The Musical Starts Right Here

There’s been plenty of press for Autism: The Musical, which has been shown at a number of film festivals and will be shown on HBO tomorrow night, Tuesday, March 25th at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Here’s an interview with educator, performer, and acting coach Elaine Hall, the mother of Neal, one of the children in the show, and the founder of The Miracle Project, a program she created to get autistic kids involved in theater. The six-month process of those five children meeting, developing, and performing “Who Am I: A Time Traveler’s Tale” is recorded in Autism: The Musical, which is directed by Tricia Regan.

Reviews of the film from Toronto can be found here, and also from the Seattle Times Newspaper (”the documentary fully engages the viewer and observes the kids’ accomplishments without a saccharine moment”) and the New York Times. You can read more about the families here on HBO and also see five clips of the movie here.

I first heard about Autism: The Musical just about a year ago. As I’ve frequently noted, music a big part of my son Charlie’s life, from the time he was a baby and Jim whistled and sang specially adapted songs (”We love you Charlie, oh yes we do”; “O Cholly Boy”—-yes, “Danny Boy”; Charlie is half-Irish). I set him on my lap while I played lullabies and Bach on the piano and there’s a photo somewhere of baby Charlie on Jim’s lap tapping a congo drum. What would car rides be without CDs playing (no more Barney ones, thankfully) or now FM radio? How many therapists and teachers have happily reported to me “Charlie loved it when we sang together!” And (ok, cue in the violins), I get that mom-heart-in-throat-thing when Charlie plays the songs in his piano book, and when he reached for the bow and rosin before we practiced the cello, and when I can feel him move his own finger from the D to the A string as he reads from his book. Music is one of the main ways that Charlie and Jim and I communicate.

Sometimes it does feel that the music playing as the background to our lives has been something like “I am a poor wayfaring stranger”—Jim and I were counting last night that Charlie has lived in eight different places so far and he’s not yet eleven. He’s been in nine schools and I’m not going to start counting how many teachers, therapists, and aides he’s had. Sometimes when something simple and lovely happens—-when Charlie started to play piano with both hands simultaneously after working on this for months—-strains of the Beatles’ “In My Life” fill my ears. And I still often hear Paul Westerberg’s weary-world voice singing “Sadly Beautiful.”

I guess you could say that it often feels that someone around here is ever on the verge of breaking out into song……..just like in a musical.