All school musicals have fantastic community spirit behind them, teachers picking up the slack, students running between their sports, clubs, home and rehearsals. Wacky feelings are had for the first time by a group of young people about to present something ambitious, innocent and quite public. The young cast getting nervous and warm, trying to remember not to lock knees and say their lines while trying not to faint; it’s a rite of passage and ordered chaos of the highest rank.
Hope School’s annual musical tradition continues this year with the production Seussical Jr, bringing the incomparable world of American children’s literary icon Dr Seuss to life here in Phnom Penh. At one hour and 15 minutes, Seussical Jr follows the ever empathetic, fiercely pacifistic and gentle elephant Horton as he seeks to save the tiny Who civilisation that lives on a speck of dust. He’s helped and hindered along his journey by the ever cheeky and clever Cat in the Hat, among other friends.
In true school musical tradition, mums will stand ready, running concession stands with Ginger Fizz Wizz and Pink Ink Lemonade, Cat in the Hat marshmallow lollipops, 1 fish 2 fish popcorn and cupcakes. Running in a flurry, taking tickets, doing hair and crowd control, all in the name of Seuss. Yet as parent coordinator of the show Bonnie Lepelaar notes, the students performing in Seussical Jr come from international backgrounds and linguistic traditions, in some of which Dr Seuss and his body of work are all but unknown. So, who exactly is this Dr Seuss?
Theodor Seuss Geisel, later known as Dr Seuss, was born in Massachusetts the grandson of German immigrants. His mother was a voracious reader to her children, in both German and English. The family came under xenophobic attacks during World War I, often being taunted as ‘drunken huns’. During Prohibition, the family lost their brewery and was unable to recover it as the Great Depression hit.
As a young man, Geisel went off to Dartmouth where he was nearly suspended and forced off the school’s comedy paper
for bringing a pint of gin to campus. It was at this point he began to sign his work under his mother’s maiden name, Seuss, as a way to keep publishing. Geisel graduated from Dartmouth and moved to England to get a PhD at Oxford, which he never completed.
It was at Oxford he met his wife Helen, a fellow American getting her Masters in Education. Helen was pivotal in the creation of the I Can Read It All By Myself Beginner Books Series which revolutionised the way children read in the mid- to late-20th century, by shifting the focus away from morals-to-be-memorised and towards a phonics and critical-thinking approach.
Geisel might have not been a doctor at all, but a brilliant ad man and cartoonist, who – through his work on the Private SNAFU cartoons in collaboration with Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny – helped train US forces during World War II. Geisel was particularly keen on exerting his patriotism through his art; he remembered all too well the poor treatment his family received during World War I because of their German heritage. Geisel created some of the most iconic posters of the era, sponsored by the Department of War: thematically they were anti-German fascist and anti-Japanese (he sought to make amends with the Japanese later in life in Horton Hears A Who).
Eventually the war ended, the men returned from the battlefield familiar with Dr Seuss from the Private SNAFU cartoons, women left the factories to go back to the home and raise children – many of them having read his work in PM magazine. It seemed the new American Dream was safe for now, as the end of the war ushered in both a heavy conservatism under Eisenhower and a new social order. But all was not well on the newly peaceful home front.
Life, the iconic now-defunct American magazine, published an article by John Hersey on May 24 1954 about the state of literacy in the United States. Under the headline Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading, he urged publishers and creators of reading primers to build excitement in young readers, suggesting the visual masters of the day – Walt Disney, Howard Pyle and Dr Seuss – should take the lead.
A gentleman named William Spaulding of Houghton Mifflin, publisher of Why Can’t Johnny Read?, shared Hersey’s concerns and called upon Geisel – by now a children’s author who had moderate success with McElligot’s Pond as well as And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street – to write a new kind of children’s book.
At the end of Why Can’t Johnny Read?, as great literary lore has it, was a list of 300 of the most common words every young reader needed to know. The challenge was to employ the most rudimentary of the words to create a story so simple and different it would enamor and educate the hardest audience on the planet: first graders, to whom the television had just been introduced.
After much frustration and months of solo work, Seuss took the first two words from the list that rhymed and put them together: cat and hat. More than 1,000 drafts later, the unrepentant icon of the post-modern American childhood was born: The Cat In The Hat. Clocking in at just 256 words, it’s a chaotic take on being left to one’s own devices while mother is away, as well as a tale about not opening the door to strangers. This formula proved the perfect set-up for a life’s lesson in dealing with the stresses of the unknown and how to feel capable with one’s own ability to handle language.
Seuss, throughout his career, also covered Cold War issues in The Butter Battle Book, spoke to the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Yurtle The Turtle, and in what is perhaps the most relevant book for our times, The Lorax, he explored the dangers of environmental destruction and greed. On the nature of his writing, Seuss once said: “I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
As the opening-night realities of Seussical Jr come closer, there are bound to be rough spots – and this, in fact, matters not. Seuss rarely drew a straight line; he drew a practiced one. If the young actors stumble over a word or two, they are paying great homage: the words of Seuss were written to be conquered by the young. Movements are being polished and not every actor is perfect, yet each one is important and has the potential to be a hero off stage. Costumes are being frantically put together with attention, love and whimsy. A borderline frazzled community is getting ready to make their own Who-like contribution to the giant canon of Seuss.
The efforts put forth by Hope School before the curtain has even lifted are tribute enough to the work of Dr Seuss. What happens after is simply imagination at work. Ultimately, Seuss is about stewardship and confidence in one’s own moral imagination: this is reflected in his writings and the communities worldwide that have pushed his work forward. In The Lorax we are reminded: “It is not about what it is, but what it can become.” And that is where the rough magic of youth and the disciplined magic of Seuss lie: simply in their own becoming.
WHO: Cats in hats, Whos, and anyone else Seussically inclined
WHAT: Seussical Jr performance (call 023 217565 or 012 409597 to reserve tickets)
WHERE: ICA Church, #37M Street 16 (off Street 1019), Teuk Thla, Sen Sok; 077 369342
WHEN: 7pm February 7 & 8
WHY: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.” – Dr Seuss
Oh, how I wish I could have seen the musical.