Word: curtained
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...when I turned 12, the magic failed. Peter Tchaikovsky's score failed to captivate--I found musical intoxication impossible without a beat--and sitting in the audience, I felt more like a babysitter than a dance afficianado. Eight years passed since I had last seen the curtain rise on a snowy night in Nuremburg and watched a petticoated-child journey through the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy. And suddenly, this Christmas I found myself listening to Tchaikovsky's tale and thinking of how long it had been since dolls and tutus. I wanted to prove to myself that magic...
Sondheim's fascination with the theater reaches back to a day in 1939 when his father took Stephen, 9, to see a Broadway musical, Very Warm for May. He recalls, "The curtain went up and revealed a piano. A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling." That moment, a few months before his parents' divorce, was one of the few distinctly happy ones from a latchkey childhood: "I did not have an unhappy time, because it literally did not occur to me that other people had a family life...
...marketing meeting in New York City and rudely denied his customary first-class air accommodations, he is wedged into a center seat in the tourist section between an old gentleman who snores and a chubby gentleman who chats. The latter is Del Griffith (John Candy), a salesman of shower-curtain rings and not at all Neal's kind of guy. He dresses funny, is too eager to be helpful, and has abominable snacking habits. Most reprehensible, he stole a cab from Neal when both were fighting their way to the airport...
...show's first image is a curtain imprinted with pages from three fables about magical keys to happiness: Cinderella, which in this interpretation concerns the illusory promises of perfect love; Jack and the Beanstalk, in which Sondheim and Lapine see a quest for the fool's gold of material conquest; and an invented tale called The Baker and His Wife, about a couple who long to escape the curse of childlessness inflicted by the "witch next door." Inasmuch as the holy grails that will lift the witch's spell are Jack's beloved white cow, Little Red Ridinghood's crimson...
...readings from De Quincey's satiric essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" and from the New York Times' grisly converage of a related 1924 murder gave the plot additional credibility. But his decision to play the last scene with alternate endings only weakens a climactic curtain...