Beloved children’s entertainer Fred Penner makes comeback

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The cat came back… and guess who else!

Fred Penner took a lot of us “through the log” to his special world for years, and it seems 20- and 30-somethings have not forgotten. The children’s entertainer has made a comeback with an adult audience on the college and festival circuit.

“It’s interesting because that generation I connected with in the ’80s and ’90s is now young adults going to university and raising their own families. It seems there was some serious imprinting that was happening during that time frame,” Penner tells News1130 from his home in Winnipeg.

“Now… they are intelligent, bright, and aware young adults. For me to go visit them at universities seems like a very logical thing, almost a no-brainer. The connections that happen on the campuses are overwhelming, to say the least.”

Penner’s resurgence started about six years ago when he was invited to play at a student lounge at McGill University in Montreal.

“As I was being guided down the hallways of McGill to Gerts Lounge, I heard this din of activity. I came around the corner and this lounge that normally holds about 120 people was doubled in size, more than 200 people were jammed in, and the roar went up! It was some serious excitement and I thought ‘Oh! So this is how it’s going to be now,'” chuckles Penner.

“I spent about two and a half hours there, just singing, talking, interacting, philosophizing, dealing with tears — it was an emotional experience,” he adds.

Penner was taken by surprise but it didn’t take long before he started playing engagements at other universities and festivals filled with young adults wanting a taste of their childhood.

“Children are such vulnerable spirits from birth to five or six years old when personality is formed. Because I was such a part of their day-to-day routine, like a baby duckling will follow almost anything that has come into its realm, it actually has made a much deeper connection than I would have anticipated in the beginning. Now, there’s such a powerful link with that generation and it continues. Almost daily, I’m receiving emails or connections with that group.”

Penner peppers his current shows with content tailored for an older audience, but it seems to be the classics that people crave.

“I do have tunes that I wouldn’t normally do in a family concert, still songs about value and positive energy,” he admits. “But when I get there, the audience really wants to connect with the old tunes. They want ‘Sandwiches,’ they want ‘The Cat Came Back.’ They even go to much younger tunes, which surprised me, like ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,'” he tells us.

“There is a desire to go back, a primal therapy, if you will, and connect to that early, beautiful energy of the child that they remember,” he says.

Penner continues to perform across the country. He appeared as recently as July in Whistler and is currently touring Newfoundland, performing for children and adults alike.