Category: Theater

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

8/4/2016

Book Review:

By John Tiffany, Jack Thorne, and J.K. Rowling

Little Brown UK, 2016

A

The Basics:

In this stage-format sequel, the heroes of the Harry Potter septology are grown up and married, and their now Hogwarts-aged children are facing their own coming-of-age trials in a world threatened by the foretelling of Voldemort’s return. Best friends Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, two rebels who’ve never seen eye-to-eye with their respective (and differently notorious) fathers, are determined to find their own way, maybe correcting a few of the last generation’s mistakes as they go.

The Downside:

A few characters from the original series are decidedly ill-used by this coda. George Weasley is inexplicably unmentioned while Ron manages his joke shop. Ron is played almost entirely as the buffoon, with a few moments of genuine sweetness but none that recognize his heroic Gryffindor side. Some time travel shenanigans indicate that, before his death, Cedric Diggory was one public embarrassment away from becoming a murderous Death Eater. That’s not Cedric. That’s the exact opposite of the point of Cedric. He’s far from the most intimately explored character in the original series, but the one thing that’s made clear about him is that he’s humble and decent in the face of any challenge, and even within Cursed Child itself, Cedric is supposed to represent an innocent and senseless loss.

Unrelated to the sanctity of the original, Scorpius’s attempted courting of Rose Granger-Weasley feels thoroughly tacked on, presumably a (useless) attempt at fanfic deterrence once the writers noticed how cute a couple Albus and Scorpius were becoming. But fine. Okay. The power of platonic love is awesome too, and a major theme of the originals, so one could argue that there's a certain authenticity in the choice to make this sequel about friendship rather than romance. (They're really cute together, though.)

The Upside:

First, let me note that, like many diehard Harry Potter fans, I was both excited and apprehensive for the release of Cursed Child. I often find that generational sagas water down original classic characters, and the main Harry Potter series was beautifully tied up by Deathly Hallows. As thrilling as the prospect of returning to the fictional world that defined my childhood along with so many others might be, I found myself bracing for the possibility of an underwhelming dose of aimless nostalgia without substance.

I’m so glad to be wrong.

While nostalgic revisiting of classic scenes from the series is a recurring device, the magic is back, and it’s far from more of the same. Scorpius is a sweet, shy bookworm, and Albus, as he’d tell you himself, is not Harry 2.0. He’s not popular. He’s not a Gryffindor. He hates Quidditch. But the one thing he can’t shake from his genes is wanting to help people. Albus and Scorpius together carry their own adventure, bringing their own flavor and their own particular baggage.

There are moments of the books’ whimsical humor (the Trolley Witch’s backstory especially), and moments that do use the generational cycle of time in neat ways, including the new kids taking Polyjuice and impersonating Harry, Ron, and Hermione to infiltrate the ministry, just has Harry, Ron, and Hermione once impersonated the ministry officials of their day.

At the same time, Cursed Child dares to challenge some of the less satisfying points of the books. The returning characters get to call out the unanswered wrongs of the past. Ginny has well deserved issues about being left out and left behind. Harry no longer sees Dumbledore through a rose-tinted lens, and the audience is not asked to squint through one either.

In fact, the largely black hat/white hat style of the original series’ conflict is subverted in this follow-up. Slytherins can be good. Mentors can be wrong. Villains can be sad. Prophecies can be broken. It’s a more grownup story, which may be exactly what many now grownup Harry Potter fans will appreciate most about it.

It worked for this fan.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasures #1: The Phantom of the Opera (Musical)

8/30/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasure #2, #3, #4, and #5)

If you don't know, Phantom of the Opera, at least the version I’m talking about, is a musical (closer to a light opera by definition) about a mad genius living in and terrorizing the staff of an opera house by pretending to be a ghost (the eponymous Phantom), a chorus girl, Christine, whom he's obsessed with, and said chorus girl's boyfriend, Raoul, who comes to shake up the Phantom's fear-enforced status quo.

I’m not lucky enough to have gone to a stage production of it, so forgive me if my lack of knowledge of the movie adaptation’s liberties starts to show, but I believe it’s a pretty faithful one.

So, how does something that fits into a category as sophisticated-sounding as light opera, something based on a novel from 1910, end up topping the guilty pleasures list? Well...

Why it's guilty:

Oh god, this love triangle. This plot.

