Everybody talks about how crummy children`s entertainment is, but nobody does anything about it. Not in America, anyway.
Things are different in Canada, and on Sunday Chicago-area kids-and parents-will be able to see a reason why. Sharon, Lois and Bram, Canada`s most popular children`s entertainers, will perform two shows at Rosary College Theatre in River Forest. And, surprise, they`re human beings, not animated piles of rags.
SL&B are marking their 10th anniversary this year and have become more than a Canadian phenomenon since their TV show was picked up by the Nickelodeon channel last fall. The children`s cable network says the show is playing to high ratings, and American parents who have caught their act are amazed: Not only do their kids love the songs, but they do too.
Not mere nursery rhymes whined to the ca-chink of a tambourine, the songs range from sentimental classics Grandma loved to jump-rope chants every girl- and mom-still knows.
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”In the United States, children`s music is dominated by nonhumans,”
said Lois Lilienstein, one-third of the trio and a native Chicagoan.
”Saturday morning TV and its spinoffs dominate children`s entertainment, and it`s difficult for a performer without $5 million in corporate backing to get a wide audience.”
Because the Canadian market is so small (25 million people) and not conveniently packaged for mass marketing (those 25 million are scattered over the second-largest country on Earth, and a quarter of them are French-speakers to boot), Canadian kids aren`t smothered by homogenized entertainment.
When the market is mass, Lilienstein said, ”they`ll sell you a lunch box or a record, it`s all the same; it`s merchandising, not entertainment.”
What makes Sharon (Hampson), Lois (Lilienstein) and Bram (Morrison)
different is that they`ve found out what entertains kids by dealing with kids. Before they joined forces, each worked independently in Canadian schools, either as full-time teachers or as itinerant entertainers supported by an unusual duo: Ontario`s provincial government and the musicians union.
”The commitment of the public school system in Toronto is what has made quality children`s entertainment possible,” Lilienstein said. The Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Musicians` Union, through the Mariposa Folk Foundation, have a sort of matching entertainer program: If schools pay for one musician, they`ll get two.
It was as a minstrel to moppets that Lilienstein learned her craft.
”When you`re thrown in with a group of kids you`ve never met, and you`ve got 45 minutes to break the ice, get them singing and teach them a little something,” you`d better get good at your job fast.
All of them parents on the silver side of 40 (Bram`s a grandpa, in fact), they share roots in the electric Toronto folk scene of the `60s and early
`70s, and their folk background is another reason kids love them.
”The folk collector`s spirit is strong in us,” Lilienstein said.
”We`re singers, not songwriters, and a children`s song is nothing more than a song that children sing.” So SL&B`s repertoire includes everything from traditional folk songs to pop music of World War I vintage to tongue-twisters to playground chants the musicians learn in schoolyards, not from books.
And that makes theirs an all-family show, Lilienstein said. First, because the material is of high quality and well performed, and second, because ”you make connections with parents to their own childhoods, and they connect with their children.”
Lilienstein made that connection years ago growing up in South Shore
(Parkside Grammar School, the old Faulkner School for Girls). Her father was an insurance man by day and a parlor singer by night. Some songs she learned at home are still in the SL&B act. ”I was always known as the girl who played the piano and loved kids,” she said, ”but I had no idea I`d end up putting the two together.”
When she and her partners decided to put it all together 10 years ago, they turned to their families for help, raising $20,000 to produce an album.
”One Elephant, Deux Elephants” sold 25,000 copies in three months and went on to become the best-selling children`s album in Canadian history.
When Lilienstein was in Chicago putting the arm on relatives for the seed money, her 8-year-old cousin Lisa Stiffel walked in singing ”Skinnamarink.” Lilienstein decided to include the old tune on the album, and it has proved something of a charm.
The trio now signs off every ”Sharon, Lois and Bram`s Elephant Show”
with the ditty, and in the show`s first American season, they won a Parent`s Choice Award.
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Well, skinnamarinkadoo.