Monica Edinger's Blog, page 105

Raves for the RSC's Matilda

My last post happened to be on the same day the Matilda musical opened.  Now I'm seeing rave reviews and very much hoping that some folks are eying it for this side of the pond.

From the Telegraph's review:

I turned up to the RSC's new musical version of Roald Dahl's Matilda expecting a pretty classy children's show. What I wasn't anticipating was the best British musical since Billy Elliot and a smash hit that will surely be the toast of the West End once its run in Stratford is over.

From the Guardian's review:

Dennis Kelly, as adaptor, has, if anything, heightened Dahl's awareness of both the mean-spirited and the miraculous. Matilda is a brilliantly precocious child detested equally by her dodgy car-dealer father and her ballroom-dancing obsessed mother. And, at school, she falls prey to the evil machinations of the diabolical headmistress to whom all children are maggots. But, in Kelly's version, Matilda is not just a voracious reader and opponent of injustice. She is also a prophetic storyteller who magically prefigures the plight of her one schoolroom champion, the aptly named Miss Honey.

Roald Dahl's Matilda — Now Singing and Dancing!

Beloved by generations of children and Americanized in a film, Roald Dahl's valiant heroine Matilda is now belting it out on one of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford stages.  Officially opening tonight, the show has been a labor of love for many people among them Australian comic Tim Minchin who penned the lyrics and composed the music.  For more on the development of this project check out this Telegraph article and the following two trailers. The first is a general one while the second focuses on the development of the song, "When I Grow Up."

Also at Huffington Post.

Thoughts on Newbery: Sensible Age Criteria

Children are defined as persons of ages up to and including fourteen, and books for this entire age range are to be considered.  (From the Newbery Terms & Criteria)

Thank goodness for that hard, but honest criteria.  I mean that really and truly even as I often butt my head up against it. Unlike some other awards (say one in particular — more on that in a second), the Newbery Award isn't given to a book that appeals to a range of kids. Rather, a range of books is considered.  That means a book can win the award that is perfect for a twelve year-old and completely useless for a two year-old. Or wonderful for a six year old and tedious for a thirteen-year-old.

Yet evidently other awards don't work this way at all.  Say the U.K.'s Blue Peter Award whose judges earlier this week took a book off their just-announced shortlist because it wasn't "suitable" for their "core audience."  The book is Andy Mulligan's Trash which I thought was absolutely riveting and perfectly suitable for my core audience of middle grade kids.  A book that, were Andy American, would definitely be under Newbery consideration — it is that good.  Here's a bit from the Guardian article on the tempest:

Trash is the story of a young street child who lives and works on a rubbish heap, and who finds himself on the run from the police. A statement from Blue Peter said the book should not have been shortlisted in the first place "because it contains scenes of violence and swearing that are not suitable for the younger end of our audience." The programme-makers added: "We regret the mistake that was made in the initial judging but we do not believe the book is appropriate for children as young as six."

Too bad.  And pretty lame too.  Now I may struggle to figure out if the language and sensibility of a particular YA book is right for an almost-fourteen-year-old, but at least I don't have to worry about it being also suitable for a toddler.  Bad show, Peter.

For the Booklover Who has Everything — How about One of Edward Gorey's Fur Coats?

So you've got this special person and are still searching high and low for the perfect gift.  A persnickety sort, your friend loves vampires, but hates sparkles, dresses in black and white (with the occasional touch of red), is a fan of felines, an opera buff, and collects quirky books. Well look no more!  Next Thursday, December 11th, Bloomsbury Auctions will be auctioning off a bunch of very cool Edward Gorey stuff including fourteen of his iconic fur coats, some of his odd jewelery, and even a rock he drew upon.

One of the twentieth century's more remarkable eccentrics, Edward Gorey was best known for scratchy pen and ink drawings often of the macabre sort, but with a particular and original wit.  Early books were cult favorites, but he became more broadly known for his stage design of the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula and Masterpiece Mystery's opening animation.  Gorey stopped wearing the fur coats after becoming passionate about animal rights and so it is both fitting and ironic that part of the proceeds of this sale will go to the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust to benefit animal welfare and the rest to the Edward Gorey House, now a museum.

Here are just a few of the remarkable objects on sale with excerpts from the catalog descriptions.

