Andersen Not Just For Kids

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This week, the New York Times reported that Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, the lads who brought us the 2007 Tony-award winning musical, “Spring Awakening,” are working with director James Lapine on an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen‘s “Nightingale.” Thinking there must be some mistake, I reached for my reading glasses. But, no: there it was — the Danish storyteller is indeed providing the source material for the next project of the guys who blew up Broadway with teen sexuality.

My response came from the fact that I associate Andersen with childhood fairy stories. This morning, I came across this essay on Andersen, which woke me up to the reality that the writer dealt not just in little mermaids (like the one pictured here) but in time travel, adultery, murder by decapitation, death, grim poverty, social inequality, child psychology, intense Oedipal drama, split personality, snobbery, social climbing, and Jewish identity. Got that?


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