Witty and stylish, Faerie Tale Theatre scores on cable TV
Once upon a time in a glittery kingdom called Tinseltown, a fey and clever actress dreamed of producing her very own fairy tales. She would get all of her famous friends to appear and pay them beans, though not magical ones. But the mighty wizards and warlocks of Tinseltown scoffed. "Ha!" they cackled, "She'll be eaten alive!"
Well, with a bit of sorcery and even more business acumen, Shelley Duvall, 34, has turned her fantasy into video reality. She is executive producer and guiding spirit of Faerie Tale Theatre, a series of hour-long classics featuring marquee names, which has become a popular and critical success on Showtime, the nation's second-largest pay-television service. Showtime, with 4 million-plus subscribers, is currently airing the sixth of her fanciful tales, The Sleeping Beauty, and plans to show three more by the end of the year. So far, Duvall has enticed Joan Collins, Elliott Gould, Maureen Stapleton and Mick Jagger into such unlikely vehicles as Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk.
In Sleeping Beauty, Christopher (Superman) Reeve is a goody-goody prince, a sort of prissy Cary Grant in a mail doublet. Bernadette Peters casts her spell as the princess who responds a mite too ardently to his wake-up kiss. The two also play their evil doppelgängers, giving a psychological twist to the old notion that fairy-tale characters are either all good or all bad. In this case, they are both. A gruff woodsman (George Dzundza) narrates the tale with the accent of a Borscht Belt comedian. "I gotta great princess for you," he tells the prince. "A dowry you wouldn't believe." Jeremy Kagan's fluid, floaty direction pays visual homage to the sensuous style of Book Illustrator Kay Nielsen. Like all of Duvall's slightly fractured tales, Sleeping Beauty gives a slightly campy twist to a classic without demeaning it.
Duvall's own career has been a Cinderella story of sorts. At the age of 20, she was plucked out of Houston by Director Robert Altman, who was on location for the movie Brewster McCloud. Duvall, all lollipop eyes and stringbean legs, was recognized by Altman as a strong, but flighty American original whom he could fashion to his needs. He cast her in a variety of roles in seven of his films, including Three Women, Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Yet long before Altman woke her from her pre-Hollywood slumber, Duvall had been collecting antique illustrated fairy-tale books. She was charmed by the stories, but bewitched by the pictures: dreamy Maxfield Parrish landscapes, bold N.C. Wyeth seascapes, puckish Arthur Rackham characters. While in Malta in 1980, playing Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Altman's film Popeye, a vision of the rubbery Williams as a vain and manic frog prince leaped into her head, and the notion of Faerie Tale Theatre was born. Each tale would have different players and be colored by the visual style of one of her favorite illustrators.