The Thaumaturgy Department

Fairy tales can come true, the old song goes; it can happen to you, apparently, if you’re young at heart. Whether one believes this hopeful sentiment, and regardless of the age of one’s internal organs, there’s no doubt that fairy tales have for the past couple of years — and into the foreseeable future — been coming pretty regularly to screens both big and small, achieving, you could say, at least the kind of quasi-truth that movies and television can concoct.

a former intern gets inspired by Dostoevsky and our production of Crime and Punishment (and goes on a reading spree):

rmgilbert:

I seem to be a glutton for punishment whenever I can pick books for fun.

Summer 2010 I was interning at Centerstage, and got to put together a preliminary actor packet in prep for a three-actor adaptation to be staged in the spring of 2011. December 2010, I was combing through DJ Ernst…

(Source: rmgilby)

“The Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, otherwise known as an adaptation of the movie’s entire screenplay loaded into Bard-ian vernacular.” Someone had waaaaaay too much time on his hands. NOT us here, where we are in Dostoevskyland these days, but from a NY-based Lebowski buff & aspiring screenwriter.

Sigh. First it was Disney’s balloon (“not in the book” as they declaim in Eason’s deliciously self-aware and faithful adaptation); then it was the CGI-driven departure from Verne’s original chronicled in this interesting, fairly technical blog post. Variations on this liberty-seizing pattern (most of them wanting to get the story airborne) are by now a well-entrenched part of the tradition of this poor book, which nevertheless endures. When the program material for our production goes online, read Drew’s ruminations on the subject in his extended profile of the many sides of Verne himself; from the very first, his writing, and 80 Days in particular, have proven prone to each new generation inscribing its own “take.” -ghw