The stage before us will be shallow, its width limited. But how far from the raison d’être of faërie lies that other infinity of magic, the unmoored tale for children? How many miles to Babylon? How far to the lamppost in the snowy wood, the hole in the ground in which there lived a hobbit, the academies for wizards and witches? How far to the nanny goddess with the parrot-head umbrella, to the white rabbit in its Wonderland, to the tin woodsman on its own yellow road, to the boy clad in oak leaves who won’t grow up?

How far from faërie to the wild wood, the greenwood, the Hundred Acre Wood; to the riverbank perfect for messing about in boats and to the Flood with its floating menagerie; to Mary Lennox’s secret garden and to the Kensington Gardens, to Primrose Hill echoing with the twilight barking, to the Parisian ascenseur at the old Samaritaine hoisting a green-suited elephant and an Old Lady, to the articulate and articulated spiderweb in the sunlit rural doorway? Every domesticated stuffed bear or bunny fallen beneath your child’s bed is related not only to Piglet and the Velveteen Rabbit but to the animals coiled in marginalia in medieval psalters, and to the animals at the manger memorialized in colored glass and in song, and the animals painted in black and blood on the walls of the ancient caves of the Pyrenees.

Turn off your cell phones, now. Sit back. Sit up. Pay attention or pay none. What will happen happens whether you pay heed or not, but what happens is sometimes called eucatastrophe — Tolkien again — or consolation. “The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation,” says Roger Scruton, the British philosopher with whom I disagree on many other matters, but not this — but enough of my quoting. The velvet curtains part, side to side, like a parent playing peekaboo.

Luminaires panning, tilting, candlepower intensifying. Color gels shifting: the red of riding hoods, the Turkish blue chalcedony of Ottoman beards, the Lincoln green of Sherwood Forest, the silver of that apple of the sun, the golden of that apple of the moon. Is that Hans Christian Andersen’s face projected on the scrim, with a saying in Danish scribbled in his own hand below? “Life itself is the most Wonderful of Fairy Tales.”