*Deep breaths*

Okay, basically, the Phantom's been courting Christine by pretending to be an angel sent by her dead father. Creepy, but it's supposed to be. So far so good. Then Raoul and Christine bump into each other, renewing their childhood friendship and sending it hurtling toward something more. Fine.

The Phantom gets mad, and Christine gets conflicted.

And that's pretty much the sum of Christine's plotline from then on. She's conflicted.

She's conflicted when the Phantom kidnaps her to his subterranean lair, plays music for her, yells at her that she'll never escape, and then changes his mind and kicks her out.

She's conflicted when he starts sabotaging rival performers and killing stage hands to impress her.

She’s clearly conflicted when he tries to kidnap her again, attacking Raoul when he intervenes, because she stops Raoul from killing the Phantom in the ensuing swordfight, exclaiming,

"Not like this!"

…And then, immediately afterward, agrees to act as bait in Raoul's plan to lure the Phantom to his death at the next performance, for the greater good.

Because tricking the Phantom into getting unmasked and gunned down in front of an unsuspecting paying audience is so much more honorable, tasteful and dignified than letting him lose the nice, private, relatively fair duel that the Phantom initiated.

And what exactly is Raoul's brilliant plan that Christine's so okay with?

Put Christine onstage so the Phantom will be sure to show up, and have guys with guns ready for when he's spotted. That's all.

This plan officially makes Raoul the smartest person in this particular universe other than the Phantom himself, because apparently no one else has ever thought of it before. True, it naturally leads to the Phantom using Christine as a human shield and whisking her back to his lair as counter-bait for a final showdown,

But hey, someone had to try it.

Oh, did I mention that the lyrics through all of this have a habit of rhyming the same word with itself? Because they do. And that constant warning to keep your hand at the level of your eyes? If you’re wondering what they’re talking about, it's based on an old French stage convention, but it's tragically wasted by not also being a warning about an eye-gouging booby-trap in the Phantom’s lair!

Why it's a pleasure:

Okay, I can do a little analysis of exactly how this tickles the girliest of the primal lizard parts of my brain.

…Yeah, sorry.

In spite of how far from a good character Christine is in every way, there's something relatable about the unfairness of her position, constantly being used in and blamed for the violence of the male characters she cares about, just because she refuses to validate it in the right ways at the right moments, and some unshakeable appeal in the theme of those attractive but violent male characters having to come to the conclusion that love can’t be won by force.

But there are also much simpler reasons to enjoy Phantom.

This is one of those mood pieces that takes you instantly away to someplace magical, in spite of the frustrating slightness of the plot there, or the fact that the magic isn't real even within that plot.

This has close to everything to do with the music. It just takes a few bars of the overture, and you're in a haunted old timey opera house, and something big is about to go down.

Okay, it's not Mozart, there are some annoying lyrical tics, and there are only a few melodies that get repeated throughout, but this score tells a story better than the story itself does. Every song carries exactly the feeling it's intended to, in such potent concentration that it hardly matters how clumsy the setups are.

The often repeating melodies have been called lazy, but I actually find them more powerful that the more common hit-or-miss variety of so many musical soundtracks.

Phantom's figured out exactly what works, for comedy, despair, drama, thoughtfulness, etc., and it goes straight for the note it wants.

There's a line sung by the opera house administrators that makes me think this is all entirely conscious:

"You'd never get away / with all this in a play / but if it's loudly sung / and in a foreign tongue / it's just the sort of story audiences adore / in fact, a perfect opera."

Minus the foreign tongue, that's exactly the phenomenon at work in Phantom itself. The intensity of the moments of musical feeling overshadowing the flimsy melodrama behind them.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Male Action Heroes #4: Macbeth

4/12/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Male Action Hero #5 and Fi’s Five Favorite Female Action Heroes)

While we're on the topic of modern classics, I can't resist tossing in one classic classic action hero, and it's not going to be Beowulf.

I killed a monster, his mom, and a dragon. Am I a character yet?

Or Achilles.

I'm not coming out of my tent until my friend brings back the sex slave he borrowed!

Or the original Jason.

I have a feeling I upset you, honey, but since Titus Andronicus hasn't been written yet, I can't imagine what that has to do with dinner.

Oh no, spot number four goes to the "hero" so dark that the artists of his medium still fear to speak the name he shares with his grisly story.

Let me know if I'm laying it on too thick.

If you haven't seen or read Macbeth, here's how it goes:

We first meet Macbeth with his friend, Banquo, returning from a successful battle.

He does know how to use a sword for more than making his name look cool.

