Every year, we give Aunt Mary the same birthday gift. It makes it a little predictable, but she seems to like it, and we do too. Aunt Mary always gets a meal with us, followed by CVCA’s musical of the year. This year, since we were going to a Saturday matinee, we went to lunch together before going to see Cinderella.

We met at the Royal Buffet, a Chinese buffet restaurant near the mall in Cuyahoga Falls. We are all big fans of buffets, and the Royal Buffet does good Chinese. In fact, Mer and I were introduced to it years ago by a man who was a missionary to China, and his Chinese wife, who proclaimed it the best Chinese food around. They also have a hibachi grill option included in the price, where they will grill up various meats and vegetables that you want. It is nice to have an on-the-spot option like that, in addition to the five or six tables of buffet food. Needless to say, we ate well.

The CVCA matinee of Cinderella began at 2:00. We had good seats, about three rows back on the left-hand side, where I had a great view of the orchestra. The orchestra was made up of two pianos, three trumpets, a few woodwinds, and a trombone, and they sounded great together. I am always impressed by the musical talent of our students.

The set and production of Cinderella was pretty fantastic. The CVCA stage is not very friendly to plays, as it is shaped like a triangle, there is no “fly” space (space above the stage to raise and lower scenery), and there is no backstage to speak of (they use hallways as backstage storage). So, the props people tend to have to get creative, with scenery that either rotates to become other scenery, or sets that are highly mobile. They also have to allow for huge numbers of actors to be on stage for big dance numbers, since there were thirty or more people involved in the ballroom scene. In this case, the bigger sets were at the back of the stage for the palace ballroom, and they used smaller sets for other things, like Cinderella’s home. It worked well.

The play actually had some pretty terrific special effects. Brandon, the assistant director on this musical, came up with some very clever ideas on how to show magic. He used shadows cast onto a screen that was back-lit. So, when the pumpkin changed into a carriage, you could see it happen as a shadow outline. A tree became the fairy godmother, and Cinderella’s plain dress became a beautiful (and poofy) ballroom gown, all using the same shadow effect. It worked really well. Brandon also used a projector to cast clock “hands” on a clock that was mounted above the set, so we could see midnight approaching all though the ball scene. It was great.

The play itself was a lot of fun. CVCA did a slightly different version of Cinderella a few years ago, but this one was funnier. The step-sisters were hysterical, and the step-mother was obnoxious and evil. The prince’s steward also was over the top, to good comic effect, and the king and queen had great moments too. There were four puppet mice that interacted with Cinderella, and that was fun. Cinderella was well cast:  she was winsome and could really sing. The actor playing the prince was great in his role, although he was probably not at the same singing level as Cinderella; but that mattered little, as he had few solos and had a large number of speaking lines, at which he excelled.

So, even though it was the same old birthday present, we all had a good time, and still were home by 5:00.