Fairy

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.

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.

Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky never quite got the whole self-assurance thing. The composer typically disparaged his own music at one point or another, as he did in 1892, after finishing a ballet that he called "infinitely poorer than The Sleeping Beauty," which he had written a couple of years earlier. "I have no doubt about it," he wrote a friend. To another, he just said: "This old chap's getting worn out." What Tchaikovsky didn't know was that he had composed what would become the most widely beloved and performed of all ballets - The Nutcracker.

Absinthe, legend has it, starred in the very first cocktail. Pale green, potent and deadly alluring, the drink in its day spawned a verb, a disease and, in Paris, its very own intoxicating time of day - L'heure Verte. To painters, poets and their imitators, absinthe became liquid muse, sipped, swirled and savored with passion until its ban a century ago. American importers and distillers, thirsty to revive a taste of the past, last year persuaded the government to end the 100-year prohibition.

Penelope stars Christina Ricci as Penelope Wilhern, a blue-blood born with a pig's snout because of a curse put on the Wilhern clan when it refused to let one of her 19th-century forebears marry a servant girl. She can break the curse only when a fellow aristocrat vows to love her for life, so her mother (Catherine O'Hara) hides her away in the family manse until she's of a marriageable age. Not even the most careful preparation can keep a succession of upper-class twits from jumping out a second-story window when they finally clap eyes on her. The movie is about what happens after one of those marital petitioners (Simon Woods)

Maybe in a week or so, owner Steve Bisciotti will huddle with his top officials and make sure the Ravens' front office is headed in the same direction again. There has been a lot of stress at the Castle recently. The Ravens had a losing season in 2007. They fired their head coach. They hired a new one in John Harbaugh, and in the process a lot of feelings might have gotten hurt. The front office might be a little divided right now. It was apparent that the consensus No. 1 choice of the organization was Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator Jason Garrett.

When Park School librarian Laura Amy Schlitz arrived at work yesterday, she was presented with a tiara borrowed from the theater's props department - a fitting tribute for the newly anointed queen of children's literature. Schlitz, 52, of Baltimore, learned that she had won the 2008 Newbery Medal, given annually for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for the under-18 set. During an all-school assembly called yesterday afternoon in Schlitz's honor, the entire student body of nearly 900 students stood and cheered for at least 30 seconds.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE Fox DVD / $29.99 John Cleese once said that after putting together the first Monty Python compilation film, And Now for Something Completely Different, the comedy team learned that an audience won't keep laughing past the 50-minute mark if it doesn't care for the characters or become involved in a story. But the writers and producers behind The Simpsons Movie didn't need a warm-up film to learn that lesson: They created a classic screwball comedy right off the bat. This 90-minute carnival of a film contains more thrills and laughs than any combination of clowns, creep shows and animal acts.

Enchanted will make some enchanted evening for the dating crowd and also be a boisterous Saturday matinee for youngsters. This tale of fairy-tale characters who tumble down a well in the storybook land of Andalasia and come rocketing up a manhole in New York's Times Square has a piquant idea and enough good jokes to overcome its uneven moviemaking and uncertain tone. Best of all, it has Amy Adams as the gorgeous maiden Giselle - and she carries the film gracefully and uproariously on her creamy shoulders.