Allen brings children’s tale to stage

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Mar 30, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The farm is still there, all 87 acres of it. A cousin still lives there, but the family is trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.

Whatever the decision, it has to be good, because this is the place where Debbie Allen spent her summers, where Aunt Fanny picked vegetables from the garden, then wrung a chicken’s neck for dinner.

Sounds pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? Well, it’s no more gory than the fairy tales Allen read in childhood.

“Have you read those Grimm fairy tales?” she asked. “Girl, those aren’t for children. Bad things happen to people in those stories. They die – their heads get chopped off. They’re scary.”

But not so scary that they couldn’t be adapted into something modern, a children’s book, maybe? And maybe a musical could be staged from that book, a fantasy about brothers who love to dance.

Brothers who know they’re not supposed to dance. The story could be called Brothers of the Knight.

“Their father is a reverend, the Rev. Knight,” Allen said. “He tells them that dancing is wrong, but the Bible says dance to praise and celebrate.”

So the boys, 12 in all, sneak out each night, dancing their way to the Big Band Room. They try out all kinds of dance styles from swing to hip-hop, and each morning, the housekeeper discovers tattered shoes by their bedsides.

And she can’t figure it out.

“But one night, she does,” Allen said.

She laughs. She has a special connection to the housekeeper. Sunday is her name. Allen played this character when Brothers of the Knight debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1998. Now daughter Vivian Nixon has stepped into the part and will portray Sunday in the production of Allen’s play Thursday-Sunday, April 3-6, in Baton Rouge Community College’s Magnolia Performing Arts Pavilion.

And yes, this is Allen’s play, based on her children’s book of the same title, which used the Brothers Grimm tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses as its basis.

There’s that connotation again, grim. But Allen assures there’s nothing ominous about this tale. It’s more of a celebration.