How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful.

We went to a play tonight. An all-musical version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, at/by Victory Gardens Theater. I was by accident given the Playbill from a different show, and I don’t know much about Andersen, so I had zero advance knowledge of the plot. This led me to an experiment: First, and without checking, researching, or exaggerating, I am going to put forth what I believe occurred. I swear I will not exaggerate. Once we finish, we shall together journey over to the Wiki, and see just how close I came. Ready?

Act I
The narrator sings to us that it is July. Then we get a song from a character who is either Satan or the North Wind or both. At some point in the past Satan had a mirror, which broke. Next we met two children, Kai and Gertl. They are approximately eight. They are dear friends. It is summer. Now it is fall. Grandmother tells them about the Snow Queen, who lures little boys off to be lost and never seen again. Kai gets something in his eye. It is a piece of Satan’s mirror, which does not hurt but causes him to be a dick to Gertl, and he goes off “hitching” with his friends. “Hitching” is a pastime of juvenile male Danes — one of whom was not male but was extremely cute — in which you tie your sled to the back of a passing sleigh and get a badass ride. Kai hitches his sled to the back of a sleigh with many horses. It may have been the Snow Queen, or not. It may also have something to do with the mirror in his eye, or not. Anyhow, he gets dragged along behind this sleigh and then it flies up into the sky with him. We do not see him again for ninety minutes.

When Gertl finds out she is so upset she throws her shoes in a river. But the river takes pity on her, and gives them back. So she climbs into a boat to take them out deeper, and the boat floats downstream to a little house covered with flowers. Two wooden soldiers guard the door. They sing a song and then go away. The house is home to a giant flower-covered old woman puppet, who sings a creepy song about living with her for a thousand years and getting her hair combed with the old flowered puppet woman’s golden comb. Gertl agrees with the Goddess of Springtime and Lesbian Pedophilia. I missed her thought process on that call.

Act II
It has been either four months or a thousand years and four months. Anyhow, it is November. It has come to Gertl’s attention that perhaps the creepy old lesbian pedophile flower goddess puppet is not her best resource for finding Kai. She laments this. The narrator advises her to consult a raven. She does. The raven — played by a dead bird on a stick — somehow gets her to the home of a horny lonely princess, and the raven’s girlfriend — also a raven, and a friend of the horny lonely princess — convinces the horny lonely princess to give Gertl a couple of white horses, a jacket, and a double-hilarious hat. Gertl thanks the Princess and rides off on a wagon, wearing the hat and being pulled by the two white horses, who are abruptly shot by a female robber.

The female robber implies to Gertl that she should join her and her robber mother in robbing people and killing their horses. Gertl demurs. The robber mother arrives, criticizes the daughter, and sings a bawdy blues number about the robber daughter’s big long knife. The lesbian imagery goes from pedophiliac to incestuous. She decides she does not wish to be a robber, so the robbers give her a bunch of their stuff plus a magic reindeer who knows the secret trick to finding Lapland, which he details in song. The robbers do not mention that Gertl is now net down one mammal since they started helping her.

The reindeer and Gertl stop at the home of a woman who sings a FLAT. OUT. SHOWSTOPPING. kick-d0wn-the-fourth-wall, bring-on-the-anachronisms, Kip-Addotta’s Wet-Dream-level-punny song about her fish fetish. Absolute unquestioned highlight of the night.

They leave the fish woman. I am unclear as to why they went there or what they got out of it. I don’t care. That last number was AWESOME.

A sorceress tells Gertl that she already has the power within her to help Kai, or something. She then tells the magic reindeer to take Gertl to a special tree and then not to hang around and help or anything, but to come straight back to her. The magic reindeer agrees. He takes Gertl to the special tree, where she hears Kai singing a song that was either lamenting his prison or glorifying his new home, I couldn’t tell which. His descriptions of her home, though, put me firmly in mind of the Fortress of Solitude. Kai appears with a giant silver puppet, who I presume is the Snow Queen. She fondles him and takes him away, and calls on her snow minions to kill Gertl. The snow minions are the cute backup dancers wearing snowflake suits and headpieces with fangs. They carry quarterstaffs, which they brandish threateningly. All appears lost for Gertl.

Except she drops to her knees and says a secret prayer. It is totally secret. It will forever remain a secret between her and the Baby Jesus, because that’s what a secret prayer is, is a secret. You don’t tell anybody your secret prayer, except Baby Jesus. This was explained in long, slow song. She shuts her eyes tight and says the secret prayer.

Immediately subsequent to transmission of the secret prayer, the Baby Jesus kills the Snow Queen and her minions. Please do not infer anything about the contents of the secret prayer.

Kai is reunited with Gertl, and weeps with joy. The weeping causes the mirror sliver — oh, did you forget about that, too? — to drop from his eye, which means he can stop being an asshole and resume being Gertl’s BFF. They travel home. Grandmother is there. Then we are told, in narrative song, that Gertl and Kai are adults in body now, but they are still children at heart. Now it is spring. They make out. We are told something about children getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. Wild jungle sex is implied. Everyone sings the glories of summer.

* * * * *

Click here for the real plot. I am as astonished as you.

(Tickets and all here.)

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