12. Fur Coat owned and worn by Edward Gorey A Finnish raccoon coat, dyed green with green woolen lining and extra-large lapels. Very long and heavy.

2. Hand-Sewn Figbash A hand-sewn, rice filled Figbash stuffed animal creature, white fabric with black spots, these rare creations were handmade by Gorey and given to friends.

40. A group of two titles 1) The Helpless Doorknob: A Shuffled Story. Complete set of twenty cards in the original plastic case with limitation leaflet. The artist claims that these cards "can be read in 2,432,902,069,736,640,000 different ways." 2) E. D. Ward: A Mercurial Bear. This "Dogear Wryde Paper Pastime" is a paper doll of a bear with a complete wardrobe of absurd clothes to cut out.

31. The Vinegar Works consists of three volumes, comprising: "The Gashlycrumb Tinies", "The West Wing" and "The Insect God."

33. The Fraught Settee The Fantod Press, 1990.

24. Rock with Painted Face. Evidently Edward Gorey found this stone on the beach, drew on it and presented it to his good friend James Marshall, the creator of George and Martha and The Stupids.

Also at the Huffington Post.

Megan Whalen Turner Reflects on Fairy Tales

Megan Whalen Turner considers fairy tales, in particular her responses as a child and more recently to The Provensen Book of Fairytales.

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Fairytale Reflections (11) Megan Whalen Turner.

 

A Tribute to My Colleagues in Public Schools

It seems that everywhere you turn these days we educators are being maligned and demonized, disrespected, not allowed to practice methods of good teaching,  repeatedly questioned and belittled, and generally presented in the public consciousness in very ugly ways .  Every time I see another such nasty mention I again feel incredibly grateful to be teaching in a private school where I am respected and where I am able to teach in ways that keep me intellectually and creatively happy. And so I am in awe of my public school colleagues  who manage to continue, in the face of all this negativity, to fight the good fight and continue to teach creatively and inform others about this too.  Teachers  like classroom teacher Mary Lee Hahn who touched me deeply yesterday when she thanked me in this giving thanks post, for for doing something that made a big difference in her professional life.  I responded with the following comment and decided to post it here too:

Mary Lee,

I'm incredibly touched and honored by your mention of me. I am incredibly grateful of your work too.  In particular my admiration knows no bounds for your staying in the classroom and fighting on behalf of good teaching and good learning. Being in a private school it is much easier for me and so I admire and respect all of you who manage to continue to teach creatively, with books, and so intimately in this time of high-stakes tests and standards.  Thank you so much for all you do.

 

Turkey Legs and Lurkey

Happy Thanksgiving, those in the US celebrating this day.

1.  Someone (can't remember who) at NCTE commented to me that the huge turkey legs available at theme parks were just too massive to be real turkey.  Wanting to see for myself I made sure to look out for them when I went to Universal Studios earlier this week and was very disappointed.  The ones I saw for sale were puny and no one seemed to be walking around with them Fred Flinstone-like.  Shucks.

2. Roger Sutton randomly posted this a while back and since it seems apt for today and I find it oddly addicting, here you are.

Sid Fleischman's Sir Charlie: The Funniest Man in the World

I wasn't going to post here about Sir Charlie, but having found it difficult to comment cogently about it on this Heavy Medal post, I'm going to attempt to try to do so more clearly here. As I've noted here already I'm a long time fan of Charlie Chaplin, have shown his movies to my 4th graders for decades, and for the last year have been researching his life and art for my own book.  As a result I read Fleischman's biography of Chaplin (several times by now) with a whole lot of background of my own.

But before offering my reservations about this particular book, I want to express my admiration for Sid Fleischman who was in a class by himself as a writer for children.  While I was well aware of his status as a wonderful writer of fiction, it was as a biographer that I came to know him best.  I was completely charmed by Escape: The Story of the Great Houdini in which Fleischman, a practicing magician himself who knew Houdini's widow, gives a very personal and engrossing account of the remarkable escape artist. And then, having been a lifelong fan of Mark Twain, I delighted in The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West, Fleischman's energetic and entertaining take on that witty man of letters. Unfortunately, I am unable to bring the same enthusiasm to Sir Charlie.

First and most of all, I feel that Fleischman does not succeed in communicating to his intended audience of young readers exactly how and why Charlie Chaplin was the "funniest man in the world."  I can imagine potential young readers seeing that subtitle, enthusiastically diving into the book, and then being lost as to why this man was supposedly so funny. Sure, many people including Fleischman and myself think he is funny, but the challenge is to write in a way that makes young readers, those who know absolutely nothing about him,  think so too.

