Briar Rose

Briar Rose is the original Grimm telling of what later generations would soften into Sleeping Beauty—a fairy tale not of romance, but of fate, time, and enchantment that cannot be undone.

When a long-awaited princess is born, she is blessed by twelve fairies with every good gift imaginable. But an uninvited thirteenth fairy delivers a curse: on her fifteenth birthday, the princess will prick her finger on a spindle and fall dead. The spell is weakened, not broken—death becomes a hundred-year sleep, and an entire kingdom is drawn into stillness with her.

What follows is not a tale of rescue, but of suspension. Fires go cold mid-flame. Courtiers freeze in motion. Vines and thorns rise year after year, sealing the palace away from the world. Princes come and perish. Time itself seems to wait.

Only when the century has fully passed does the story allow movement again—awakening not just a sleeping girl, but a world held captive by inevitability.

Narrated with quiet gravity by Joanna Agee, this production restores Briar Rose to its original tone: somber, enchanted, and faintly dangerous. This is the Grimm fairy tale as it was first told—beautiful, unsettling, and bound by fate.