Utah Children's Theatre | Amelia Bedelia

It is no secret that our family loves The Utah Children's Museum down in Salt Lake. My kids have really come to love live theater over the past year and we've now been to a number of their shows since we first discovered them on a field trip with the kids' school.

This month we went down and they hosted us at a showing of their Amelia Bedelia play that runs for the next two weeks. I grew up on Amelia Bedelia and at some point we have acquired multiple Amelia Bedelia books at our house that my kids love to read as well, so we were all pretty excited to go see this one. We discovered that their play mostly followed the original Amelia Bedelia book and Come Back, Amelia Bedelia.

As usual my kids were pretty impressed with the props that they used. They got a kick out of watching Amelia Bedelia (who did an amazing job in her role) mixing real cereal and coffee, using actual water and flour, cutting up actual, nice dresses and making real messes on stage! They also spent the car ride home debating which scenes were authentic and which scenes just used special effects to appear as though she was doing things. My oldest (9) figured out that the cream puffs weren't really cooking in the oven but that she must have switched out the plates when she took them back out and all his younger siblings thought he was pretty impressive to have caught on to that one!

The whole thing was well done and the kids loved being told they could clap and cheer and laugh out loud throughout the show. My youngest (4) is just as fun to watch as the actual play because he gets so immersed in the storyline and gasps aloud, grips the edge of his seat, tugs on your arm while pointing things out, and really just shows such emotion in his facial features, I love it!

While we were there they saw the poster announcing next month's play, Tom Sawyer, which we just happen to have read this year together as a family so they are already looking forward to attending that one as well.

We also saw that they have opened up their summer camp registration already and are currently offering an early bird discount of $25 off their normal cost. My daughter attended one of their camps last summer and loved, despite being a painfully shy little girl. It ended up being such a good experience for her, we let her sign up again this year, so we'll be sure to share how that goes as well later this summer.