Zoo, (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953), On Beyond Zebra! (1955), If I Ran the Circus (1956), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957).

At the same time, an important development occurred that influenced much of Seuss's later work. In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, Seuss's publisher made up a list of 400 words he felt were important and asked Dr. Seuss to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Nine months later, Seuss, using 220 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. This book was a tour de force—it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Seuss's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary could be read by beginning readers.

... Dr. Seuss went on to write many other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary manner (sold as "Beginner Books") and in his older, more elaborate style. ... The Beginner Books were not easy for Seuss, and reportedly he labored for months crafting them.

... Today, Dr. Seuss is widely viewed as one of the greatest American childrens authors of all time.

Dr. Seuss wrote most of his books in a verse form that in the terminology of metrics would be characterized as anapestic tetrameter, a meter employed also by Lord Byron and other poets of the English literary canon. (It is also the meter of the famous Christmas poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, more familiarly known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas".)

Anapestic tetrameter consists of four rhythmic units (anapests), each composed of two weak beats followed by one strong, schematized below:

x x X x x X x x X x x X

...Seuss generally maintained this meter quite strictly, until late in his career, when he was no longer able to maintain strict rhythm in all lines. The consistency of his meter was one of his hallmarks; the many imitators and parodists of Seuss are often unable to write in strict anapestic tetrameter, or are unaware that they should, and thus sound clumsy in comparison with the original.

Seuss also wrote verse in trochaic tetrameter, an arrangement of four units each with a strong followed by a weak beat.

X x X x X x X x
An example is the title (and first line) of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. The formula for trochaic meter permits the final weak position in the line to be omitted, which facilitates the construction of rhymes.

Seuss generally maintained trochaic meter only for brief passages, and for longer stretches typically mixed it with iambic tetrameter:

x X x X x X x X
which is easier to write. Thus, for example, the magicians in Bartholomew and the Oobleck make their first appearance chanting in trochees (thus resembling the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth):

Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff
then switch to iambs for the oobleck spell:

Go make the oobleck tumble down
On every street, in every town!

In Green Eggs and Ham, Sam-I-Am generally speaks in trochees, and the exasperated character he proselytizes replies in iambs.

...Seuss's figures are often rounded and somewhat droopy. This is true, for instance, of the faces of the Grinch and of the Cat in the Hat. It is also true of virtually all buildings and machinery that Seuss drew: although these objects abound in straight lines in real life, Seuss carefully avoided straight lines in drawing them (in fact, he never drew a completely straight line at any part of any of his works). For buildings, this could be accomplished in part through choice of architecture. For machines, for example, If I Ran the Circus includes a droopy hoisting crane and a droopy steam calliope.

Seuss evidently enjoyed drawing architecturally elaborate objects. His endlessly varied (but never rectilinear) palaces, ramps, platforms, and free-standing stairways are among his most evocative creations. Seuss also drew elaborate imaginary machines, of which the Audio-Telly-O-Tally-O-Count, from Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book, is one example. Seuss also liked drawing outlandish arrangements of feathers or fur, for example, the 500th hat of Bartholomew Cubbins, the tail of Gertrude McFuzz, and the pet for girls who like to brush and comb, in One Fish Two Fish.

Seuss's images often convey motion vividly. He was fond of a sort of "voilà" gesture, in which the hand flips outward, spreading the fingers slightly backward with the thumb up; this is done by Ish, for instance, in One Fish Two Fish when he creates fish (who perform the gesture themselves with their fins), in the introduction of the various acts of If I Ran the Circus, and in the introduction of the Little Cats in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. ...

...Dr. Seuss was a friend and drinking partner of crime author Raymond Chandler, who was also a resident of La Jolla.

... Is often attributed with inventing the word 'nerd'.