By Sandi Masori in San Diego
Recently we caught the new show at San Diego Musical Theater, Suessical The Musical. What an adorable good time this show is!
Before I even begin, I want to give a huge shout out to 10-year-old Arden Johnson, who usually plays the role of Cindy Lou Who, but for the performance we saw was the understudy playing the main character of Jojo. She was amazing! And not in the “oh it’s a 10-year-old, let’s give her some credit” kind of way, but in the “Wow! This kid has serious talent” kind of way. I hope San Diego gets to see a lot more of her.
Now let’s talk about the show… it’s made from several different Seuss books, but the main story line follows Horton Hears A Who, where Horton the elephant (Jordan Brownlee) hears a cry for help coming from a universe on a speck of dust and tries to save it by holding onto the flower the dust has landed on. Along the way he is tricked into babysitting a bird’s egg up a tree, and as you might expect, chaos ensues.
The play is cleverly directed by Xavier J Bush and Van Angelo, making use of crates all over the stage to be many different things. The set designed by Michael Wogulis uses even more crates as walls and doors. Some of the crates are doorways, and others have a removable panel that when flipped over shows a piece of Seussian art that goes with whatever story is being told — sea animals or pairs of eyes, or signs to provide the setting. Once the panels are removed, the wall underneath is painted in the colors of the cover of Oh The Thinks You Can Think or Oh The Places You’ll Go. As the show progresses, the wooden texture of the panels is removed leaving only the colorful walls. It’s very effective and clever.
Xavier J Bush (yes the same one) did a masterful job with the choreography, making for a fun and energetic family friendly show.
Other standouts were Carjanae Evans as Sour Kangaroo (man can she sing!), Cameron Blankenship as The Cat In the Hat, and Jasmine January as Gertrude McFuzz. And let’s not leave out Brownlee’s Horton.
The fun and spectacle of the show were tempered a bit by proprietors Erin and Gary Lewis’ announcement that due to their funding being cancelled by the City of San Diego as part of the sweeping cuts to the arts and culture budget, they need to raise $100,000 or the next show, Rock of Ages won’t be staged. They shared that they were getting about $75k a year from the city of San Diego, and that it takes about $300k to stage a show. Though they have many small donors, they do not have any big visionary donors like the Jacobs or Prebys families.
As all theaters have lost their funding, everyone is competing for the same grants which are few and far between. The flyer inserted in the back of each seat notes that SDMT is San Diego’s only year-round musical theater, producing over 100 performances annually and providing artistic opportunities to more than 300 local artists.
If you love live theater, now is the time to reach into your wallet and make even a small donation to your favorite local theater(s). Until San Diego gets its budget balanced and hopefully finds money to refund the arts, it’s up to each of us to do what we can to keep it going. Even a $20 donation helps. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, we are really lucky to have such a lively theater scene here in San Diego, and as AI becomes increasingly popular and the deep fakes that much better, it’s only live theater where we’ll be able to trust what we see as human talent and not a digital actor. In the coming years this will become more and more important (in my humble opinion).
Back to SDMT, I really hope that they will be able raise the money to stage Rock of Ages, as it looks to be an awesome show. But in the meantime, be sure to catch Seussical the Musical, playing through June 7. And maybe while you’re there, drop an extra bill or two into the kitty to help fund the next production.
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Associate Editor Sandi Masori is a theater and restaurant reviewer for San Diego Jewish World