Everybody knows “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the fairy tale in which a boy trades away the family cow for magic beans that grows overnight into an enormous beanstalk up to a castle.
But in other tellings, Jack went on to have many more adventures, including here in Appalachia. And perhaps no one has done more to carry on and spread the Jack Tales than Rex Stephenson, a professor at Ferrum College who founded the Blue Ridge Dinner Theater. Stephenson dramatized the Jack Tales, cultivating a troupe of performers that for the last 50 years have performed them to more than a million audience members in 34 states and in England.
“Jack Tales are stories, mostly about a central Jack character,” says Emily Blankenship-Tucker, who teaches Appalachian music and theater at Ferrum College. “The Jack that I know is lucky, and he’s smart, and he goes through all kinds of situations where he encounters devils or giants or witches or big brothers that pick on him. And he always outsmarts whatever he’s up against, and comes out on top.”…