Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Christopher Johnson is an Ovation Fellow from the Azusa Pacific University.
After watching the vibrant characters in the beautifully produced musical, Meet me in St. Louis, I observed other audience members leave with a smile of satisfaction and admiration. The impressive vocals, elegant dancing and beautiful acting told the story of a close-knit Midwestern family with traditional values. Although I was impressed by the overall production of this show, the portrayal of the characters left me thinking about the transformation of American culture over the years. It compelled me to examine the traditional values to which we once held firmly.
At first glance, the Smiths appear to be the typical American family with strong values. Every character represents an element of classic American constructs including the cranky working husband, the faithful wife, the sassy maid and the ambitious children. Although they carry these traits throughout the show, the execution of these precise characters left me questioning the beliefs and values our society once held dearly.
At one point during act one, the mother is showing her daughter how to determine when you’re truly in love. She illustrates the giddy emotions and silly behaviors that happen when that special guy has touched your heart. During this scene, I started comparing my experiences of falling in love in order to verify what I once felt was also “true love.” Then I had to take a step back and realize how foolish I was being for trying to define my love life by the standards of the Smiths. I felt silly for trying to compare myself with these characters because I was blindly accepting their family values as truths, instead of analyzing them.
With the wholesome characters and the dollhouse set creating an image of a perfect life, I began to wonder if this is really how I want to live my life. The values that were once the foundation of many American families have been altered so many times in order to accommodate the numerous groups and communities that have been woven into the American quilt.
As I watched these characters live their lives happily in their little community, I began appreciating diversity even more and how society’s richness stems not from generic constructs but from the alternate ways of life every community brings to the table. Of course, the family constructs displayed in the story, such as having a patriarchal father and submissive mother, work for some families. However, we must learn to appreciate the other ways of living that have proved successful for other families and cultures.
This beautifully told story allowed me to reminisce about how far our society has come and how we have grown to become such a diverse group of people. Viewing the piece of history shown in Meet me in St. Louis opened my eyes to see from where we have grown and how we have allowed for other groups of people to grow and bloom within our own culture.