They run across the three witches, who recognize them both by their full names and titles and offer them a series of suitably cryptic prophesies, including that Macbeth will become king.

They're skeptical at first, but when the small prophesies start coming true, Macbeth starts picturing himself on the throne. He mentions the incident to his wife, who jumps on the idea, and the two of them plan and carry out the murder of King Duncan while he's staying in their castle.

Macbeth loses his nerve in the middle when he sees the blood (killing a sleeping guest is a lot different from a battle, he explains to the audience), and Lady Macbeth has to finish setting up the scene to frame the guards they drugged, but with the first murder committed, so are the Macbeths, like it or not. When the guards wake up, Macbeth slashes their throats in front of the king's gathered entourage in a fake fit of rage to stop them from contradicting his version of events. The princes run for their lives, not sure who killed their father but sure that whoever it was will want them dead too, and with them out of the way, Macbeth seizes the throne.

That's when the next part of the prophecy starts to seem important to him. The witches told Banquo that his descendants will be kings, though he will never be one himself. To avoid his line being usurped, Macbeth has Banquo killed, but Banquo's son escapes, and Macbeth's paranoia keeps growing. He goes back to the witches to demand clear answers and only gets more cryptic prophesies, including that no man born of woman can kill him.

Sadly, this is not the loophole they're hinting at.

Also a warning to "beware Macduff." Macbeth orders the entire Macduff family wiped out, and his people get them all... except for Lord Macduff himself.

This is how vendettas happen.

This is also around the time when the guilt starts eating Lady Macbeth's brain, and she starts wandering around and saying incriminating things in her sleep that would make monologue-seeking actresses very happy for centuries to come, and then stabs herself offscreen.

She was the one holding things together while Macbeth wrestled his own doubts and the only person in on the coup with him. On his own, he starts to wonder if death would be better but can't bring himself to give up completely.

Macbeth stays on the throne until an army led by the survivors of the families he's destroyed comes to remove him, including Macduff, who (spoiler alert) was born by C-section, because apparently that counts, and who ultimately cuts off Macbeth’s head.

Okay, two words that probably don't immediately come to mind in relation to Macbeth are "action" and "hero."

I'll start with the first one.

Macbeth is definitively horror and tragedy, but as a writer of action-y sci-fi-y horror, I'm a big fan of calling things everything they are.

As a matter of fact, this list spot almost went to a much later horror icon.

Macbeth doesn't directly take part in that much of the action, but that's mainly due to the practical limitations of Jacobean theater, which cause the largest-scale scenes to be summed up in dialogue after the fact instead of shown. Without those confines, it would be easy for Macbeth to give us quite a few more reminders of his ability with that sword. As it is, he goes down fighting, as well as pulling that double-throat-gouging move, and the play is altogether one bloody, corpse-racking thriller of its time.

As for hero....

Well, by Aristotelian definition, Macbeth is a classic tragic hero. He's a larger-than-life protagonist with larger-than-life problems who self-destructs under his own tragic flaw. In Macbeth's case, power-lust.

What makes him unusual is how utterly, unforgivably unheroic his flaws are.

When asked to name the darkest hero you can think of who still counts as a hero, chances are you'd think of someone like this.

Okay, maybe Sweeney only occurs to theater dorks like me, but the point is, they all have at least some noble intentions, at least a thoroughly justifiable revenge story, and then carry things too far. They're broken people who do terrible things for good reasons, or good things for terrible reasons.

Macbeth does terrible things for terrible reasons. He doesn't have anything to avenge. He's not protecting the people he loves. He has the suggestion made to him that he could be king, and he starts slaughtering people to make it happen.

There is the question of whether the events of Macbeth are destiny, because the witches do accurately foretell them in advance, but there's no indication in the text that the witches can influence Macbeth's mind or actions other than by speaking to him like anyone else, and scholars generally agree that they can't.

Maybe their prophecies would have come true no matter what.

Maybe King Duncan would have become increasingly corrupt until Macbeth felt compelled to put a stop to it. Or maybe the princes would have turned out to be psychos, and Duncan would have decided to name Macbeth his heir. The second set of prophesies are even vaguer and are only made after Macbeth's started his murder spree. Maybe Macduff would eventually have led a coup against him that would have been unsuccessful if Macbeth had started being more careful and hadn't added so much fuel to the fire. The witches only said to beware him, not that he would definitely kill him.

