Everyone knows there are 60 seconds in every minute and most remember that there are 525,600 minutes in a year, mostly thanks to the song Seasons of Love in the musical “Rent.” How often, however, do we pause for a reflective moment to think about our personal minutes, hours, days and years and calculate how they were spent, wisely or poorly, with kindness, with anger, with regret, or with love. David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr. are encouraging you to set aside some of your precious moments to review your life and all its happenings and take score of how you’re doing in their new revue “About Time” completing its run at the Terris Theatre in Chester.
We all are born, go to school for scores of years, enter the work force, fall in love, marry, raise a family, help the community, make a circle of friends, adopt a pet, experience aches and pains, play pickle ball or golf, donate to charity, attend church or synagogue, concerts or theater, and effectively build a life. Along the way, we experience trials and tribulations, triumphs, tragedies, and learn the lessons that life doesn’t always prepare us adequately to face.
Come along with six gifted actors, Darius de Haas, Shinnerrie Jackson, Daniel Jenkins, Eddie Korbich, Issy van Randwyck and Lynne Wintersteller, with the piano skills of Deniz Cordell and Annie Pasqua, as they hopscotch through vignettes about life and take you along for the often bumpy ride. In a series of reflective show tunes, these singers turn life into a musical, complete with jazz hands and insightful thoughts. They look backward and encourage you to examine all you have achieved as the years fly by. The clock is running faster and faster, like from kindergarten to your college cap and gown. One moment you are accepting a plastic compass ring from your first love Buzz and the next he is just a pleasant memory you struggle to remember.
For example, one minute your children have left the nest and it is blissfully empty and the next those little birds are threatening to return. A trio of mature women are stretching their wings and dancing under a disco ball. With or without popcorn, a couple can have fun making up movie plots. Feeling no pain women can consider themselves pieces of ripe fruit even if they are yesterday's sweet cherries. These forever songs are set to convince you that you are unique in the universe, the only one of you that exists, even if you do have trouble remembering your password and dealing with Microsoft.
These songs encourage you to fill your life’s journey with possibilities and make your dreams come true, to embrace “coming out” when you discover your grandfather’s top hat and cane in a Vaudeville routine, whether you are Ken or Gwen. The message is to be who you are and be proud of it. To build your character and speak the truth, to complete your bucket list and regard time as more than just a clock. All through life you will have dreams and choices so don’t postpone joy along the way. It’s all “About Time” after all.
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