CINDERELLA by Charles Way Study Guide
Prepared by Sophie Kruip Arden Education Department
Study Guide Contents Meet the Characters! 1 Plot of Cinderella 3 Words to Know/Background Info 7 Shadow Puppets 8 Home by Midnight! 9 Rehearsing Cinderella 10 Design your own Ball! 11 What do you think? 12
Meet the Characters!
Here’s a quick look at the characters in the play along with a photo of the costume designer’s drawings called “renderings.”
Cinderella (Mary Tuomanen)
The daughter of a poor clockmaker. After her mother passes away from the sickness, she must take over responsibilities of cooking and cleaning. She mourns her mother terribly, and spends most of her time at her mother’s grave in the garden.
Sigmund (Joe Guzman) Cinderella’s father, the clock maker. He is a hard-working man who does what he believes is best for the family, but loses his daughter’s trust by marrying another woman a year after his wife passes away.
Maria (Susan Riley Stevens) A widow with two daughters, Maria remarries Sigmund and moves into his small house with them. She trains her daughters to dance and sing so that they might find a wealthy husband and be happy.
Fairy Godmother
(Kala Moses Baxter) Disguised as a bird, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother watches over Cinderella in her mother’s absence. She uses her magic to bring Cinderella to the Prince’s ball.
The Stepsisters:
Constanze (Alex Keiper)
Constanze dances! She longs to marry someone rich so she can move away and enjoy fame and fortune.
Aloysia (Miriam White)
Maria has taught her to sing “like an angel.” Aloysia loves her sister very much and never wishes to be away from her, but Constanze does not feel the same way.
Wolfgang (Matteo Scammell)
The King’s composer, and Prince Sebastian’s best friend. Other characters always make fun of his hair, but Wolfgang is very smart and an excellent musician.
King Leopold (Benjamin Lloyd)
Prince Sebastian
The King who lives in the grand palace. He (Peterson Townsend) has been bedridden by his fear of going out The son of King Leopold. He disguises since his wife died four years ago, thinking hishimself like a townsperson to experience people blame him for the great pandemic. being a regular boy. He meets a Clock maker’s daughter and falls in love.
The Story of Cinderella The Fairy Godmother, appearing as a dove, introduces the setting: A clockmaker and his daughter, Cinderella, live in a beautiful little town in Austria. But all is not well: there is a sickness that is spreading throughout the town, and the sickness has taken Cinderella’s mother. Cinderella grieves her mother for a year, crying and spending her days by the grave in her mother’s garden. One day, as Cinderella is sitting in the garden, she is bothered by the dove always flying around her head. She tells the bird to just leave her alone. Suddenly, the bird speaks to her: FAIRY GODMOTHER: There’s no need to be rude. CINDERELLA: A talking bird! FAIRY GODMOTHER: Stranger things have happened, and will again, The Fairy Godmother asks her to plant a tree in the garden in her mother’s memory. Cinderella plants the twig the Fairy Godmother gives her, and a huge hazel tree magically grows in the garden. The tree attracts the interest of the Prince (disguised as a poor kitchen boy), who has been drawn to the garden before by Cinderella’s crying, and sees there is suddenly a new tree. Cinderella turns him away, telling him she wants to be alone. After turning him away every day for a month, she lets him stay and talk to her. When she asks him who he is, he tells her he is just a kitchen boy in the castle. PRINCE: They just call me Boy. Boy come here and clean the pot, stir the soup… CINDERELLA: Have you ever seen one of the parties they hold, where they dance all night in the great hall? He tells her about the grand parties at the palace, and teaches her how to dance. Suddenly, Cinderella’s father Sigmund appears and the Prince must go. Sigmund arrives with huge news for Cinderella: he has been remarried to a new woman. Cinderella now has a stepmother, and two new stepsisters. SIGMUND: These girls are very nice. They come from Heidelberg. They are charming, friendly, Aloysia has a wonderful singing voice and Constanze dances. CINDERELLA: I will never forgive you for this—never. Sigmund welcomes Maria and the girls into the house while Cinderella hides in the kitchen. Maria sees that the big clock in the living room has stopped, and asks why Sigmund, a clockmaker, hasn’t fixed it. He tells her the clock stopped “the moment his wife died.” Maria and Sigmund go on a tour of the house, and Constanze and Aloysia collapse into the scene with their huge bags. ALOYSIA: This is it, sister, our new home. Quaint. CONSTANZE: It’s not quaint—it’s tiny. It’s a doll’s house. Cinderella enters, covered in soot from the fireplace. Her stepsisters think she is just a servant, and ask her about Cinderella. The girls are apprehensive because it has always been “just them.” Just then, Sigmund and Maria enter and find Cinderella with her face covered in soot. As Maria reaches out to wipe off her face, Cinderella bites her hand! Sigmund is furious. SIGMUND: Apologize to your Mother! CINDERELLA: She’s not my Mother! In response to this behavior, Sigmund gives Cinderella’s room to Aloysia and Constanze!
