The Lee Family: Once Upon a Mattress

This afternoon we met up with Olivia's friends Hannah and Nicole and Sofia's friends Isabella and Milani to go see the musical Once Upon a Mattress at Heritage High School. I first saw the musical poster on the window of Menchie's Frozen Yogurt, where we go every Wednesday after picking Sofia up from choir practice and before the girls go to gymnastics. When Sofia was 4 and Olivia was just a tiny baby, we took the girls to the Beauty and the Beast musical at Southlake High School and were shocked at the quality of the musical. They actually ended up using real fireworks throughout the musical, so I ended up spending most of the time out in the lobby with a crying Olivia. She used to be really fearful of loud noises, especially when she was a baby.

Anyway, based on that surprisingly good production, I texted the girls' moms to see if they would be interested in going with us. All morning the girls stayed in the pjs and jumped on the trampoline, which has become their new daily fun activity. When it was finally time for us to all get ready, I sent the girls to get dressed while I showered and got ready. Sofia threw on her striped skirt and flower shirt, which is one of her favorite outfits and she wears it fairly often. Even though it's only in the low 50s, she is fairly warm natured. Meanwhile, Olivia got dressed up like she was headed to a wedding. She had gold and white tights with her sequined-dress, but she said it was all scratchy, so she changed. She changed into one of my favorites - Sofia's raspberry dress that she wore at Olivia's age for Easter. It looked so absolutely adorable on Olivia. She wore her pink tights and gold sweater with it along with her cute new shoes. They both looked adorable!

The tickets were $10 each and they all agreed! The 2pm show actually offered a 1:30 "tea with the princess" so we decided to meet up early check it out. It ended up being so cool! The entire cast was dressed and standing in front of the stage to meet the girls. Besides our six girls, there were maybe 10 other kids there, so they got a lot of individual attention. After meeting the cast, one of the girls invited the girls up onto the stage so they could explore the castle sets and then they gave them a tour of backstage, showing them the props, costumes, make-up section and explaining how they made the sets. Hannah and Olivia stuck together and Sofia and Isabella were together with another high school girl. Nicole wandered around while Milani sat in her seat in the audience. At one point, one of the actresses sought Milani out and asked if she wanted a tour of the stage and backstage and she agreed. She's very shy and doesn't generally like to participate in things like that, so it was cool to see her go up and enjoy the stage.

The cast took one picture of all the kids before we found our seats and waited for the show to begin. One super cool part of the musical is that there was a live orchestra providing the music in the pit in front of the stage. Our seats were about halfway back in the theater, but it's not a very large theater so the seats were great! The theater was only about half full and I'm pretty sure most of the audience were parents. The show was terrific! The voices, acting and music were really terrific and the girls completely enjoyed it. Hannah, Olivia and Nicole sat together in front of us while Sofia, Isabella and Milani sat together and scarfed down candy the entire time. The musical told the story of the princess and the pea and was clever and funny although there was too much singing in it. We all agreed that a few of the musical numbers could have been skipped, but they were all good. The musical went on for nearly 3 hours with an intermission after about two hours. It was very good but really could have been shorter. Sofia and Olivia really loved it and were totally engaged the whole time. Both girls decided they wanted a king crown as a souvenir (aside from the boxes of candy we bought earlier) and I figured it was for a good cause. It was really a fun musical and afternoon spent with friends!

Sofia and Olivia