Kerry Butler, Drew Aber, Demond Green, Kenita Miller, Alysha Umphress and Emily Walton will star in Kirsten Childs’s Funked Up Fairy Tales. Tonya Pinkins, Peter Friedman, Vanessa Ray, Katrina Diderickson, Olli Haaskivi, Timothy Warmen, Annie Golden and Bryce Ryness will be featured in Brendan Milburn, Rachel Sheinkin and Valerie Vigoda’s Sleeping Beauty Wakes, directed by Rebecca Taichman with music direction by Brad Haak. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.Casting is complete for the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT)’s 24th Annual Festival of New Musicals to be held on Thursday, October 11 and Friday, October 12 at New World Stages. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Throw in a palace and a bit of suspended animation, not to mention a cunning servant (that enterprising and kindly cook) and you have all of the ingredients of a classic.Ĭontinue to explore the world of fairy tales with these classic Victorian fairy stories, our history of the ‘Puss in Boots’ fairy tale, our discussion of the Bluebeard myth, and our analysis of the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairy tale. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ features many of the common tropes of classic fairy tales: the beautiful princess, the evil stepmother figure (the evil Queen Mother), the handsome prince, the good fairy, and the patterning of three (the Queen Mother’s planned meals of Morning, Day, and Sleeping Beauty respectively). (Unfortunately, this important medieval collection of tales remains criminally out of print and in need of a good translation/edition: Oxford University Press or Penguin, please commission one!) Yet even by this stage, the story of Sleeping Beauty was a few centuries old: one of the stories in the anonymous fourteenth-century prose romance Perceforest features a princess named Zellandine who, like Sleeping Beauty after her, is cursed to end up being pricked by a spindle, an accident which prompts her to fall asleep until – you’ve guessed it – a dashing prince, in this case a chap named Troylus, arrives to wake her up. Yet as we remarked at the beginning of our summary and analysis of this, one of the most famous of all fairy tales, the basic story predates Perrault, and a similar version can be found in the 1630 Pentamerone. It was Charles Perrault, however, who first made the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty famous, when he included it in his landmark 1697 collection of fairy stories. (Brynhild was imprisoned in a remote castle behind a wall of shields and doomed to sleep there in a ring of flames until a man comes along, and rescues and marries her.)
Indeed, the only reason the Brothers Grimm didn’t throw out ‘Sleeping Beauty’ from their catalogue of fairy tales for being too French was the tale’s suggestive affinities with the myth of Brynhild in the Völsunga saga, which was the inspiration for Wagner’s Ring Cycle among other things. This summary of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is based on the tale that the Opies include in their The Classic Fairy Tales there are some minor differences between the various versions of the tale, which has been told by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, among others.
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