Maybe Macbeth would have died at a ridiculously old age after the treeline encroached naturally on the castle.

We don't know, because Macbeth doesn't try any of those things. We don't know the bounds of what was fated to happen, but whatever it was, it doesn't change the fact that Macbeth took those prophesies and chose the most horrific possible way to react to them. It doesn't change the fact that it took only the slightest verbal hints on the witches' part to make him a serial killer.

Lady Macbeth has her hands in things too, of course. She's at least equally horrible and has to coax him into carrying out the plot, but she has no way of forcing him, and Macbeth lets himself be persuaded. The way he brings up the prophesies to her can even easily be interpreted as him hinting that he wants someone to talk him into the conclusion he's not comfortable coming to on his own, and he commits the first three murders with his own hands.

The only reason we're able to feel for Macbeth is that Shakespeare's soliloquy-heavy style lets us into his head, where all his horribleness is so frighteningly human. His story is about wanting more, more power, more recognition, more respect. It's about fearing that his own weakness is what holds him back and will forever, and that decency and weakness may be the same.

I'll bet that any non-sociopath who claims never to have felt the same is a liar.

It's as if Shakespeare set out to see how reprehensible a serial killer he could force the audience to identify with, without giving him any absolution.

It's that creep factor that wins him the serious spot on this list.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Remakes (That Don't Exist) #2: The Changeling

1/25/2015

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(Click the links to read favorite imaginary remake #3, #4, and #5)

“The Changeling” is the name of an unhelpfully large number of things. Those things include a 17th century tragedy by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, a couple of contemporaries of William Shakespeare who, because they are not William Shakespeare, have never been heard of by anyone outside of a Renaissance Drama college classroom.

These things do not include a halfway decent screen adaptation of said play.

If you weren’t there with me in that Renaissance Drama class...

The Original:

Beatrice wants Alsemero. Alsemero wants Beatrice. Beatrice is betrothed to Alonzo. De Flores also wants Beatrice. Beatrice convinces De Flores to murder Alonzo for her in the hopes of marrying Alsemero instead, without having to put Alsemero through a duel with Alonzo (since that’s what people normally do in such plays). De Flores does it, then instead of skipping town as Beatrice was hoping, he blackmails her into bed with him by threatening to confess for the both of them.

Beatrice gets to marry Alsemero but sends her servant in her place on the wedding night, afraid Alsemero will notice she’s not a virgin (but not afraid that he’ll notice she’s someone else, because again, that’s how it works in plays like this). She gets jealous when her servant doesn’t come back quickly enough, and De Flores tries to kill the servant too, to make Beatrice happy.

Beatrice and De Flores end up developing a twisted kind of codependence, but when they get found out, they kill each other over what they’ve done before Beatrice and Alsemero can ever come to any kind of understanding.

Okay, Thomas Middleton (who’s widely acknowledged as the mind behind the main plotline) didn’t have the most charming agenda with this, or with everything else he ever wrote. There’s a theme throughout his work of original sin (read: natural human sexuality) bringing about ruin and tragedy.

If you don’t know that, however, he’s accidentally created a hell of a thrilling tragedy of errors. It’s a conniving, twisting power play amongst all of its main characters. It kept me up at night reading it and imagining the perfect performance.

The Imaginary Remake:

First of all, let’s bring in some major league talent, in front of the camera and behind. I’m voting for Kenneth Branagh to direct.

Keep the original language (it’s got the snap-crackle-pop to it that Shakespeare fans will love) but give it a little trimming to enhance the already quick pace.

Now let’s have some fun with these characters. De Flores is an actor’s dream. He’s definitely a bad guy, what with blackmailing someone to have sex with him and all, but he’s the sad, never-learned-how-to-play-well-with-others, Phantom of the Opera type bad guy.

At first we can even root for him to get with Beatrice, until he crosses the line, and everything gets uncomfortable all over.

Beatrice is nice and complicated too. She starts out in the thoroughly sympathetic position of a woman betrothed against her will, trying to find her way around an unfair system. Then she handles this by being completely dishonest with everyone including the man she thinks she loves and jumps very easily to the idea of murder by manipulation of a guy she knows has a crush on her.

Think of her as a younger, starry-eyed Cersei Lannister.

Alsemero doesn’t have to be anything too special other than pretty. Part of the point of the play is that Beatrice and Alsemero become infatuated with each other at first sight and never truly get to know anything about each other.

Alonzo, who’s the relatively forgettable first kill of the play, absolutely must be played by James Marsden and made into something special.

