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I was trying to remember the last theater review I wrote for this site.  At first I thought it might be the review I did way way back in the day for the staged adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline where the main character was played by a heavyset middle aged woman (it worked quite well, thank you very much).  Then I remembered that I did write up the Matilda musical when Penguin was kind enough to offer tickets to local librarians.  Still, that was over a year ago and my theater going has shriveled in the wake of my increasing brood.  What would it take to get me back in the swing of things?  Good friends from my past, apparently.

The Snow Queen, which I have discussed here briefly before, came to NYC as part of the 2014 Musical Theatre Festival (spellcheck is questioning why I chose to spell it “theatre”, by the way). Having originated in the San Jose Repertory Theater the composer of the show is one Haddon Kime, a friend of mine from long back.  Indeed his wife Katie presided over my wedding and long ago he created the music for my very brief foray into podcasting.  He’s always been ridiculously talented but I confess that I’d never seen a show of his.  Until now.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot of this Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, here’s the long and short of it. Two kids, Gerta and Kai, are best buddies.  Then one day two shards of a magic mirror enter Kai’s eye and heart, rendering him a cold-hearted bastard (which is to say, a teenager).  Along comes The Snow Queen who takes Kai away to her magic palace up North.  Rather than just mourn her friend, Gerta sets out to rescue him, encountering rivers, witches, crows, royalty, thieves, and more.  When she finds Kai he doesn’t exactly want to leave, so engaged is he in a puzzle The Snow Queen set up for him.  Fortunately love wins out, and the two kiddos go back home.

As the novel stands it is unlike most Andersen tales in that it has a metaphor so clear cut you’d swear it had been ghostwritten by Freud himself.  The shards of glass in Kai’s heart and eye are so clearly a stand-in for the changes adolescence that it’s scary.  Indeed, when Anne Ursu wrote the Snow Queen inspired novel Breadcrumbs, she made explicit what is only implied in the Andersen tale.  With that in mind, I was very curious how a staged production of the show would deal with some of these themes.

Right from the start the show casts Kai and Gerda as adults playing children.  This is a clever way of dealing with adolescence in a theatrical setting.  Years ago the remarkable staged adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials saga cast two adults as Lyra and Will, allowing them to learn and grow throughout the show.  And since Kai spends a fair amount of time in this show begging a grown woman in a white garter belt to kiss him, this was a wise choice.

I suppose you could say they decided to give the show a Steampunk feel.  There were a fair number of corsets and goggles, but it wasn’t overwhelming.  When I saw a Steampunk version of The Pirates of Penzance a couple years ago the effect was overdone.  Here it was subtle, more evident in the clothing than anything else.  Each character was outfitted in a simple but effective manner, none so effective as The Snow Queen herself.  Played to the hilt by the commanding Jane Pfitsch, she’s a photo negative of The Phantom of the Opera, bedecked all in white, luring a boy through a window (as opposed to the Phantom bedecked all in black, luring a girl through a mirror).  Admittedly her very cool costume resembled that of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” outfit from the MTV Music Video Awards, but there’s no crime in that.  Her blond bob stood in stark contrast to the elaborate headwear of Elsa in the Disney Snow Queen adaptation Frozen.  But it was her singing voice and violin playing that gave her true power.  A very strong soprano, you can actually see her right now in the current revival of Cabaret as Rosie.  As for the violin playing, this show followed the current trend of having the performers play instruments on the stage, but her violin contained not a jot of fly-by-night fakery.  This girl could play!  I was impressed.

Other strong performances included Eryn Murman as Gerda, Reggie D. White as a Troll, a Hyacinth, a Prince, and a Reindeer respectively, and Jason Hite as an oddly sexy River, Crow, and Italian (for no particular reason) Daisy.  But the strongest actress, aside from The Snow Queen herself, was clearly Lauren Cipoletti.  There is much to be said for performers that have fun with their roles.  Cipoletti, by all appearances, seemed to be having a blast.  First she was a rosebush, and though all she does is preen in a manner best befitting The Rose of The Little Prince, you are entranced.  Later she came on as an adorable nerdgirl princess, pulling off the cheery “Never Give Up” song that might have wilted in a lesser performer’s mouth.  Best, however, was last since her most memorable role was the psychotic Little Robber Girl.  Singing “I Want That”, a ballad worthy of Veruca Salt herself, Cipoletti let her freak flag fly.  She was punk one minute and a cabaret singer the next.  She was Amanda Palmer and Courtney Love and a whole host of other wild women.  You didn’t trust her not to slit your throat while cooing sweet nothings in your ears all the while.  I’ve always loved the Little Robber Girl.  Now I adore her.

The music?  Superb.  Catchy.  Hummable.  I have actually been humming the song “Flying” ever since I saw it online, actually.  See, here’s a taste.

