Dog Man: The Musical
Started: 2023-10-09 21:08:25
Submitted: 2023-10-09 22:15:26
Visibility: World-readable
Watching a children's series converted to the stage
I think Julian was in first grade when he found the Dog Man series in his school library. He brought home the graphic novels, one or two at a time, and wanted me to read them to him. I believe in graphic novels (and comics, and books of comics) as forms of literature, but I find them awkward to read aloud, because the text is supposed to go with the pictures and I haven't figured out whether I'm supposed to point at the pictures while I'm reading, or not, and how fast to move to the next panel. So my compromise was that I'd read each book once, and Julian could read them himself as often as he wanted.
Julian is mostly reading other things these days (he's found the well-loved Calvin and Hobbes paperbacks in our own house, and the even-more-well-loved paperbacks at the school library), and occasionally asks us to define words he finds there (which makes his vocabulary almost as precocious as the kid in today's xkcd). When I learned about Dog Man: The Musical coming to San Francisco for one weekend in September, I asked Julian if he wanted to see the show (I offered it as a culturally-significant experience) and he said yes. No one else in my family wanted to see Dog Man, which did not surprise me, but I asked just to be safe.
I picked a mid-afternoon show on Saturday afternoon, the 16th of September. Julian and I drove to Daly City and took BART into the Mission for lunch. I suggested eating lunch at a new-to-me arepa place, Pica Pica Arepa Kitchen, on Valencia at 15th, and Julian agreed. I liked mine (the grilled plantain was perfectly sweet, though the tofu was a bit bland), but Julian dislikes melted cheese, and I did not manage to order his without melted cheese (instead I got extra cheese on the side) so he awkwardly scraped all of the melted cheese off and tried to eat what was left.
We finished lunch with ice cream at Bi-Rite and dropped by the playground in Dolores Park for ten minutes before climbing the rest of the hill to the J streetcar stop to ride inbound to Powell.
As we rode on MUNI, and as we walked past Union Square to the theater, I began to wonder how many of the people around us were going the same place. Is this family with children going to Dog Man, or are they going somewhere else? It was easier to spot people coming in the opposite direction, from the earlier performance, who were wearing Dog Man apparel. By the time we were within two blocks of the Curran Theater it seemed clear that all the families with children were converging on Dog Man.
I picked seats on the right side of the first row of the second-floor mezzanine, which was slightly elevated above the two-row "loge", with a good view looking down on the stage. (I'm always a little nervous picking theater seats because I'm given choices but I don't feel like I don't have all of the information I need to make my best choice, but my choice worked out.)
The show was presented in one act, telling a slightly-compressed mash-up of the stories I recognized from the multiple volumes of the series of graphic novels. It started with Dog Man's origin story (as the result of an explosion, depicted on stage with an umbrella opening with the word "Bang" painted on it, a dog's head gets sewn onto a cop's body, creating Dog Man: part man, part dog, all hero!) and quickly proceeded to introduce the main antagonist, Pete the Cat, serving time in Cat Jail before he escapes and clones himself. All of the characters and plot points that seemed in the graphic novels to have emerged from the fevered imagination of a hyperactive grade-school kid were depicted on stage with almost the same intensity, complete with singing and dancing. Most of the cast played several characters, swapping costumes and props (and prop-costumes including buildings that came to life, and an evil robot cyborg fish). Much of the set design and the props were drawn like they had thick outlines, as if they were panels from the original graphic novel scaled up onto the stage.
This video on YouTube shows an excerpt of Dog Man: The Musical presented at the Library of Congress.
By the time the show wrapped up, after Dog Man saved the day with a daring stunt involving a hang glider, and Pete the Cat went back to Cat Jail, it was quite obvious that we had witnessed a culturally-significant event, for an uncertain but interesting definition of "culture".