I realize that humor is very subjective, but does this make you laugh or want to check out a Chaplin movie?  Fleischman on page 58:

In his drunk act, Charlie enters to seat himself in a theater box, pausing first, with great dignity, to peel off a white glove.  Moments later, too hazy to remember, he again attempts to remove the glove.  He tries to light his cigar from an electric light.  When a stooge in the next box lights a match for him, Charlie reaches for it with his cigar and falls out of the box.

Charlie's gift for constant invention reveals itself.  He climbs back into the box, only to balance out and hang on again, feet dangling.  The audience gasps.  Physical humor is triumphant. At the climax, the diminutive drunk finds himself onstage wresting a huge and terrible villain. (Fleischman, page 58.)

While it certainly is an appreciation of  Chaplin's gags expressed by a sincere and true fan, I don't think it succeeds at helping a young readers unfamiliar with Chaplin get that this is really funny and even make them eager to see for themselves   Now I've read a lot of descriptions of Chaplin's gags and so far the ones that come closest to communicating how the man was so funny are the ones he wrote himself.    For example:

I entered with my back to the audience…I looked immaculate dressed in a frock coat, top hat, can and spats — a typical Edwardian villain.  Then I turned showing my red nose.  There was a laugh. That ingratiated me with the audience.  I shrugged melodramatically, then snapped my fingers and veered across the stage , tripping over a dumbbell. Then my cane became entangled with an upright punching bag, which rebounded and slapped me in the face.  I swaggered and swung, hitting myself with my cane on the side of the head.  The audience roared. (Chaplin's Autobiography, pg 101)

Here are two more contrasting examples.

Fleischman (page 71) describing Chaplin as he launches the Little Tramp in Kid Auto Races in which Charlie plays a spectator who is obsessed with getting in front of the cameraman who is filming the race.

Every time the director moved the setup, in shuffles the tramp to mug for the camera.  Soon Charlie is almost run down by racing cars, only to duck a cop policing the crowd.  He goes from improvisation to improvisation until the cameraman delivers a swift kick to launch him out of the shot and the picture.

Versus this excerpt from Chaplin's own version (describing Mabel's Strange Predicament which was released after Auto Races, but may have been filmed first):

In all comedy business an attitude is most important, but it is not always easy to find an attitude.  However, in the hotel lobby [the setting of Mabel's Strange Predicament] I felt I was an impostor posing as one of the guests, but in reality I was a tramp just wanting a little shelter.  I entered and stumbled over the foot of a lady.  I turned and raised my hat apologetically, then stumbled over a cuspidor, then turned and raised my hat to the cuspidor.

Frankly,  I think Chaplin does a much better job of communicating why he was so funny than does Fleischman.

Another difficulty I have is with some of the writing. I agree with the commentator on Heavy Medal who complained of purple prose. ("…insolent as a cannonball" from page 1, for example.)  Additionally, there are moments in the book where Fleischman puts one sentence next to another in ways that require young readers to fill a dauntingly huge chasm in between.  Here's an example when he is writing about Chaplin's discovery of reading:

Later and offstage, he could almost always be found struggling through a book.  His ambitions had taken a profound shift. Performing was necessary for fried bread and haddock.  He would spend a lifetime pursuing a closeted aspiration to become well educated.  An intellectual. (Fleischman, pg 32)

Seems to me that young readers could do with something after that mention of bread and haddock to make the point that he was also looking for intellectual nourishment. Not to mention, I don't think this is true of Chaplin as performing for him was definitely more than a way to make ends meet. I also don't at all feel his wish to be an intellectual was closeted.  Far from it — he loved to befriend intellectuals, writers, and such and writes about them in name-dropping profusion (which Fleischman does indeed note) throughout his autobiography.