New York News

Neat, right? The show is jam-packed with music, making it almost more operetta than musical.  Haddon mixes up the styles, creating punk rock anthems and Southern bluegrass and Irish ballads depending on what fits best.  Should the show ever get picked up it could, of course, be cut down.  Some songs were lovely but easy to do away with.  In fact the song “Gone” was probably the loveliest of the batch, but superfluous in terms of plot.

As I exited the theater during intermission I saw a small girl wearing a Frozen t-shirt.  Since it was a 9 p.m. performance she was the only one of her kind to do so, but I like to think that there were other kids in the audience in a similar state of mind.  Kids entranced by Frozen who have an interest in the original source material.  My husband has always said that Frozen feels more like a prequel to The Snow Queen than anything else.  A cool thought (no pun intended).  However you look at it,

The show ended its run July 20th and one can only hope and pray that it gets picked up here in the city in some manner.  For another opinion check out the New York Times review A Fairy-Tale That Rocks in which reviewer Anita Gates calls parts of the show “evocatively effective”.  Also check out the TheaterMania review which calls Haddon’s score, “an endlessly listenable pastiche with elements of bluegrass, punk rock, and symphonic metal.”

Interested in reading the original story?  For the best round-up of Snow Queen works, go to the SurLaLune Fairy Tales site containing Modern Interpretations of The Snow Queen.  There you will find a list that is jaw-dropping in its content. It really is a remarkable collection.

I had the pleasure of seeing just the most delightful show the other day.  The Snow Queen’s run is ending, but you can at least enjoy this little number from it.  It’s been caught in my head all week.  I bestow that honor now upon you.

New York News

And the award for best set design in a book trailer goes to . . .

Mildly miffed that this trailer came out in February but that I only found it now, though.

And now the Weird Al video that shall outlive him thanks to English teachers around the world.  They shall play it from now until the internet burns down to a dark, black piece of coal.

Just when you think they’ve done absolutely everything one can do with the physical book, they turn around and come up with something COMPLETELY NEW!  Trust the Japanese to come up with something this lovey.  More information can be found here.

MOTION SILHOUETTE from KYOT∆® on Vimeo.

Thanks to Marci for the link.

Finally, I was shocked that some friends of mine had forgotten this old Italian video where a fellow performs fake English.  So here we go.  Fake English for one and all.  Love this.

• Howdy do.  As per usual I’m going to direct you this morning to that lovely little Wild Things website where Jules Danielson and I have been posting the stories that got cut from our upcoming book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature.  If you haven’t already seen them you might like to read some amusing stories about:

- Some Madeleine facts you may not have known, two straight lines and all.
- The downside of owning your own tropical island, even if you DID do all the art for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
- The story I was MOST sorry to cut. War of the Pooh! It’s what happened when a British MP decided that the dolls of Pooh and friends had to come back to the UK. What followed . . . got a little crazy.
- A quick look at some of the WORST school visits suffered by authors and illustrators of all time.
- Children who would one day become writers bugging cranky older authors. It’s one of the more peculiar posts but it has nothing on . . .
- Udders, cleavage, and a monster penis. Need I say more?
- A nightmare publishing story to rival publishing stories.

• The New York Public Library’s pathetic summer reading list for kids. Come again?  That would be The New York Post taking issue with a list that includes books kids would have fun reading as well as dreaded diversity.  Apparently if a book contains a non-white kid it can’t possibly be any good and must have appeared on a summer reading list to appease some kind of demographic.  Full disclosure, I’m one of the folks that made the list (which wasn’t just for NYPL but for Brooklyn and Queens library systems as well) so all I’ll do is gently point you to Rita Meade’s incredibly restrained response.

• And how did you spend your evening last night.  For my part, I saw The Snow Queen.  The composer of the show is my buddy Haddon who, years ago, did the intro music for a podcast I posted for a while (the podcast is no longer up so his good work has been lost to the wilds of time).  Now the show is here for a limited run in NYC, before the inevitable Frozen musical steals its thunder.  Of Snow Queen musicals there can apparently be only one.  Here’s a New York Times article about the show, if’n you’re interested.

Where do you even get a Where’s Waldo costume, I wonder.  Everyone’s favorite stripey hero is key to this very clever children’s bookstore promotion thingy thing.  In Kalamazoo the fabulous bookstore Bookbug is hiding Waldo in 26 of the local businesses on sort of a scavenger hunt.  Other small town bookstores take note.  It’s good for the store and good for the other businesses.  I love a clever campaign.  Thanks to Colby Sharp for the link.

If you have ever taken the Leonard Marcus walking tour of children’s literature here in NYC then you’ve probably seen Margaret Wise Brown’s house in Greenwich Village.  Good thing you did since the poor little structure is slated to be razed.  Has someone alerted Leonard?  I think we’d better start sounding the alarm on this one.

• Don’t have enough conferences in your life?  Well The Nerdy Book Club was kind enough to feature this post on the upcoming Kidlitcon.  The only conference out there for children’s and YA literature bloggers, it’s happening in October in beautiful Sacramento, CA.  Would that I could go!  If you’re able, I highly recommend a trip.

• This.  Just . . . . this.  No words.