Cinderella is left alone, and the Fairy Godmother sings her to sleep with a lullaby, and waves her wand to change the scene to the King’s bedroom. The King is in his bed, ringing a bell and yelling for his son Sebastian. Sebastian confesses to his father that he went into town. The King is horrified, believing that the people blame the King for the sickness, and would kill Sebastian if they knew he was the King’s son. PRINCE: No one blames you for the sickness. KING: Oh, they do. I can see it in their eyes. The cook, the chambermaid they all looked at me—that’s why I sacked them. The Fairy Godmother, as the bird, flies into the King’s bedroom. Sebastian remarks that it must have followed him home from town. The King asks if it belongs to someone he was with in town. The Prince tells him he has been with an ordinary girl, a clockmaker’s daughter. The King declares that the Prince is never allowed to see the girl again. Wolfgang, the King’s composer and the Sebastian’s best friend, advises Sebastian to stand up to his father and follow his heart with this clockmaker’s daughter. But to ease the King’s nerves, Wolfgang makes a suggestion: WOLFGANG: We’ll have a dance—a ball. And to this ball, we’ll invite every princess for a thousand miles… Sebastian will, I am sure, meet someone else. KING LEOPOLD: Good, we’ll have it in here. WOLFGANG: What do you mean, in here? KING LEOPOLD: Yes, in my bedroom—the King’s bedroom. Wolfgang is distraught by the thought of his 36 piece orchestra in the bedroom, but must deal with it: there is no getting the King out of bed. Back at Cinderella’s house, Cinderella is playing tricks on Aloysia and Constanze to make them go away: putting mustard in their food and pins in their shoes. But what bothers the stepsisters the most is the fact that Cinderella has a beautiful singing voice. The girls are so upset that Constanze slaps her! Maria proposes that Cinderella stays in the kitchen to keep the peace, and Sigmund agrees. The sisters return from the mailbox with excitement! They announce that they have received an invitation to the grand ball at the palace! Maria and the girls rush off to make preparations, and Cinderella goes to her garden to cry. The Prince appears, dressed in rags. PRINCE: I have to tell you something. I can’t come here again, not ever. Cinderella chases him away, and the Fairy Godmother finds her, weeping. Cinderella asks her when things will start to get better. FAIRY GODMOTHER: Oh, Cinderella, they already have. He left his shoe behind! Cinderella doesn’t understand, but saves it in her chest of special things. She comes face to face with her stepmother Maria, who warns Cinderella that she will not go to the ball under any circumstances. The Prince must marry Aloysia or Constanze, Maria explains, because they deserve it more than she does. Aloysia and Constanze are, at that moment, rooting through Cinderella’s belongings in Cinderella’s old bedroom, and find a beautiful dress that belonged to Cinderella’s mother. When Cinderella comes in and finds the twins fighting over who will wear it to the ball, she tries to take it back. They all accidentally rip the dress in half! The dove finds Cinderella in despair on the floor. The Fairy Godmother decides it’s time to transform herself from a dove into her true form. CINDERELLA: I don’t understand! FAIRY GODMOTHER: I’m not really a bird, it’s a disguise. I’m your Fairy Godmother. Cinderella asks for her mother back, one wish that the Fairy Godmother cannot grant. But she what she can do is turn a pumpkin into a carriage, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, and Cinderella’s tattered dress into a beautiful ball gown— and so she does. In a puff of smoke and
some magical shadow transformations, Cinderella is off to the ball! At the castle gates, the Fairy Godmother issues Cinderella a warning: she must be home by midnight or everything will change back to its original shape. Cinderella agrees, and Cinderella enters the gates. In another room of the palace, Wolfgang and Prince Sebastian are arguing about whether Sebastian should stand up to his father.
