More about this on the weekend in The Times and The News-Star, but I saw “Gilligan’s Island: The Musical” Sunday in the Emmett Hook Theatre in Shreveport.

If you are of a certain age, you know that “Gilligan’s Island” was a sitcom that ran for three years in the mid-to-late-1960s and then was in syndication forever, although I haven’t seen an episode in a while. I don’t turn on the TV much, but I am sure it is on TruTV or some such. If I WERE to turn the TV on and it’s playing, I’ll watch it.

Sentimental reasons. I watched lots of episodes with my sisters back in the day. One sister has 14 or 15 grandchildren now—don’t judge!; it is easy to lose count—the other has one. They are both ahead of me. Good!  But sometimes I wish we could watch “Gilligan’s Island” again, together, after school. With no grandkids. Eating Baby Ruths. And laughing.

Anyway…

Since the theme song is one of the greatest in sitcom history, I figured an expanded musical would be an easy chore. But I forget that a musical is never an easy chore. It’s hard to make it look easy. “Gilligan’s Island: The Musical” isn’t “Guys and Dolls.” But…it wasn’t trying to be.

Sherwood Schwartz, the producer of the TV show and (along with his daughter) coauthor, wrote the musical. The humor is familiar. And again, sentimental. Our community theater group did an A-plus job with the material. Glad I went. It still amazes me what people can do.

Dawn Wells played Mary Ann in the sitcom, and she came to Shreveport 20-ish years ago for a benefit or something, and The Times told me to go write a story, and I might have worked that week for free because I was going to go anyway. Before she signed her 4×6 photo and handed it to me, she said, “You were what, 10 or 12 then? I practically RAISED you!”

And I wondered, “How did she know?”

(Because I was in my mid-30s then but a part of me is perpetually a 12-year-old boy, it was a few hours later that I realized she meant, “I practically reared you.” In the words of stud Argentine golfer Robert De Vicenzo, who signed an incorrect scorecard after his final round in the 1968 Masters and missed a chance at a playoff, “What a stupid I am!”)

-30-