Unswervingly straight, Edvard was also such a snob that he wouldn’t even condescend to address Andersen, his lifelong correspondent and eventual benefactor, in the familiar “Du” form. He develops a passion, entirely unrequited, for Edvard (the countertenor Randall Scotting, who alternates in the role with Daniel Moody), Collin’s son. Some of his writings impress the theater’s director, Jonas Collin, who sends him to school and encourages his literary career.īut as his star rises, his heart breaks. I only appear to be dead.” (Andersen, whose many phobias included premature burial, used to keep this note by his bed: “I only appear to be sleeping.”) After a quick trot through “The Princess and the Pea” - a story of another restless sleeper - Hans reappears as a teenager, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, making his way from sleepy Odense to Copenhagen, begging a place at the Royal Danish Theater. We first meet Hans (Jimmy Ray Bennett) as a lily-clutching corpse, though he quickly rises from his bier, saying, “Do not be afraid. (It doesn’t, like Martin McDonagh’s viciously provocative “A Very Very Very Dark Matter,” suggest that his stories were actually written by a congolese woman he kept in a cage.) “Hans Christian Andersen” sidesteps and streamlines a lot of what makes Andersen’s life and work so discomforting, while also insisting, inflexibly, gawkily, that the life and the work are inextricable.
Eve Wolf’s script complicates the sanitized Hans of Andersen’s own autobiography and the imagined one of the 1952 Danny Kaye movie, best remembered for Frank Loesser’s gentle, irrepressible score. Like all of the Ensemble’s shows, “Tales” synthesizes dramatic narrative with chamber music, offering a portrait of an artist through image and sound and here at least, some fantastic puppetry. Now Andersen arrives at the Duke on 42nd Street, with the Ensemble for the Romantic Century’s “Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined.” His oversize statue - with oversize top hat and oversize cygnet - permanently hogs a granite bench in Central Park.
A man with a peculiar take on happily ever after, the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen wrote tales that have inspired operas, ballets, a couple of Disney movies. Once upon a time a little boy became a literary sensation.
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