2005-06 The Fractured Fairytales

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S y r a c u s e S t a g e2005-2006 Study Guide

education office: 443-1150 or syracusestage.org/education.html 3

PRESENT

Fractured Fairy TalesWritten by A.J. Jacobs

Directed ByJoan Hart Willard

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES TM & © Ward Productions. Inc.Licensed by Bullwinkle Studios. LLC All rights reserved

James A. ClarkProducing Director

Robert MossArtistic Director

Sponsored by

Composer/MusicalDirectionFred Willard

Choreography byKim Hale

Set/Costume DesignLindsey Vandeveer

Sound DesignLauren Shaw

Season Sponsors

S y r a c u s e S t a g e2005-2006 Study Guide education office: 443-1150 or syracusestage.org/education.html 4

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Table of Contents

Theatre and Education 5

Elements of Theatre 6

A Message From the Director 7

Fairy Tale Timeline 8

Setting The Scene 9

Tackling The Text 10

In The Classroom 11

"Supporting the arts is a main priority of the Bank of America CharitableFoundation, which is why we are so excited to partner with the Syracuse Stageon this exciting project. Through innovative programs, such as this one, we caneffectively encourage the children in our community to embrace the arts at anearly age. Bank of America is pleased to support such an important programand hope children throughout the greater Syracuse area will take full advantageof it."



Theatre and Education

"Theatre brings life to life." — Zelda Fichandler

When the first cave dweller got up to tell a story, theaterbegan. Almost every culture has some sort of live per-formance tradition to tell stories. Television and film mayhave diminished the desire for access to theater, but theyhave not diminished the importance. Live theater giveseach audience member an opportunity to connect withthe performers in a way he or she never could with TomCruise or Lindsay Lohan. The emotions can be moreintense because the events are happening right in front ofthe audience.

Ultimately, there is a fundamental difference in the psy-chological responses aroused by electronic media andtheatre because the former presents pictures of eventswhereas the latter performs the actual events in whatamounts to the same space as that occupied by the audi-ence. This difference results in one unique characteristicof theatre: its ability to offer intense sensory experiencethrough the simultaneous presence of live actors andaudience.

"The sole substitute for an experience which we have notourselves lived through is art and literature."

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Pedagogically, theatre can be used in a variety of ways.In many respects the teacher in the classroom is muchlike the actor onstage - with an audience (hopefully atten-tive), a script (lesson plan), props and set (classroom set-ting and teaching tools). The environment of the teachingexperience can change day to day, and can be impactedby weather, mood, outside events - in other words, eachday is a unique, active, sensory occurrence, just like aplay.

From this perspective all of what can be taught can betaught theatrically, whether it is having young childrencreating a pretend bank to learn about money, to olderstudents acting out a scene from a play. Theatre providesan opportunity to teach, and any play provides an oppor-tunity to teach more.

"Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the

world. Then artists come along and discover it the sameway all over again."

— Eudora Welty

Bringing your students to productions by Syracuse Stageand the Drama Department and utilizing this study guidein teaching about the plays, fulfills elements of the NewYork State core requirements. We know that as educatorsyou are the more qualified to determine how our playsand study guides blend with your lesson plans and teach-ing requirements. We hope that you find lots of possibili-ties to cover a variety of disciplines.

As you bring your students to the shows, you might wantthem to examine not merely the thematic elements of thewritten word, but also how production elements explorethese themes. Everything you see on this stage has beencreated specifically for this production — Our designersmeet with our directors months before rehearsals start,and shows are built to their specifications, which are inline with their vision of the work. In our detailed studyguides for our school shows, we will try to give you somepreviews of this process, but you might want to explorediscussing all of the design elements with your students asa way of opening the door to the production they will beseeing. You probably know all of the elements that makeup a show, but to recap:

Sets Costumes LightsProps Sound PaintingChoreography Music Casting

And of course, the one thing that is vitally necessary forany piece to be theatre:

AN AUDIENCE

Without this last, most important element, the theatreceases to be. Welcome to Syracuse Stage's EducationalOutreach Programs.

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Theatre usually engages other art disciplines includingWriting, Visual/Design, Music and Dance or Movement

CharacterWho? - Who are the characters in the play and what is their relationship to each other.

Plot/StoryWhat? - What is the story line - What happened beforethe play started? What do the characters want? Whathappens next?

SettingWhere? Where does the story take place? This influ-ences design concepts and actor's actions. Charactersmove and behave according to their environment.

TimeWhen? Time consists of Historical (period in history),Time of Year/Season and Time of day, which influencesdesign concepts and actors actions.

This column contains some possible elements for fur-ther classroom exploration when investigatinga piece of theatre.

