I Wanna Be...
I Wanna Be... is one of Ken Bradbury's most personal kinds of show: a musical revue conjured not from a finished script but from the dreams of the children who would perform it. As Ken explained in his program note, the play had no single author. Early one summer he met a talented group of young people in a very hot fellowship hall at Grace Methodist Church in Jacksonville. They played a few improvisational games, rolled around on the floor a bit, chatted, and at the end of the evening he handed each of them a simple form asking what they wanted to be in the future.
Ken always avoided the phrase "when you grow up" — he insisted that growing up was overrated and that he had never actually tried it himself. From the answers his young cast gave him, taking each actor's first or second or fifth choice, he fleshed out an entire script. The result, he wrote, "is very much a product of all of us."
The show opens in darkness with a steady beat on a woodblock as the cast drifts in from every direction, trading one-liners about childhood — Walt Disney's "Too many people grow up; that's what's wrong with the world," Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Hope, and the kids' own family stories — before launching into the ensemble anthem "I'm a Mess!" From there it spins through a NASA rescue with a busted "DARN," a Broadway diva turn, a guitar-playing bluesman, aliens, a presidential rap, and a closing promise of "A Brand-New Me!" Beneath the comedy runs the show's real subject: the wide-open, slightly terrifying question of who a kid is going to become.
Musical Numbers
Act I
- Opening — "I'm a Mess!"
- Houston, We Have Eli
- "Something So Spectacular!" — Maria, Jaxon, Myles, Andrew & the cast
- "A Hope, a Prayer, a Dream" — Gracie
- "Do More Than Just Talk" — Hallie & Will (Jaxon)
- A Dark and Stormy Night — Marcellus and Kamdyn
- "You Better Never Mess Around With Will" — the cast
- "Do What the Fishies Do" — Bella & the cast
— Intermission —
Act II
- "The Eight-bar, Boxcar, Got to Have My Guitar Blues" — Myles
- "Get 'er Done!" — the cast
- Andrew and the Aliens
- "I Wanna Sing It Like My Mama Would" — Sophie
- Carson!!!
- "The POTUS Rap" — Jaxon
- "A Brand-New Me!" — the cast
Cast
- Carson Cole
- Jaxon Dion
- Maria Fulgenzi
- Gracie Hobrock
- Will Hutchison
- Kamdyn Aggi Johnson
- Myles Leonard
- Hallie Mason
- Sophia McCartney
- Hunter Prather
- Bella Robinson
- Andrew Soltermann
- Marcellus Speed
- Eli Stock
Production Notes
The show was written and directed by Ken Bradbury and presented at Playhouse on the Square. Stephanie Soltermann served as entire orchestra and vocal director, Maryjane Million as production coordinator, and Steven Varble as "All Things Artistic." The cast was drawn largely from Jacksonville Middle School, Triopia, and other area schools, with many of the young actors veterans of earlier Playhouse on the Square productions.
Ken's surviving rehearsal notes are a portrait of his coaching at full tilt — exacting, funny, and relentless about the craft of live performance. He reminded the cast to hold for laughs, never break character, and stop glancing at the audience ("I will be taking names"), to keep reacting even when they weren't the focus of a scene ("How would you react if you heard this for the first time?"), and to make up for the inevitable surprises of live theatre so the audience would never know. Threaded through the corrections is his obvious delight: "This is going to be so much fun. You folks are wonderful," and, after one run-through of the songs, simply — "Those kids can sing!"