• Not a shabby idea.  Over in Britain they recently had a Great children’s books author bake off for all those novels and picture books featuring baked goods.  I am hungry.  Therefore someone should do this over on our side of the pond.  And then invite me.  Nom nom nom nom.

• Two recent 100 Scope Notes pieces caught my eye.  The first has the rather memorable title All middle grade novels should be 192 pages. No exceptions.  The other is the hugely amusing Wildest Children’s Books of 2014.  I’ve missed a couple of these on my maternity leave.  Glad to have Travis keeping me up to speed!

• Daily Image:

Finally, could somebody do this for a couple works of children’s and YA literature?

If I had my choice I’d like some Westing Game tights.  And imagine how much money you could make off of The Fault In Our Stars tights.  The mind boggles.  Thanks to Aunt Judy for the link.

Annecy, the longest-running and largest animation fesival, has announced the feature film selections for their upcoming festival in June. Nine films were chosen to compete for the Cristal award for feature film, which will be decided by a jury consisting of producer Didier Brunner (Les Armateurs), Cartoon Network exec Brian Miller and director Robert Morgan (The Cat with Hands, The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph). An additional fourteen features will screen out of competition.

Marcel Jean, the festival’s artistic director, said of this year’s feature selections:

“Many films have been created in a totally independent way, using traditional means, which illustrates the change in production habits that is opening the way for smaller companies and happening at the same moment as the production of digital 3D features is becoming more accessible. Japanese production has also particularly stood out through the number and quality of science fiction, horror or genre films.”

Feature Films—In Competition

• Arjun, The Warrior Prince
  Directed by Arnab Chaudhuri (India)

Feature Films—Out of Competition

• After School Midnighters
  Directed by Hitoshi Takekiyo (Japan)

No, not Disney’s Frozen – This is the Russian version of The Snow Queen, of which we posted a teaser from back in February. Here’s the latest “official trailer” for the film, this one playing up the “comedy” elements.

The Snow Queen will be released in Stereoscopic 3D and was produced on a budget of $7 million (US$). Moscow’s Wizart Animation is the producer/production company. More information and artwork can be found on the official Snow Queen web site.

“My brother teaches an undergraduate writing course at a university in New York, and he recently shared with me a thesis statement from one of his students’ papers: “Words are very important in A Passage to India.”  It was, perhaps fittingly, a poor choice of words on the student’s part—it’s a novel, after all—but I think I see the point about word choice that the student was trying to make.  Words, after all, are not simply bricks in the path upon which an author is leading a reader, identical and interchangeable and valuable more for their sequence than for their individual qualities.  They are much more than that.  They have shades and contours.  They catch light in different ways.  They are meant to illuminate a pathway that already exists, and when enough of the right ones are strung together in a great novel, they are just as tangible as the things they represent.

One of the reasons I love working with Anne Ursu, and especially on her latest middle grade novel Breadcrumbs, which releases this September, is because she knows how important words are.  Anne is one of the most talented wordsmiths I know – her ability to turn a phrase is boundless, fluctuating so smoothly between humorous and heartfelt that the two almost seem to form one quantum state (“It was not the greatest insult ever, but one thing Hazel had learned at her new school was when it comes to insults it’s the thought that counts”).  But Anne takes things much further than that in Breadcrumbs.  It’s a contemporary fairy tale set in present-day Minneapolis which draws its structure and inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Snow Queen.”  In Anne’s book, a young girl named Hazel and a young boy named Jack are best friends, and they’re both dealing with hardship, but it’s their friendship that holds them together.  They spend their days talking about Joe Mauer’s batting average and Batman’s utility belt and the Chronicles of Narnia, but what they’re saying with all of it is “I know you, and I am here.”  They’re just saying it with different words, and it’s the words that make the difference.

If you’re familiar with “The Snow Queen”, you know what happens next.  Jack’s heart is frozen by a broken piece of an evil mirror, and he decides to leave everything in his life behind – including his friendship with Hazel.  Jack is still there, he is still speaking English, but the language they had created is gone.  Now, baseball and comic books and talking lions are just baseball and comic books and talking lions.  As in the original story, Jack eventually leaves, taking off into an enchanted forest with a woman made of ice.  Hazel, of course, follows him, and under normal circumstances, this would be fine.  She has read Alice In Wonderland, The Hobbit, A Wrinkle In Time.  If she has to kill a sinister queen, slay giant spiders, or tesser, she’ll be good to go.  But how do you save someone you can’t talk to anymore?  How do you convince someone to come back home when no one there speaks the same language?  How do you connect when words have lost their meaning?

Part of the brilliance of Breadcrumbs is that it is so deeply concerned with the shades and contours and light-catching that make words much more than interchangeable bricks.  Hazel navigates the fantasy world in the book the same way the reader will – with the stories she’s brought in with her.  It’s finding the right words that will save Jack or lose him forever at the end, but Hazel thankfully has enough words and stories to light the pathway to him.  And we hope that readers will find a similar path lit for