CharacterRelationshipConflict/ResolutionActionPlot/StorySettingTimeImprovisationnon-verbal communicationStagingRealism/NaturalismVisualCompositionMetaphorLanguageTonePatternRepetitionEmotionPoint of ViewHumor

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Creating questions for exploration

Creating an open ended question using an element for exploration, otherwise known as a “Line ofInquiry” can help students make discoveries about a piece of theater and it’s relevance to theirown lives. A Line of Inquiry is also useful for Kinesthetic Activities - (On your feet exercises).Examples of Lines Of Inquiry :

1. How does an actor create a character through changing his/her body shape?

2. How does an actor create setting using physical actions?

3. How does an actor use the language of gesture to convey emotion/feelings?

4. How does the use of music convey the mood of a scene?



A Message Fromthe Director

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Dear Teachers,

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved watching theRocky and Bullwinkle Show on Television. The Program includ-ed a segment called, Fractured Fairy Tales, that was her favoritepart of the show. She enjoyed hearing her mother read fairy talesand knew them all. But The Fractured Fairy Tales turned the tra-ditional stories upside down and twisted them into contempo-rary skits; tales that the little girl could more easily relate.

I have never forgotten those funny stories and wanted to bringthem to life for today’s audience. But the primary purpose inwriting this show was to spark a child’s imagination and intro-duce the idea that traditional stories can be recreated. Ask aroom full of children to make up a new ending to Little RedRiding Hood and you may acquire twenty different stories.Grandmother, who just so happens to be a Park Ranger capturesthe wolf and releases him in Yosemite National Park to be withthe other wolves-since they travel in packs. As a teacher, Iencourage my students to explore all possibilities. . .what wouldhappen if? Giving them permission to create freely, encouragingspontaneity and inventiveness. The fun part is asking them,what they can learn from this story? What is gained by tellingthis story? It just may be to make people laugh-and that’s fine.

I hope you will help--motivate your students to turn off theircomputers, put down their Game Boys and write a story; mayberecreating one of their favorite stories. Then they must ask theirfriends to act it out. Or perhaps the teacher can give them asubject and they can all help write one play together, by brain-storming their ideas. If they have the physical experience ofvoicing their thoughts and feelings creatively, it may stimulatetheir imaginations and challenge their minds. If they arereminded to support each other’s ideas without judging, theywill experience ensemble (or team work). The necessary compo-nent in all this is, of course to have fun!

Yours truly,

Joan Hart Willard, director of Fractured Fairy Tales

Fractured Fairy Tales includes:

Princess and The Pea

Slurping Beauty

The Absentminded KingMeets the Goblins

Rupunzul - The Opera

The Witch’s Broom

Pinocchio

Cutie and The Beast

Prince Hyacinth


Fairy Tale Timeline 1812 & 1815GermanyJacob and Wilhelm Grimm publish Kinder undHausmarchen (Childhood and Household Tales). Populartales from the collection include The Frog King, Hanseland Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White and theSeven Dwarfs.

1835DenmarkHans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children ispublished. Including The Wild Swans and The Princesson the Pea.

1845NorwayThe first illustrated edition, featuring the work of ErikWerenskiold and Theodor Kittelsen, appears in 1879. Twoof the most famous tales from this collection are East ofthe Sun and West of the Moon and The Three Billy GoatsGruff.

1893Great BritainMarian Roalfe Cox publishes her book, Cinderella: ThreeHundred and Forty-five Variants of Cinderella fromaround the world

1937United StatesWalt Disney's first feature length animated film isreleased, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

1950United StatesWalt Disney's Cinderella is released.

1954United StatesMarcia Brown's picture book, Cinderella, or the LittleGlass Slipper, wins the Caldecott Medal (1955). 1959Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty is released.

1959-1964United StatesJay Ward's "Rocky and His Friends" premieres on ABC.One of its popular "shows within a show" is the FracturedFairy Tales segment.

1989United StatesThe Disney version of the Hans Christian Andersentale, The Little Mermaid is released.

Ed Young's picture book, Lon Po Po: A Red-RidingHood Story from China , is published and later winsthe Caldecott Medal (1990).

1991Disney's Beauty and the Beast is released. It is the firstfeature length animated film to be nominated for anAcademy Award.

2001United StatesDavid Wiesner wins the Caldecott Medal (2002) for hisfractured fairy tale picture book, The Three Pigs.

The Film Shrek is released. It revisits fairy tale themeswhile parodying popular culture

2004United StatesThe film Shrek 2, the sequel to Shrek, is one of thehighest grossing movies of the year.

Sleeping Beauty by Henry Meynell Rheam

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Setting the Scene

HISTORYAlthough in the late nineteenth and twentieth century thefairy tale came to be associated with children's literature,adults were originally as likely as children to be the audi-ence of the fairy tale. The fairy tale was part of an oral tra-dition: tales were narrated orally, rather than writtendown, and handed down from generation to generation.

The tales often had sad endings; such was the penalty fordealing with the fairy folk. Later fairy tales were aboutprinces and princesses, combat, adventure, society, andromance. Fairies had a secondary role. Moral lessons andhappy endings were more common, and the villain wasusually punished. In the modern era, fairy tales werealtered, usually with violence removed, so they could beread to children (who according to a common modernsentiment should not hear about violence).

Sometimes fairy tales are simply miraculous entertain-ments, but often they are disguised morality tales. This istrue for the Brothers Grimm Kinder-und Hausmärchen,and much of the witty, dead-pan, social criticism beneaththe surface of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, whichinfluenced Roald Dahl.

The fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the "ArabianNights" collection of magical tales, in antiquity: Cupid andPsyche, Bel and the Dragon. Fairy tales resurfaced in liter-ature in the 17th century, with the Neapolitan tales ofGiambattista Basile and the later Contes of CharlesPerrault, who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty andCinderella.

SOURCES

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/instructor/fairytale.html

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=4160&si=126

http://www.brownielocks.com/fractured-fairytales.html

http://www.dailywriting.net/Fractured_fairystory.html

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/con-tent/2175/

1915, illustration by Arthur Rackham.

S y r a c u s e S t a g e2005-2006 Study Guide education office: 443-1150 or 10

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Tackling The Text

A.J. Jacobs’Fractured Fairy Tales The standard formula used throughout the FracturedFairy Tales, twenty-five of which are collected in hisbook, was to take a standard fairy tale and put a twiston it, frequently involving bad puns. The stories werewritten in a folksy style, as if they were being told by afavorite uncle who was aware of any misunderstand-ings his story might cause and be ready to take advan-tage of those misunderstandings in telling the story.This tone comes across exceedingly well throughoutFractured Fairy Tales.Ward Productions, who produced the original shows,created 91 Fractured Fairy Tales, frequently revisitingstories when they came up with a new slant. Whilethis book has just under a third of those stories, Jacobselected to include some of those revisitations by pro-viding the reader with both "Beauty and the Beast"and "Cutie and the Beast" as well as multiple talesbased on Rumpelstiltskin and King Midas.Although the tales were meant to be topical whenthey were first aired in the 1960s, they remain topicaltoday, although with references to "Faraway Hamlet90210" at the end of "Pinocchio," it seems that Jacobsdid take the liberty to update some of the references tomake them more understandable to today's readerswho may not have been alive when the cartoons firstaired.

Did you Know...?Who doesn't love a good spoof--especially whenthe spoof takes on some of your favorite and mosttime-honored memories? In 1959, Jay Ward intro-duced his famous Fractured Fairy Tales series, as4.5-minute cartoon segments for Rocky & HisFriends.

A total of 91 episodes were made, tackling suchtales as The Brave Little Tailor, The Princess andthe Pea, Goldilocks and Sleeping Beauty.

While the tongue-in-cheek twists offered in eachsegment were a big hit with adult and kid viewersalike, Fractured Fairy Tales was never able to pickup an independent fanbase and thus, it neverexperienced the multimedia success of otherpotential spinoff series. One comic book was pub-lished in 1962, adapted from actual episodes bycartoonist Mel Crawford. But Fractured Fairy Talesended its regular televised run in 1969, as part ofthe short-lived Dudley Do-Right series.

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=4160&si=126

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES TM & © Ward Productions. Inc.Licensed by Bullwinkle Studios. LLC All rights reserved



In The Classroomquestions and activities

1. How are the fairy tales in Fractured Fairy Tales different from the original stories we know?

2. The Actors play different characters in Fractured Fairy Tales, what are some of the things that you notice abouthow they change characters? (Think about how they use their voices and bodies)

3. The characters in each story show different kinds of emotions, what do you notice about the different ways thecharacters show emotion/feelings? When we are happy what happens to our bodies? When we are sad whathappens?

3. What do you notice about the music and sound in the play? Does the music help with the mood of eachstory? How can we create mood with just our voices?

4. How are the characters in Fractured Fairy Tales like us? Do They make mistakes? How do they solve problems?

5. How would you change Sleeping Beauty, or Princess and the Pea? What if these stories took place in a differ-ent setting? How would that change the story?

Creating Mood and SettingThrough VocalizationHow is it possible to create mood or the feeling of astory with our own voices?

Have the kids brainstorm different emotions, angerhappiness sadness, etc. With their eyes closed letthem make the sounds they associate with that feel-ing.

What are some of the things they notice? What hap-pens to their voices when they are angry? Are theylow and loud or high and shrill?

Split the class into pairs or groups of four and havethem listen to each other.

Now try this activity with a Nursery Rhyme. Whathappens to the words of Jack and Jill if you are angry,or if you’re happy.

You can expand this to setting as well. What if Jackand Jill takes place in a haunted house, what wouldthat sound like? What if it were the mall?

Creating Characters - The Artist andThe Piece of ClayHow does an actor change the shape of their body toreflect a character other than themselves?

Have the kids brainstorm things they notice about dif-ferent characters such as an old man, a body builder, adoctor, etc. paying special attention to the shapesformed by their bodies.

With kids in pairs give one child the role of an artistand the other child the role of a piece of clay.

Using animal characters as a jumping off point, havethe artists mold their clay into the shape of the charac-ter. Making sure they are gentle when moving the clay.They can also give verbal instructions to shape the clay.

Now let the artists take a gallery walk noticing the dif-ferent shapes. The kids can then switch so that everyone gets a chance to be an artist or a piece of clay.

You can then experiment with other character possibili-ties.

In The Classroom

2005-06 The Fractured Fairytales

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