SEBASTIAN: He’s the King. WOLFGANG: What kind of King stays in bed for four years, without even changing the sheets. And now this—a ball in a bedroom, I’ve never been so humiliated. Sebastian: Then you stand up to him. Wolfgang: I am poor, Sebastian—if I speak my mind, I’m out. I’m sacked. They start calling each other names, and they end up wrestling on the floor. The conductor’s baton breaks in half! At that moment, Cinderella enters looking for the ball. Sebastian follows her out in a trance, though he does not recognize her. The Fairy Godmother gives Wolfgang her wand to use to conduct his orchestra, which she realizes is too big for the bedroom, and uses her magic to shrink them: FAIRY GODMOTHER: Your orchestra I shall make small, but great shall be their sound, and every note they play tonight shall be for heaven bound.
Aloysia and Constanze enter in their ball gowns, and discover the composer. Wolfy is entranced by Aloysia’s beauty and her voice, which makes Constanze very jealous of her twin, and Constanze attempts to sabotage any chance she has with the Prince. Both girls end up making quite a scene on the dance floor (of the King’s bedroom). Then, Cinderella enters. With the help of her Fairy Godmother, Cinderella and Sebastian end up together on the balcony in the snow, dancing for hours until the Prince says: SEBASTIAN: Princess, whoever you are… I love… I love someone else. CINDERELLA: So do I. But he doesn’t know… I didn’t know, until now. Each had no idea they were with the one they loved! But they continued to dance, lost in a dream, until the clock booms that it is almost midnight. Cinderella has to escape before her dress and carriage become rags and a pumpkin pulled by rats! When the Prince tells the King that the princess had run off without even telling him her name, the King demands that he search the kingdom until she is found! Sebastian refuses, and tells the King he will not obey him again until he gets out of bed and washes. When Wolfgang arrives with a glass slipper that Cinderella left behind as she escaped, the King decides he will get out of bed, wash, and use this slipper to find the woman Sebastian loves. In Cinderella’s house, Maria finds out that he daughters had completely wasted their opportunity to woo the Prince. Just outside their house, the Prince shows up in the garden to explain to Cinderella what had happened with the new girl he had met at the ball. She con-
fesses that she had also met someone, but cannot believe that this boy is the Prince. Maria suddenly bursts into the garden and makes Cinderella go inside while she interrogates the Prince. MARIA: Whoever you are—even my stepdaughter deserves better. SEBASTIAN: I am Prince Sebastian. MARIA: Ha! My daughters have danced with the Prince, and I can assure you he is twice as tall as you are, twice as handsome, and twenty times better dressed. Then, the King rides up on horseback and tells Maria that the Prince and Cinderella are not allowed to see each other anymore because she is not a princess. Maria is very happy about the news until she recognizes the glass slipper in the King’s hand is the match to the slipper Cinderella had in the kitchen that morning. Maria bursts into the kitchen and attacks Cinderella, putting her into her chest of things, and angrily stuffing the bird in after her. Maria takes the matching shoe and calls her daughters in to try it on. It won’t fit either girl. Maria, in a rage, tells them that they must make it fit if they truly love their mother, or else. The Fairy Godmother, stuck in the chest with Cinderella, uses her bird powers to fly the whole trunk to the palace to get her magic wand back! In the Great Hall of the castle, the King is trying the shoe onto every princess who will come to the palace. After trying the slipper onto every princess in town, Aloysia and Constanze arrive to try it on. To everyone’s horror, the girls have cut off parts of their feet to make the shoe fit! King Leopold sadly agrees that there are no more princesses in the land, until a voice comes from inside a chest: CINDERELLA: There is one, your Majesty.
Maria recognizes the chest and tries to stop the King from opening it, but the Fairy Godmother instructs Wolfy to use the magic wand: Cinderella escapes the chest in her mother’s beautiful dress, and she tries on the shoe. It fits, of course. LEOPOLD: And you are? CINDERELLA: An ordinary girl. (To Sebastian) And you are? SEBASTIAN: A kitchen boy—a prince. How can I make you believe? Cinderella looks in her chest for the shoe that the boy who visited her once left in the garden. It fits the Prince, and the two finally see each other for who they really are. The King blesses their marriage, and Wolfgang begins to conduct a merry tune and everyone dances. The sickness is finally washed clean from the Kingdom! Finally, the Fairy Godmother can bid a happy farewell to Cinderella: FAIRY GODMOTHER: And the bird flew away with all Cinderella’s sorrow, and she grieved no more, but remembered her mother with joy. And of course, she and the Prince lived happily ever after.
Words to KNOW and Background INFO These are good words to know during the show: Ball: A big party where the royalty and all their guests would dine and dance Bedridden: Cannot or will not leave one’s bed Composer: A musician who “composes,” or creates, a piece of music Pandemic: A great sickness that spreads quickly, an example of a pandemic is the Plague, a disease that killed millions of people in the 14th Century in Europe.
