‘Cinderella’ not just for kids

Published 8:59 am Thursday, February 28, 2008

Fairy tales aren’t always just for kids.

Northwest Savoyards’ “Cinderella” threw me for a loop. The kids, it didn’t. They booed the wicked stepmother and her spoiled daughters. They suffered through Cinderella’s abuses every bit as much as she did. They ooh-ed and ahh-ed her new dress and horse and carriage when she went to the ball. They swooned as she and Prince Charming waltzed their way into one another’s heart. They marveled at an uncomplicated world in black and white buoyed up by Richard Rodgers’ gorgeous music.

But events in the Middle East had soured me going in. For me, the stepmother was a single parent saddled with somebody’s else’s kid and two grown daughters that she never had the parenting skills to deal with to begin with and could hardly wait to marry off. Also prince Charming was a rich, preppy bachelor with nothing but time on his hands, and Cinderella was a textbook case of being in denial.

Before intermission, the “Cinderella” I was watching bore no relation whatsoever to the world outside P.U.D. Auditorium in Everett on opening night. It was la-la land on a planet gone mad.

Then there came traipsing into my consciousness two little grade school girls with their grandmother. The girls were chattering like magpies about how uncool Cinderella’s mom was and weren’t Portia and Joy just brats and didn’t Cinderella kind of look like Gwyneth Paltrow only different?

It had been bugging me since before the curtain went up and so I asked them when they stopped for air what they thought about Fairy Grandmother taking away somebody’s cell phone before “Cinderella” started. Dana Williams as Cinderella’s Fairy Grandmother had actually done that. Williams had requested everybody turn off their cell phones. One that a lady seated in the front row had, went off. Williams snatched it away from the lady, told the caller to give it up and walked away with the lady’s cell phone. A bold move, I thought, for community theater. I wondered what the little girls made of that.

“Silly,” one said. “It was wood.”

“How do you know?” The thought that the cell phone was fake and Fairy Godmother was merely warming up her audience for “Cinderella,” that thought had never once entered my mind. But then, I wasn’t in the best of moods.

“Fairy Godmother showed us.”

“She did?”

“When she hit the floor with it.”

I remembered Fairy Godmother hitting the floor with the cell phone and everyone around me laughing, and I remembered thinking how odd it was that everyone around me should be laughing at her hitting the floor with somebody else’s cell phone. Fact was, I had missed the boat. Fact was, I had been missing the boat all the way along.

Funny how after that, Jennifer Wills transformed into the Cinderella whose rise from rags to riches shows that dreams can come true. And John Edwards as Prince Charming became the gentle and all-understanding soul of Cinderella’s heart’s desire. And Marcia Bridges, Ingrid Buron and Amber Lozott as wicked Stepmother and spoiled sisters, all diminished into nothing more than foolish delusions, hardly worth a second thought.

Funny, how after that, the fairy tale was a fairy tale with a fairy tale ending, nothing more, nothing less; and how, after that, the world outside the P.U.D. seemed a little less threatening.

But then, fairy tales aren’t always just for kids.