sweet dreams, rip van winkle

This is how the conversation went on fb,
Monday, 24 Feb 2014:

me: Wow! Thanks, Bryan!
What a treat to find it here,
sleeping soundly in my mailbox,
cuddled in the latest issue of "Time"!
Coincidence??? :D

Only later did I find that he had
actually placed the dvd in the mailbox
two days earlier (Saturday evening),
but I had misread his fb nessage
to me at that time.
What dvd, you ask?

Well, the kickstarter reward I wrote of last summer, of course! Savannah Stage Company has been quite busy, with new productions, improv, and fundraising since their project launched in 2012.
I've attended several events they've hosted, but those were improv shows and a fabulously fun fundraiser. Sadly, though, my schedule had not yet allowed me the distinct pleasure of seeing them enact a cohesive performance.
That has now been rectified, as I have watched the troupe perform "Rip Van Winkle: A New Musical", on my own schedule, and will doubtless watch it again and again. You see, it is not quite the same old anti-sloth story we know from reading the works of Washington Irving in our grade-school days.
Oh, no.
For starters, it's been reinvented as a musical. The multi-talented men - and women - of Savannah Stage Company use the musical lyrics to move your toes, as well as the story, along a merry path from the village, up the mountain, and back down again. With only four players, and minimal costume changes, they bring to life more than double that number of distinctive characters.
There are no bowling dwarfs in this version, either. Instead, enter the trickster Diedrich Knickerbocker, the one who will make all of your dreams - whether good or bad - come true. We see the villagers recoil from the mere utterance of his name, as if he is the devil incarnate.
Well, not so to Rip van Winkle, nor to his son, who is growing up listening to his dad weave tales instead of tapestries. In fact, we see that Rip doesn't do much in the way of work, and what little he does is done so poorly that it would have been better left undone. That's just the way he likes it, too. If he had his druthers, he would tell tales in the village square all day, every day.
Washington Irving was quite a tale-teller, too. As a matter of record, he even used several pseudonyms, allowing him to write in different styles, different voices. This musical pays homage to two personae of the prolific writer. Take the trickster, Diedrich Knickerbocker - he was "a Dutch historian", famous for having written "A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty". The "historian" was also credited with the narration of the story of Rip van Winkle as one of 34 pieces collected in "The Sketchbook", by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Neither Knickerbocker nor Crayon were any more real than van Winkle was - all products of a fertile imagination.
Pretty clever of Irving!
And very clever of the Savannah Stage Company! Thanks for making sure I did my literature research and homework!
Kindly take note, any teachers of the English language.