Customer Reviews

Scenes for Kids

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My friend and I are drama instructors, and we got this book hoping to use it for our younger kids for basic scene building. We read the scenes, however, and they were horrible. The poorly written vignettes, featuring recurring and awful dialogue in various scenes, show a total lack of understanding of any actual human being. But you know what? It was freaking hilarious! Roddy's incompetence as a writer produced what may be some of the funniest scenes, based on the awkward, frank, and stupid dialogue. If you ever need a good laugh, or want to perform a scene that is so ridiculously bad that it makes your sides hurt from laughter, this book is a great investment.

These skits bring the cruelest, worst elements of TV sitcoms into children's theater. In a recent performance, I watched as my daughter and her classmates played brothers and sisters who tear each other down with cutting remarks, friends who squabble about who is best in something, girls in cliques who ditch a misfit, and girls who get into a little female bonding by heaping ridicule on their (offstage and unseen) younger brothers. There is also the memorable line, uttered by my daughter during her skit, that "boys are creeps".

The more audiences and parents watch this stuff, the more pronounced its effect will be -- like the negative effect, discussed by Robert Bly in his book Iron John, that Norman Lear's father-bashing sitcoms have had on fathers in this country. We need to learn, and teach, respect for others.