PAN

Press “PAN” above to view the trailer. Joe Wright, director of Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, and Hanna has turned his attention to Peter Pan.  Now we have a television production (Peter Pan Live), a Broadway musical (Finding Neverland) , and what looks to be a big Hollywood production (Pan), with Hugh Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, and Rooney Mara.

Counting down to December 2, and looking forward to Christopher Walken doing the tango.

For this Peter Pan, the cast of 46 includes Broadway veterans like Kelli O’Hara as Mrs. Darling, Taylor Louderman as Wendy, and Christian Borle as Smee. Mr. Walken accepted the role of Captain Hook with one condition: that he be able to dance a lot. In this version he does a tango, a tarantella, a choreographed duel and a new opening tap-dance number, says director Rob Ashford. “We exploited every moment in the script to include dancing.”

As reported by the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-pan-takes-flighton-live-tv-1416931328?KEYWORDS=peter+pan

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11243761/Neil-Gaiman-Disneys-Sleeping-Beauty.html

Honestly, does anyone say it better than Neil Gaiman, when it comes to fairy tales?

“I feel like some kind of alchemist,” Gaiman suggests. “I have to go to the cupboard and take one ounce of Snow White and two ounces of Sleeping Beauty, and heat the Sleeping Beauty and froth the Snow White and mix them together: it’s kind of like fusion cuisine. It tastes like both of them but it’s actually a new dish.”

And later:

“The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me,” he says. “Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: ‘You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.’ And we all went: ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right – you can blow things up with these!'”

When I ask Gaiman who his favourite fairy tale character is, he says he fell in love with Red Riding Hood when reading Carter. She was also Charles Dickens’s favourite, but in order to interpret Gaiman’s taste, you need to know that Carter’s take on the tale was “The Company of Wolves”, an ornately told story in which the heroine makes a relatively late appearance in a savage, sexual world, not a small child skipping along a path but a daring pubescent girl who strips naked, laughs in the face of danger and sleeps with the wolf – rendering him post–coitally “tender” – in her dead grandmother’s bed.

In fact, as Gaiman explains (becoming, in his own description, “fairy tale nerdy”) the bombs inherent in such stories have been defused more often than they have been detonated. For instance, the reason why Disney’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t work, he says, is because “it’s not a story. It’s the opening to a story. The first versions we have of it make more sense but are less kind to human nature.

 Woodson, who won for “Brown Girl Dreaming,” her memoir in verse of growing up African-American in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, said, “It’s so important that we talk to our old people before they become ancestors, and get their stories.” 

I have framed those words and placed them above my desk while I work on Annotated African American Folktales.

And here’s Ursula LeGuin

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/20/365434149/book-news-ursula-k-le-guin-steals-the-show-at-the-national-book-awards

I was a fan of Lemony Snicket until I watched this:

http://gawker.com/lemony-snicket-makes-series-of-racist-jokes-at-national-1661096744

The Guardian reviews Jack Zipes’s translation of the first edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales and folktales.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers-fairytales-horror-new-translation

The original stories, according to the academic, are closer to the oral tradition, as well as being “more brusque, dynamic, and scintillating”. In his introduction to The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, in which Marina Warner says he has “redrawn the map we thought we knew”, and made the Grimms’ tales “wonderfully strange again”, Zipes writes that the originals “retain the pungent and naive flavour of the oral tradition”, and that they are “stunning narratives precisely because they are so blunt and unpretentious”, with the Grimms yet to add their “sentimental Christianity and puritanical ideology”.

But they are still, he believes, suitable bedtime stories. “It is time for parents and publishers to stop dumbing down the Grimms’ tales for children,” Zipes told the Guardian. The Grimms, he added, “believed that these tales emanated naturally from the people, and the tales can be enjoyed by both adults and children. If there is anything offensive, readers can decide what to read for themselves. We do not need puritanical censors to tell us what is good or bad for us.”

Annie Leibovitz revisits Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” in a photo shoot for the December issue of Vogue.  

Powerful narrative, unforgettable characters, illustrations that stir the imagination, and insights that engage the mind and heart—literature for children is forged from the same enduring elements as literature for adults.  Children’s books with these qualities often shine for generations, with some achieving landmark fame.  A few such books ultimately go on to enter the canon of classics of children’s literature

Into the Woods

http://nypost.com/2014/11/06/latest-trailer-for-into-the-woods-drops/

                                                                   Here’s the announcement for the Boston Book Festival’s forum event!