Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...find Alex chatting airily with Beth about purchasing their apartment now that they are moving to the country. She pours acid on his car hood, and still he cannot confide in Beth. Fretting at his living-room desk one night, he glances up at Beth reading a fairy tale to Ellen. He still believes in his picture-pretty life. To tell Beth about Alex would be to deface the greeting card. He must deal like a man with the crisis he has helped create...
When Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine completed their Pulitzer-prizewinning musical Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, they began exploring two new ideas: to create from scratch a classic myth or fairy tale for the stage and to bring together Lucy, Ralph Kramden and other memorable sitcom characters in a single overlapping story for a TV special. Eventually the two plans sort of fused. Instead of the sitcom figures, the authors decided to jumble larkingly together the characters and archetypes popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The strikingly original yet completely...
Into the Woods is a musical fairy tale in which Jack, of beanstalk fame; Little Red Ridinghood; Cinderella, Rapunzel and their respective princes; Sleeping Beauty; Snow White -- and, of course, a wicked witch and a menacing giant -- are living out their stories in the same forest at the same time, bumping into each other and entangling one another's narratives. As funny as Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, as musical as his A Little Night Music, as morally inflamed as his Sweeney Todd, yet more forgiving and affirmative than anything he has written...
...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 cape, Rapunzel's yellow hair...
Three star-quality performances help. In Natica Jackson, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a pampered screen beauty who falls for a married man. John O'Hara's tale has a bitter twist, and Pfeiffer adds her own tasty mix of sweetness and vinegar. A Table at Ciro's, from a Budd Schulberg story, resorts to broader caricature, as some familiar Hollywood types (washed-up director, naive ingenue, swaggering Latin lover) gather at a dinner hosted by a powerful studio mogul. But Darren McGavin plays the bigwig with such bemused dignity that the character seems brand...