By Shannon Hicks

Students at Head O’Meadow School took a whirlwind musical tour of the 20th Century early this week.

Thanks to a sometimes dramatic, sometimes comedic and always musically accompanied performance by Pushcart Players, the students had the 100 years from 1900 to 1999 neatly encapsulated for them into a 60-minute program. From Edison and electrification, Charlie Chaplin and the Roaring Twenties, World War II and the entry into the Atomic Age, to the Kennedy Inauguration and the Peace Movement, and even Mick Jagger and Madonna, the multi-media production touched on a number of topics both familiar and unfamiliar to its young audience.

Pushcart Players is a professional repertory theatre for children based in Verona, N.J. It is an Actors’ Equity Association company, which means its actors and stage managers are members of the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States. On Tuesday, January 11, the professional company presented its newest production, called Wow! What A Century!

Wow! What A Century! is a memory piece that was written by playwright and Pushcart Players co-founder Ruth Fost. Ms Fost based her play on the life of her own father whose life, like the play’s character Grandpa Charlie, spanned most of the century. It took over a year for Ms Fost to write the play, and another two months for the rotating cast to learn the dialogue and choreography.

While it was based on the life of her father, Ms Fox wrote Wow! What A Century! so that it is narrated by a character named Alex Mayer. Alex is a writer who, in 1999, decided to write a story about the 20th Century. His grandfather was Charles Mayer (Grandpa Charlie), a journalist who was born in 1900 and lived to 1995.

Using Grandpa Charlie’s collection of photos and articles, all of which have been arranged in an album, Alex is able to provide the audience a chronicle of not only the events of the century but also the generations of his family. The playwright purposely presented a family tree within the context of Wow! What A Century! to illustrate the family as a source of strength in an ever-changing world.

The opening number of Wow! What A Century! was a song-and-dance number called “Oh My, What A Century,” which provided the Head O’Meadow students with an overview of some of the accomplishments of the late 19th Century. The show quickly moved into the first years of the new century, and continued with simple breakdowns of each decade.

Four actors spent 60 minutes presenting the program at the Boggs Hill Road school Tuesday morning. Clark Carmichael played the part of Alex Mayer, and innumerable nameless parts throughout the production. Harry Christian, Melanie Fox and Julie Waldman-Stiel also played a number of parts, with each actor playing the famous and familial characters that kept the century-long story moving. Once the play was finished, the actors even took time to answer a few questions from the audience.

“I liked it all,” third grader Gracia Bergen said after the show. “I learned a lot about what happened before the Nineties.”

Classmate Jenna Ruddock agreed, saying, “It was all really good.”

While the girls seemed to be taking in the entire show, two fourth grade boys focused on one decade in particular.

“The part about World War II was cool,” said Kavin Gantnier. “They were acting it out in slow motion, and I thought that was really good.”

Andrew Kirner concurred. “The Elvis part was good, but the war, when they were throwing grenades and everything, that was really good.”

Head O’Meadow School has a special display set up in its library right now called “Wow! What A Century.” Students are being encouraged to visit the display, which breaks the century down into decades, and to borrow some of the books that outline major events that happened during the last 100 years.