Secco Recit

This title is misleading, because it implies that there is a problem with the classic Cinderella story. But that would require there to be one definitive Cinderella , which there is not. There are countless variants on the story across many many centuries, independently evolved in many cultures, brought together by convergent evolution, split apart by divergent evolution, and so on and so forth. For this, and other reasons, I would like to take a moment to call out those who snarkily berate Disney and other adaptors for "sanitizing" the "original Brothers Grimm version" to make it more "kid-friendly," usually citing the part in the Disney movie where Cinderella's stepsisters conspicuously do not chop off bits of their feet to fit in the glass slipper. To that I say: The idea that Disney or any other adapter is somehow at fault for changing elements of a story in their adaptation is blatantly untrue. Every adaptation of every story ever by definitio...

A friend recently posed to me the hypothetical (and I'm just now realizing probably rhetorical) question, "Where would we be if Howard Ashman were still alive?" And my immediate response was "Well, Wicked probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in the form it does today." Which led me down a rabbit hole of counterfactualizing an elaborate timeline in which Howard Ashman did not die in 1991, and continued to change the landscape of Disney and musical theater in a radical way. (NOTE: This is all for fun and intended to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I do not have the ability to accurately predict this or any other alternate futures. If I did, I would become a time-traveling theatrical producer.) Howard Ashman and frequent collaborator Alan Menken You see, Howard Ashman's role in the shaping of a generation of childhoods began in 1987/88, when he was brought in to write lyrics for Disney's new animated feature, Oliver And Company . While worki...