Hopatcong Students Twist Timeless Stories

Parents, grandparents and siblings were treated to an end-of-the-year play by Alison Ibaceta’s second-grade class from the Tulsa Trail School.

“The kids did an amazing job and they had a really good time,” Ibaceta said.

Held in the school library and playing to a packed audience, the students performed four separate plays, called "Fractured Fairy Tales," including “Little Miss Muffet Smashes The Spider To Smithereens,” “Jack Climbs To The Top Of A Very Tall Vegetable And Finds A Very Large Individual With An Attitude Problem,” “The Big Bad Wolf Goes To The Doctor To Find Out Why He Can’t Huff And Puff Anymore” and “Don’t Kiss Sleeping Beauty, She’s Got Really Bad Breath.”

According to Ibaceta, a "Fractured Fairy Tale" is a tale that has been modified in such a way to find comedy at an unexpected characterization, plot development or contrary point of view. The altered fairy tales come from “Frantic Frogs and Other Frankly Fractured Folk Tales for Readers Theater.” After choosing the fairy tales to perform, all 25 students from Ibaceta’s class participated, each picking the part they wanted to play.

Each play offered a comedic version of the original fairy tale. Miss Muffet, sitting on her tuffet and eating her curds and whey, was asked repeatedly by the creatures in the forest to share her bounty of food but refused each time. She grew more and more cranky with each request and vowed to dispose of the next creature to ask for her food. Along comes the spider and sits down beside her and asks to share the food. That’s curtains for the spider.

"Jack and the Bean Stalk" starts out with Jack selling the family cow for a handful of cactus seeds. With the help of the narrator, the cactus seeds are magically turned into beans, which were planted and, of course, a bean stalk grows, which Jack climbs and meets a very cranky giant. In the end, Jack and his mom move to Arizona and start a cactus mail-order business. The giant sells his bean stalk to a developer and buys a condo on top of another large vegetable.

The Big Bad Wolf finds himself unable to huff and puff and needs to see a doctor. The doctor prescribes some medicine and sends Wolf to the pharmacy to pick up the medicine. On his way through town to the pharmacy, Wolf gets heckled by fairy tale characters, knowing he can no longer huff and puff. Snow White was especially hard on him. In the end the medicine works and Wolf gets back his huff and his puff.

Sleeping Beauty was waiting for her Prince Charming to awaken her with a kiss but all the princess in the forest refused to go into her house because her breath smelled so bad “it peeled the wallpaper off the walls.” As the story goes, years later, after mouthwash was invented, a traveling salesman came along and thinking he was going to land Sleeping Beauty, gave her the mouthwash and kissed her. She awoke, saw the salesman but refused his advances, saying he was “no Prince Charming.”