Widow: A woman who has lost her husband Coachman: Someone who drives a carriage. This is a 14th century Plague mask
What is a Stepfamily?
A family connected through marriage! If your father remarries to another woman, that woman becomes your stepmother, and her daughters become your stepsisters.
Plague Masks
Doctors wore these masks when treating patients with the plague because they believed the curved nose stuffed with herbs would keep the “evil” plague smell out, which they believed was the cause of the plague.
“The Terrible Sickness”
The play takes place in a little town in Austria, ruled by a King who does not get out of bed. In this time, the country was in the grip of a terrible sickness much like the Plague, which they called “the Black Death.” In the 14th century, this “pandemic” spread through from China all the way in the East through Europe and the Mediterranean in the West, killing millions. Can you believe the Plague was spread by fleas on rats? In just a few years, the Black Death brought the world’s population from 450 million to about 350 million. There were so many victims that there were mass graves of hundreds of people. In the play, Cinderella tells her Fairy Godmother that she didn’t want her mother to be buried like that, so she buries her in her garden she loved so much.
SHADOW PUPPETS! You can make shadow puppets just like the ones you saw in the play! To make the Fairy Godmother’s swooping bird shadow, cut out the bird below and trace it on to an empty cereal box. Then cut along the lines you drew and tape or glue the cut-out onto a stick (a pencil or pen works!)
You can even use your hands to make shadow puppets! All you need is a lamp and a blank wall to have fantastic puppet shows.
Try these:
Goat
Goose!
Bird! FLAP your hands to FLY You can even make people!!
“When the clock strikes 12:00…”
Help Cinderella get home by midnight! Read each question and keep track of time so she does not miss her ride home!
Cinderella leaves for the ball at 10:00 p.m. and gets stuck in traffic on the way to the palace for 45 minutes. She has to look for a place to park her pumpkin carriage for 10 minutes. She has some delicious food from the King’s closet buffet for 15 minutes, and ends up dancing with the Prince for 35 minutes before she looks at the clock. How much time does she have?
____ hours ____ minutes left!
Cinderella tries to leave at 9:30 p.m. but realizes she forgot to brush her teeth and has to stay for another 10 minutes. It takes her 20 minutes to get to the palace. She is stuck dancing with an old man for 15 minutes before she gets to dance with the Prince. She gets so lost in his eyes that they end up dancing for two hours! Is she too late to get away before the magic wears off?
circle:
NO YES
On the way to the palace at 8:50, the horses stop at a cheese factory (they are mice, after all!) and won’t leave until she goes in to get some: that takes 20 whole minutes! They ride for 15 more minutes and arrive at the palace with a basket of cheese. There is a line for the ladies restroom that takes 7 minutes, and then Cinderella gets lost trying to find the king’s bedroom for 15 minutes. She listens to Wolfgang’s music for 20 minutes before she spots the Prince. They dance for 1 hour and 25 minutes… Uh-oh, what time is it now?
: p.m.
Rehearsing Cinderella None of the actors knew each other before Cinderella, now they are all good friends!
Mary and Peterson as Cinderella and Sebastian Alex and Miriam as Constanze and Aloysia
Matteo as Wolfgang
Some of the actors wore “rehearsal shoes� to get comfortable wearing crazy shoes, like the shoes the stepsisters wear!
Where and how long did the actors rehearse? The actors rehearsed for 3 weeks in the rehearsal hall on the top level of the Arden! It is much smaller than the stage, so the set is marked out with tape on the ground so actors know where to stand.
Design your own Ball! The King has asked you to plan the ball for Sebastian to find a wife! Draw your perfect party with music, activities and decorations. Who would you invite? What would you wear?
What do YOU think? Here’s a chance to start really thinking deeper about the play. Talk to your parents, brothers and sisters, or friends you saw the play with about these questions. Maybe you feel the same way, maybe not.
If a fairy godmother visited you and asked you for your greatest wish, what would you say? (Next time you see the very first star in the night sky, whisper your wish to that star. Who knows, maybe your Fairy Godmother will come visit you!) Cinderella’s stepmother Maria has always been called “evil.” Think about the things Maria does in the play to deserve being called that. Is she really evil? Talk about it. Cinderella goes to her mother’s garden when she wants to be alone and think. Do you have a secret spot you like to go to? Why is it your favorite? What do you think about this quote from the Fairy Godmother: “Every girl is a princess, every boy a prince…” Why would YOU be a good king or queen?