The Red Riding Hood/Wolf illustration. By Gustave Dore;1883. |
If Sondheim had a partial debt to Hammerstein, he was also consciously challenging himself to emulate the triumphant construction of a Hollywood favorite, The Wizard of Oz,a work whose score he lauded as inextricable from its action. Lapine would bring an equal enthusiasm as well as a sympathy for the writings of psychologist Carl Jung, whose ideas Lapine initially investigated in his acclaimed play Twelve Dreams. If such firm foundations afforded the collaborators a promise of navigating the hazards of musical fantasy, they gained further confidence in the tradition itself, which is defined by its state of constant reinvention. From the initial core stories gathered by Charles Perrault in the 17th century, to the 18thcentury publication of forty volumes of French fairy tales, the 19thcentury collections of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, on through the imaginative literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Lewis Carroll, and James M. Barrie, down to our present age of Walt Disney, Jean Cocteau, Angela Carter and J.K. Rowling, the polyphonic nature of the genre warmly welcomes all comers.
To be continued Friday…