His total obliviousness to everyone’s warnings that it might be wrong or even dangerous to assume that he and Beatrice will get married and all will be well without ever actually talking to her can be used to bring some much needed silliness to a very dark play.

What I’m saying is that someone needs to have fun with this. Someone needs to do an interpretation, rather than a recitation.

Like this one.

We need some actual choices made with the text that are brave enough to be analyzed in that Renaissance Drama class, or at least could be if there were any other decent interpretations to compare them to.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Event Review: Delusion: Lies Within

9/28/2014

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Event Review:

Delusion: Lies Within

www.enterdelusion.com

(Click here for my review of last year's Delusion)

A+

The Basics:

Guests are incorporated as characters in a horror play and guided through a creepy old building (this year an old mansion), observing and participating in scenes to progress the plot. This year, we are obsessed fans of an author whose dark fantasy series appears to have been abandoned unfinished. No one has seen or heard from her for years. We venture into her manor to learn what’s wrong and find her literary nightmares impinging on the physical world.

The Downside:

The pacing isn’t quite as tight as it has been in previous years, with a few extended moments in which the group waits for one member to accomplish something nearly out of view, but details like that often improve after opening weekend. Architectural challenges again limit the stunts, this time with low ceilings. And as usual, through no fault of the production, there are attendees who will insist on rejecting the spirit of the event and making fun of it at every opportunity. The fact that the atmosphere of the play can overwhelm their influence most of the time is a testament to its quality.

The Upside:

It’s Delusion. Enough said yet? The sets, cast, and effects are amazing as always, and the story is better than ever. I’d like to think I’d think so even if I weren’t such a book person. The house is perfectly haunted by our mysterious novelist’s fantastical madness, and the logical flow of the plot allows the ending twist to work as it would in a movie.

The beauty of Delusion is always in the interactive immersion in a fully developed world, making for a much more intense psychological experience than the disjointed jumpscares of traditional haunted houses, but when the monsters do come out, when they’re least expected and built up by the context of the story and some truly awesome makeup and costuming, they’re bloodcurdling scream-worthy.

The guests are briefly split up several times per tradition, and the show always continues in character for everyone involved, with some terrifying separate moments (I had friends on both sides of most splits to swap stories with), so I hope to see even more of this incredible show next time around. Oh yes, if the run is extended as it has been in years past, we will be returning. There's a reason this is what we look forward to all year.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Parents #3: Edna Turnblad (Hairspray)

6/22/2014

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Parent #4 and #5)

Here we have another traditional bad parent setup tuned on its head.

Edna's daughter and our hero, Tracy Turnblad, wants to be a dancer. She knows it's what she's meant for and can't wait to get home every day and practice to the dance TV show she someday wants to be on.

Edna insists that Tracy's destiny is her to take over her laundry business.

*cough*

That bitch! Right? No wonder Tracy's going to run away to follow her dream!

Well... no. Not exactly.

What happens is way better.

We find out that Edna is severely agoraphobic and self-conscious about her weight, and she's afraid of Tracy being hurt the way she has been by people, because Tracy is also heavy.

Sure, she's still wrong to try to stop her daughter from chasing her dream even out of the best intentions, but people and characters are wrong sometimes, without being evil.

Tracy's dad steps in and encourages Tracy to audition anyway, which she does and, as most of us do the first time out of the gate chasing our dreams, falls flat.

Tracy is not easily crushed, however, and continues practicing until she's finally spotted by the host of the show dancing at a school event and gets her break.

Know who's more excited for her than anyone else? Edna.

All she wants is for Tracy to be happy, and as soon as Tracy proves to her that there's a better way than the hiding technique Edna's used all her own life, she's Tracy's biggest supporter and feels awful for standing in her way.

So it's a story about a girl proving she can do better than her shortsighted mother thought she could and finally winning her blessing?

Wait, there's still more.

Tracy's not angry with her mom or even desperate for her approval. She wants to help her.

At the point in the story where she would normally break out of her mother's world and strike out on her own, Tracy drags Edna along for the ride, finally coaxing her out of the house, getting her a makeover, and showing her how the world has begun to change from the one she remembers.

Tracy becomes an icon of change in '60s Baltimore, championing racial integration as well as ahead-of-her-time body type acceptance, and eventually ends up an outlaw when she impulsively hits a police officer with a picket sign at a civil rights rally.

