Fairy Tale

BAGHDAD, Iraq - It was as if the Iraqi dictator, an orphan who grew up poor, wanted to prove to himself that children who lost their fathers could still lead fairy tale lives. So, once upon a time, Saddam Hussein built the lavish, $40 million Orphans Village in southwestern Baghdad. The campus, which opened 2 1/2 years ago, had landscaped gardens, columned classrooms, air-conditioned dormitories and a mosque. More than 600 orphans swam in the village pool, rode horses, played basketball and tennis.

"Cymbeline" is a Shakespearean fairy tale, complete with a wicked stepmother, lost children, a journey in the woods and, ultimately, a happy ending.At Washington's Kennedy Center, director Adrian Noble's imaginative Royal Shakespeare Company production reinforces the play's fairy-tale qualities from the opening speeches, which he has re-assigned to a storyteller character, who shares the crucial introductory exposition with a host of hooded listeners, sitting around a fire.Each time the storyteller mentions a major character -- King Cymbeline, his daughter Imogen, her banished husband, Posthumus Leonatus -- that character stands and faces the audience, discarding a hooded robe and revealing the character's full costume underneath.

Ballet Theatre of Maryland opened its 35th season, and 10th with artistic director Dianna Cuatto at the helm, with the fireworks of a world-premiere ballet. Known for enchanting audiences with classic tales at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, Cuatto summoned new choreographic wizardry for her personal favorite, "The Dancing Princesses," a lesser-known Grimm fairy tale. Striving to deliver "a dramatic retelling in dance where I could create an amazing new secret world of magic," Cuatto achieved her goal and more.

In its English offering this week of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Opera AACC calls upon the talents of Anne Arundel Community College faculty members, Maryland-based singers and 15 students from county elementary, middle and high schools. The shows, including today's at 3 p.m., will be presented at AACC's Pascal Center for the Performing Arts. James Harp, the artistic administrator of the Baltimore Opera, is the stage director of AACC's production, and Anna Binneweg, AACC's music director, is music director and conductor.

The Howard County Ballet enthralled and awed children of all ages last spring with a production of Peter Pan, complete with flying special effects. This weekend, Jim Rouse Theatre at Wilde Lake High School will provide the backdrop for the company's full-length ballet version of Cinderella, the most enchanting fairy tale of them all. "It's the ultimate rags to riches story," says Kathi Ferguson, the ensemble's founding director, who recently received this...

Anne Arundel Community College's Moonlight Troupers will present the classic fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel," with a few twists, this weekend and next.The company, which produces a children's play every other spring to coincide with an AACC course in children's theater, is using William Glennon's adaptation of the Brothers Grimm story of a witch and the two children who outsmart her.This version has no wicked stepmother. The children's real mother is put under a spell by the witch. A bird and a gnome -- puppets of nearly human size -- are unwilling henchmen of the witch, leading the children to the gingerbread house.

For the next two weekends, midshipmen will display teamwork and discipline along with performance artistry when they present Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, a fully staged, costumed and choreographed production with a live pit orchestra, in the annual Naval Academy Winter Musical. The cast will venture into the challenging realm of the 1987 musical that brought Sondheim a Tony award for his score and a Tony to James Lapine for his book. Into the Woods brings adult dimensions to familiar fairy tale characters who deal with the threatening environment they've helped to create.

"There was once a witch who desired to know everything. ... Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind." A pretty cool hook for a fairy tale and, as it turns out, a pretty cool inspiration for an original production being staged by Single Carrot Theatre under the intriguing title "Illuminoctem." The source material comes from 19th-century Scottish author and clergyman George MacDonald, who counted the likes of Tennyson and Lewis Carroll among his friends, the likes of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis among those he influenced.

MANILA, Philippines -- If Imelda Marcos is to be believed, her husband, the dictator, bricked up his family home with lead-covered gold bars.If the Philippine Central Bank is to be believed, the amount of gold the Marcos family allegedly hoarded would have required a convoy of trucks to move. Its size would have exceeded all the gold reserves ever kept in the bank's vaults.If a private investigator is to be believed, $7 billion worth of the Marcos gold held by Marcos-family front companies is navigating through Swiss accounts or has been laundered already.

When Steven Spielberg calls, Hollywood answers, especially when it's for a good cause. So when the legendary movie director asked Gwyneth Paltrow, Whoopi Goldberg and nearly 20 other celebrities to re-write four classic children's stories, they said yes. The result, Once Upon a Fairy Tale (Viking, $30), is a quirky take on old favorites that is visually captivating, thanks to 21 renowned children's book illustrators -- and easy on the ears, thanks to a CD that comes with the book. Royalties from the project will go to the STARBRIGHT Foundation.