Kiss for Cinderella

J.M. Barrie rewrites the fairy tale for a world at war. Cinderella is no princess in waiting but a shop girl in bomb-ravaged London, and her Godmother is something stranger and sadder than magic: a doctor who prescribes fantasy as medicine for a broken heart. When a young policeman encounters her at midnight, the glass slippers become something else entirely, a metaphor for the fragile beauty people cling to when the world is burning. This is not the story you think it is. It is darker, quieter, and infinitely more tender. First produced on Broadway in 1919, Barrie crafted a play about what happens after the ball, when the clock strikes and the spell breaks and you must still live in a world that has forgotten how to dream. It is a love letter to the lies we tell ourselves to keep going, and the truth we find when we stop believing in happily ever after.