She wants one more victory before she's caught, though, and both her parents support her crusade and help her sneak into the TV studio to dance in the final episode of the season which determines the show's new lineup.

The play ends on my vote for the most uplifting musical number ever, even accounting for the fact that almost everyone in it was probably arrested immediately afterward, "You Can't Stop the Beat," in which the show is integrated through a well-exploited loophole and both Tracy and Edna take the stage and dance for respect and self-acceptance to wild applause.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #2: Peter Pan

4/22/2014

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(Click the links to read Terrifying Children’s Story #3, #4, and #5)

Ooh, I knew this one was going to come up again.

We all know Peter Pan, right? The immortal kid who invites other kids to Neverland, where they'll never have to grow up?

What's so terrifying about that?

Well, let's start with the terrors most people know. Like in Annie, Peter Pan's lead preteen characters get themselves in very real danger, in spite of the all-fun-and-games facade Neverland puts up.

Captain Hook fully intends to kill Peter given the slightest chance, and he's perfectly happy to kill as many of the other Neverland kids as happen to cross his path.

Except Wendy. If he succeeds in annihilating the Lost Boys, he's going to take Wendy alive, to keep as the pirate ship's "mother." At least, that's the extent of the kids' understanding of his intentions.

The fact that Peter and Hook's rivalry is a to-the-death thing isn't remotely vague or subtle. Apart from Hook trying to poison Peter, there are vivid descriptions of the rages Hook is prone to flying into, when he disembowels people with his hook.

Peter's in it that deep too. He refuses a chance to escape with all his friends in the last battle because "It's Hook or me this time."

But Hook is the villain. Villains are expected to be scary and often to bring out the worst in heroes. He may be a bit on the extreme side as kids’ books go, but not too far out of the ordinary. Not enough to put this story in the #2 spot.

What makes Peter Pan exceptionally terrifying is Peter himself.

I've written before about why Peter is one of my favorite tragic figures. I almost hesitate to call him a tragic hero, but if Macbeth merits the title, I suppose Peter must too. He's an antihero through and through, the deeply flawed cause of his own unhappy ending, which is something you don't often see in children's literature outside of bland, two dimensional morality tales.

Peter has in all likelihood killed more people than Hook. And I'm not talking about killing pirates to protect the lost boys. The thing all the movie adaptations fail to mention is that Neverland doesn't actually keep its inhabitants from aging. Peter is the only one frozen in time, the only one who can't tell imagination from reality, and the only one whose thoughts the island responds to.

Peter is forever trying to preserve his world of fantastical childhood, and anyone who challenges him or simply gets too old for his taste in friends, he kills. We're told this as a fact from the start. Some of the lost boys love Peter as the closest thing to a parent they can remember having, but everyone in Neverland lives in fear of his wild mood swings and whims.

No, he doesn't eliminate any of the Lost Boys within the timeline of the story, but from the moment we land on the island, when Peter comes within inches of stabbing one of them who was tricked into shooting Wendy with an arrow, there's a creeping feeling of wanting to go home where there are sane and trustworthy adults.

Wendy eventually does leave, taking one batch of Lost Boys with her. To his credit, Peter lets them go, and it seems to be more than one of his whims. He's had relationships with generation after generation of the girls in Wendy's family, and apparently they've all survived him to grow up and have daughters of their own.

But the other parts of the cycle continue as well, with Peter never growing up, searching forever for other children to keep him company.

Forever and ever.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #3: Annie

4/15/2014

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(Click the links to read Terrifying Children’s Story #4 and #5)

Let's skip the original "Little Orphant Annie" poem, which was creepy in ways only 1880s cautionary tales can be. That would take a whole post of its own to explore. And we can skip over the comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, because it was written more for adults, and the radio show simply because I know next to nothing about it.

I'm talking about the musical so well known for introducing kids to Broadway that it's been adapted to screen by Disney.

Let us also set aside the fact that this is a story about an eleven-year-old girl who gets taken in by a reclusive middle aged man.

So it's about a kid getting adopted. That can be a wonderful thing. The creepiness we find in that is mainly a product of our paranoid generation, and the real life horrors that do exist to fuel that paranoia are again more depressing than what this list was made for.

And why dwell on deliberate (if easy) misinterpretations of a story so teaming with intentional horror?

The whole setup for Annie is unabashedly Dickensian.

