From Fairy Tale and Folk Story to Ballet and Pantomime by Translation and Adaptation

Once upon a time, in the early years of this blog, there used to be an annual Christmas Diversion. It took the form of a history that traced how a foreign folk tale or fairy story came to be transformed by translation and adaptation into a popular Christmas entertainment for children and their parents in British theatres. Some of them became a unique British form of musical comedy called pantomime (or panto for short). Others provided the story line and characters for ballets. Their traditions endure.

The Diversion posts are still available on the blog but they are scattered and difficult to find if you aren't adept with the Search function. So this year I've compiled a single cohesive document of them. It's too long for a blog post, so I've transferred it to my Academia.edu page, which you can reach in a twinkling by clicking [here] or going to https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRIS,

The stories are Aladdin, from the Arabic of The Thousand and One Nights; The Nutcracker from the German stories by E T A Hofmann; and Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty, both from the French tales by Charles Perrault.

Merry Christmas!