Looking for something different to do with your mom this weekend?  I found the perfect thing.  Thursday I took my daughter and mom to see Beauty and the Beast at Straz center, and a great time was had by all three generations!

I seem to be getting hooked on musicals, but with all of the great shows at The Straz Center can you blame me?  Beauty and the Beast is a story told almost entirely through song, and the Broadway musical includes songs that were not in the Disney movie which I loved.  I spent the evening trying unsuccessfully to decide on my favorite song.

You don’t know how it could be so hard to decide?  Take a look at some of what I had to choose from!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Qb72ddIBE?rel=0]

My first favorite? Gaston of course. All of the girls in town and all of the tavern patrons joined in for a rowdy, beer mug clinking good time.  All in the name of cheering Gaston up of course.  So that was my favorite.

But then they did Be Our Guest.  The entire stage was filled with happiness and joy, colors and dancing. Confetti even.  So that was my favorite.

But then Mrs. Potts (Emily Jewell) sang Beauty and the Beast while standing quietly at the edge of a nearly dark stage and blew me away.  It’s amazing that one person can have such a presence. So then…

I decided it was OK to like them all.  And that’s my final answer.

So, moving on.  There were two other parts that really struck me. The first were the scenes in the woods. They were amazingly done, the woods were foggy and creepy and the wolf attack scenes were pretty awesome.  Oh, and the night time scenes with the stars and moon were also pretty amazing.  But that wasn’t supposed to be part of my 2. So I guess make that 3 parts?

The other was the rug during Be Our Guest.  I can’t even imaging being dressed as a rug while flipping around the stage and singing. Talent much? There’s a little clip of him at about the 15 second mark in the video I embedded above, but that doesn’t really do him justice.  I guess you’ll have to go see for yourself!

I won’t subject you to my inner dialogue about which was my favorite character.  You’re welcome.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is playing at the Straz Center through May 10th. Take a look on Straz Center’s site for tickets and times.  Tickets to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast would make a perfect mother’s day gift for a lot of moms out there!

I received 2 tickets to Pippin as a member of Tampa Bay Bloggers and their partnership with the Straz in exchange for this review. All opinions are my own, of course.

This is the second year that the family and I did Color Me Rad en masse.  We had a couple of different faces this time (same day as SAT testing), but everyone that goes to Color Me Rad is going to want to come back and run it again.

This year we even got my mom to run it – she decided that if the twins could do it at age 3 she had this.  And she did!  The only problem is with this as a first race you’ll have a hard time finding future races to live up to the precedent Color Me Rad sets!  Especially this year.

Bigger, Badder, Radder is no joke.  Twice the color stations, gel (shot from water guns and cannons!) AND the free photos after the event. Seriously?  To top all that off several of the color stations actually had people on each side with different colors, so you were TRULY not getting through without being turned into something akin to a running rainbow.

Before and After photos tell the story pretty well.

What’s funny is the two on the right went to prom that night. They went to the run determined not to get too colored up. Which I took as a challenge. All it took was asking one person throwing color to be sure to get my niece, next thing you know the two of them were having color wars every time I turned around. Just another reason why having a ton of teenagers in the family is underrated!

Oh, and just in case you were worried, they cleaned up just fine. (Told you so, but didn’t really know for sure…)

We ran in the very last group, which the race people were nice enough to let go WAY after the original time due to the fact that apparently my family isn’t the only ones who forgot how to estimate time that morning.  Just another reason to love the Color Me Rad  people, we got there 10 minutes after the last run should have gone, a result of getting three car loads of people headed in the same direction at the same time.  Three ring circuses have got nothing on this family, you should see our holidays when there are 4 times more people.

Anyways, since we started in the last group and ran with 4 year olds we were some of the last people to finish too. We only caught the tail end of the after party, but the older kids ran ahead (am I allowed to call 20 year old+ people kids?) and they had an awesome time.  They got some great videos too, but we seem to have misplaced the charge for the GoPro so there will be no sharing of videos for a while.

Anyways, to make a long story short ( I know, too late for that) if Color Me Rad is coming anywhere near you you should go. Regardless of age or ability this race is tons of fun for everyone.

Disclosure: I received race entries through the Tampa Bay Bloggers’s partnership with Color Me Rad in exchange for writing a review.  All opinion are my own of course.