Annie was abandoned when she was born by parents who left a note promising to return, and who then disappeared without a trace. She lives in a 1930s orphanage where she's starved, exploited for slave labor, routinely beaten (okay, okay, Disney mostly removes that part), and sleeps in a room full of other girls who lack her Shirley Temple-esque optimism and often scream in the night from their various PTSD-induced night terrors.

Well, she's got nowhere to go but up, and her salvation comes in the form of a publicity stunt by Mr. Warbucks, one of the uber-rich, who's worried about his business's public image, given the Great Depression, and all.

His godawful name can't be helping any with that either.

He's not actually planning to adopt Annie, he's only going to let her stay in his mansion for the holidays. After that, when the charity hype season is over, he's going to dump her right back where he got her from.

For reasons that are never fully explained, Annie just wants to spend the holiday hanging out with Mr. Warbucks, rather than enjoying the splendor of his home in the company of his far more welcoming and approachable servants.

Well, one possible reason occurs. Maybe Annie recognizes the opportunity to make a very powerful friend.

Suddenly Annie seems a lot smarter than she did when I was a kid.

Annie coaxes Mr. Warbucks into taking her out to a Broadway show himself, and he has fun for the first time in no one knows how long. He offers to adopt her, but Annie wants her own parents back, and like the now-doting tycoon he is, Mr. Warbucks throws money at her problem, offering a giant reward to anyone who can prove themselves to be Annie's parents.

How could this possibly go wrong?

Like this, but with less adorable con artists.

Well, since she knows every bit of personal information Annie knows about herself, the evil mistress of the orphanage sees an excellent chance to set herself up for life. She and her brother plot to pose as Annie's parents (because this is the wacky kind of story where disguises work like that), to collect the reward money.

Whoever gets the money gets Annie, so once they've got both, they're going to throw her back in the orphanage, right?

No, she could escape and blow the whistle on them. They’re going to murder her.

They show us the knife.

To pull off an act of fraud, they are going to kill an eleven-year-old with a switchblade.

Okay, maybe that's not quite horror stuff, but it would be right at home in an ultra-dark action flick starring Liam Neeson.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I think the real disconnect is between childhood and adult perceptions of how scary many of these stories are, the reason kids can handle things that can still horrify if you give them enough thought later in life: danger to children.

As children, the children in stories are our heroes, protagonists, our figures for identification. They're people like us. And like people of any age, we like to see our protagonists face real stakes and real danger.

As we get older, we begin to see children as something separate from ourselves, fragile and sacred, something to be protected, and suddenly these fictional children in deadly danger are far more disturbing to us than the most horrific things that could happen to an adult cast.

It's the grown up authors who can bring themselves to put those fictional kids in peril who have the best chance of also being able to engage real kids in the story.

The same naturally goes for not coddling or condescending to fictional teenagers.

So that's my writerly soapbox moment this week.

Annie is the first story on this list to demonstrate this phenomenon, but it won't be the last.

Oh, she's fine, by the way. Annie. Her real parents are finally traced, they're dead, she comes to terms with the fact that she's always sort of known they'd have come back by now if they weren't, with the help of her new filthy rich family.

Hurrah!

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional (Mostly Insane) Romantic Gestures #5: The Merchant of Venice (The Trial)

2/1/2014

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Happy February! Last year, in this month of romance, I wrote my first blog countdown, honoring my favorite fictional couples. You can read it here, if you'll pardon the lack of pictures and general roughness.

This year I'm devoting February to my favorite fictional romantic gestures. Many of these are sweet, and many are downright crazy. Plenty are both.

(Disclaimer: I've actually never seen Say Anything, so don't hold your breath for the big boom box moment while counting down my far stranger selections.)

In the number five spot, we've got inarguably the strangest entry of all, the trial from Merchant of Venice.

If you haven't read or seen it, here's how it goes:

Bassanio wants to marry Portia, an heiress whose dead father has read too many fairytales and decreed that she can only marry a man who correctly guesses one of three caskets. Bassanio borrows money from his "best friend," Antonio,

Kinda like how these two are best friends.

...so he can take his turn guessing. Antonio's money is all tied up in some ships out at sea, but he takes out a loan for Bassanio, with a pound of his own flesh as collateral. Oh, and he takes this loan from Shylock, someone he's screwed over in the past and who he already knows hates his guts.

And that isn't even the romantic gesture that puts this play on the list.

Bassanio seems like the least dickish of Portia's suitors, so she and her servants rig the game for him, and they get married. Then Antonio gets word he's lost his money at sea, and Shylock's coming to collect.

