Sick of Sappy Children's Fare
"This would NEVER happen in real life," I'd say. "You know that, right?"
I didn't want my daughter exposed to the ugly reality that there are bad people who do unspeakably horrible things, even to children. But after doing some reading, I soon began to realize that I was protecting myself--not her.
Throughout the ages, kids have been drawn to Grimm fairy tales exactly because they allow them to access their darkest fears in a safe way. Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychiatrist, wrote brilliantly about this phenomenon.
From that point on, I became intolerant of the sappy children's fare--the Hollywood remakes and new books that turn the wicked, menacing characters of old classics into just annoying snobs or meanies who become "nice" once they learn to love and be loved.
So it was with great disappointment--but not surprise---that I read the New York Times review of the new Broadway staging of "Mary Poppins."
As the reviewer put it, "you can’t help noticing that while [Mary Poppins] looks like Joan Crawford trying to be nice, she sounds more like Dr. Phil."
Last weekend, Emily and I went to see Great Expectations, the new off-Broadway production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. While the play felt like a Reader's Digest version--why the producers felt the need to squeeze most of the twists and turns from the 500-page plus book into an 80-minute show is unfathomable--I still appreciated the fact that the show didn't try to sanitize the story. The play still has all of the moral ambiguities of the Dickens novel (a creepy criminal who nonetheless rescues Pip, a likeable hero who turns out to be very hurtful to some very nice, good people) which makes it a compelling story for adults--and children.
Stumble It!
posted by pam at 11:15 AM
0 comments
links to this post