Then I have to disagree with some of the ways Fleischman presents aspects of Chaplin's life. For example, in "Chapter Four: Life With Father" I feel Fleischman sets the stepmother up very oddly as a complete villain even though Chaplin doesn't himself in his autobiography. In it he shows how she was horribly abused by his father and how that clearly was the reason for her unhappiness. In fact he writes of his horror and shock when the father knocks her unconscious, "I was shocked at Father's action, such violence made me lose respect for him… She loved Father.  Even though very young I could see it in her glance the night she stood by the fireplace, bewildered and hurt by his neglect." (Autobiography, pg. 37)

Then there is this flippant comment of Fleischman's about poor Charlie's purchase of a Latin-English dictionary: "One can only guess what he intended to do with it.  Hit Karno over the head with Ovid in the original language?" (Fleischman, pg 50) Actually I feel that Chaplin's mention of this in his autobiography is a poignant example of his life-long effort to educate himself.  Given the profound class differences in Britain he well knew that knowing Latin was a sign of status. Fleischman does note other examples of Chaplin buying and reading challenging texts such as Schopenhauser — it seems to me very possible that Chaplin thought he might be able to teach himself Latin as he'd done with other things.

Finally, I'm highly uncomfortable with Fleischman writing in a note for page 66  "… Chaplin, writing in an earlier autobiography, Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1916, cited in McCaffrey's Focus on Chaplin, p. 31…"  (Fleischman, pg 243) The problem is that this is a totally bogus autobiography.  Rose Wilder Lane (yeah, that Rose Wilder Lane who helped her mother write the Little  House books) interviewed Chaplin in 1915 for the San Francisco Bulletin. After the original publication the manuscript was juiced up with all sorts of made-up stuff and then published as Charlie's autobiography. He was outraged when he encountered it.  After quoting from it, David Robinson in Chaplin: His Life and Art,  writes, "The book is full of such romantic and misleading nonsense, which has nevertheless continued to supply and confuse gullible Chaplin historians for seven decades." (pg. 182)

There's more, but I'm not on the Newbery Committee so I'll stop now.  Good and decent book — yes.  Newbery quality — no, at least not in my opinion.

The Stucco Snow was to Die For

So my bucket list is now down one — I've been to Wizarding World, had some butterbeer, and lived to tell the tale.

Is it as fabulous as other visitors have told me?  Yes and no.

Yes, the look is delightful —the moving portraits, the lovingly created stores and castle, the noises and movements of creatures and books and such, as well as employees-I mean-characters telling you to "move aside, Muggles." The Forbidden Journey ride was as exhilarating as promised, the butterbeer icily head-ache-producing, but believable,  and it was great fun to see young fans so excited to be there.

No, at least yesterday, because the crowds became overwhelming and then it felt like all you were doing was waiting, waiting, and waiting to shop.  Ollivander's wand shop, for example,  is a brief sweet performance and then a long shopping opportunity.  Now I am not a snot about merch by any means, but some of the lines I waited in for a very long time (probably 90 minutes for that wand shop) and the payoff just didn't seem worth it.  I'd expected more amusing entertainments to keep us occupied while waiting, but they weren't there.  Well, other than the two ladies in line behind us (not park employees, mind you, and not attired in purchases from the park) who were rather intimidating in a way all of the young uns in their Hogwarth robes were not.  (Note to Universal Studios: I only noticed the snow was stucco when right up against it during the long and tiring wait for the wand shop.  My recommendation — give us something else more fun to look at!)

A Few Fine Fairy Tale Films

While waiting for next week's Tangled, Disney's take on Rapunzel, I've been mulling over what makes a successful fairy tale movie for kids.  There are a lot of ephemeral ones out there, more out all the time it seems.  The ones that work for me are those with a bit more heft — some are updated, some are not, but all have wit, charm, and depth.  Here are four of those, one of which will be very familiar and three others that may be less so.  Do add your own suggestions in the comments.

 

Ashpet.  This is a delightful independent, small-budget, film, a Cinderella set in the rural South.  It is one of Tom Davenport's From the Brothers Grimm series; the others are excellent too.

 

Enchanted.  Okay, this is the familiar one, but it is really clever and charming and holds up on multiple viewings.  The gentle digs at all sorts of classical Disney films are extremely funny if you know the originals and still extremely funny if you don't.

 

Unfortunately I can't find a trailer for the very sweet and under-the-radar I Was a Rat! (although I did notice the whole thing is up in parts on youtube — probably illegally so I'm not linking to it).  I regularly read aloud Philip Pullman's book, a witty and elegant fiddling about with Cinderella, and find this movie to be a very faithful rendering of it.

 

Penelope.  This is a very interesting contemporary take on Beauty and the Beast, fun, different, and a tad surprising.