Portia catches on pretty quickly to what she's gotten herself into and decides to do the nice thing and bail Antonio out, but it's too late, Shylock won't take the late money and demands his legal right to cut his pound of flesh out of Antonio’s chest.

Now, this is where a normal person says, "Sorry, I tried, and by the way, when were you planning on telling me how complicated your love life is?"

Or, more likely in sweet, feminine, Elizabethan style, "Sorry, I tried, and maybe you’ll grow to love me if I'm the one who’s here for you through this."

But no, not Portia. What does she do? She dresses up as a man, passes herself off as a lawyer from out of town, and saves Antonio's ass on a questionable technicality in open court. And she doesn't tell Bassanio her plan in advance, so the whole time she's monologueing passionately about the quality of mercy, she has to watch the two of them fawning over each other with the kind of fervor imminent death tends to inspire.

But she doesn't back down. She only checks to see if maybe, possibly, Bassanio might care about her for more than her money too, by giving him a ring as herself and then demanding it as payment in her lawyer guise.

He's reluctant, but he hands it over, staying as ambiguous and noncommittal as all his attention to her has been so far. So Portia confronts him as herself and makes it clear, in her lawyerly way, that if he can't prioritize her love from now on, he can't expect her fidelity. That's all, fair and simple. And then she tells him what she did.

Knowing the whole story, Bassanio chooses Portia... leaving poor Antonio, who would have died to buy him happiness, alone, and Shylock, who was only acting out a revenge fantasy cultivated by a lifetime of religious persecution, ruined and destitute.

Have I mentioned it's a really twisted, mostly horrible play?

Okay, it's far from the most aww-worthy gesture on this list (don't worry, there's plenty of aww coming up this month), but I can't help loving its bizarre uniqueness. When asked "how did you win your spouse's heart?”, I don't think any of us can say we cross-dressed to save our romantic rival from being publicly gutted by his loan shark through Johnny Cochran-esque court drama audacity.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Beginnings #3: Romeo and Juliet

1/15/2014

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Beginning #4 and #5)

As well as being one of my all-around favorite beginnings, the opening of Romeo and Juliet is my favorite example of why there’s nothing inherently wrong with prequels. No, obviously, Romeo and Juliet isn’t a prequel itself, but check out the prologue again (since you’ve all read it already, right?), and you’ll see what I mean.

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Got it? Blood feud ends only when the children of the two sides fall in love and kill themselves. That’s the entire story in a nutshell, and now we’re going to spend the next two hours telling it again, because there’s more to a good story than making you wonder how it ends!

Then, right after warning us that this is going to be a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet launches right into making us forget. There are no witches, no obviously sleazy Iago on the stage, no weighty monologues about the winter of our discontent. Instead you’ve got a hero who thinks he’s in love with the wrong woman, a wacky sidekick,

(Not always quite this wacky, but close)

...who likes to stir up trouble and indulge in witty innuendo about his friends’ sexual inadequacies, and a heroine whose mother is trying to arrange her marriage while her nurse insists on telling long-winded, embarrassing mom anecdotes about having to wean her by coating her nipples in wormwood.

Your mental image for the day. You're welcome.

In short, it feels just like the beginning of one of Shakespeare’s comedies. Or, like the beginning of a good, character-heavy horror movie that’s good and character-heavy because its beginning doesn’t feel like a horror movie.

These posters do little to convey the comedy vibes of their movies' first acts. Just trust me.

Romeo and Juliet isn’t about suspense; it’s about a looming inevitability. There’s absolutely no excuse for not seeing the ending coming. Even if you arrived late and missed the prologue, the hints keep dropping about that grave consequence hanging in the stars. We’re essentially dared to risk investing ourselves in these characters, at the same time we’re irresistibly coaxed to do so with their charming playful banter.

When pulled off right, this is one of my favorite story styles, and the setup of Romeo and Juliet makes the best example I know.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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<<Previous

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Guilty Pleasures #1: The Phantom of the Opera (Musical)

Fi's Five Favorite Male Action Heroes #4: Macbeth

Fi's Five Favorite Remakes (That Don't Exist) #2: The Changeling

Event Review: Delusion: Lies Within

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Parents #3: Edna Turnblad (Hairspray)

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #2: Peter Pan

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #3: Annie

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional (Mostly Insane) Romantic Gestures #5: The Merchant of Venice (The Trial)

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Beginnings #3: Romeo and Juliet

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