And Ms. Parks's blunt fairy-tale language lacks her usual hypnotic force and musicality.
Speaking in stilted fairy-tale language infused with contemporary slang, the cast maintains a poker-faced sobriety that enhances the dialogue's mythic aspirations while seeming glaringly artificial.
The theater songs of Lynn Ahrens (lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music) are sleek, machine-tooled products written in a Disney style whose fairy-tale language speaks to the child in all of us.
These songs, some more autobiographical than others, are really dreams in which Ms. Collins muses out loud on time, regret, death and renewal in an impressionistic fairy-tale language through which people and places flicker like shadows, lights and flashes of color.
When Bush recently addressed the Knesset in Jerusalem, there was the tell-tale language again.
Keswick's Theatre by the Lake revives a truly great play, David Harrower's Knives in Hens, a tale of language, identity and murder.
We all know the incantations of fairy tales, the language writers invent to make the dead rise and the gods appear, to send ordinary people past the boundaries of the natural world.
"Fever Moon" is a violent tale, with strong language and sexual situations.
In The New Yorker, James Wood called The Goldfinch "a virtual baby", "a fairy tale" whose "tone, language, and story belong to children's literature".
The director Alain Guiraudie's leisurely French language tale (it's subtitled) of the end of an era plays a few games with the audience.
