Musicals and Fairytales - Wait, what?

So I was thinking about "Once More, With Feeling" and The Nutcracker and the King of Mice and it occurred to me that each embody and parody different predominantly comedic mediums (in the Shakespearian happy-ending sense): respectively, musical theater and bedtime stories/fairy tales. Several people - Sydney and Madison off the top of my head - have already posted about the self-awareness and parodic nature of "Once More, With Feeling". Joss Whedon particularly takes advantage of the melodrama and overblown emotions inherent in musicals in order to effectively bring all of the characters' quietly simmering problems come to a boil and/or flaming pile of tap dancers. I apologize for that metaphor and the even sadder failed pun. Anyhoo, Hoffman makes a somewhat similar use of children's fantasy worlds. The Nutcracker and the King of Mice inhabits Marie's fantasy world but just as Tara singing "Under Your Spell" seems all fine and dandy till we realize she is literally under Willow's memory charm, Marie's romance with her Nutcracker doll seems perfectly delightful and innocent until she marries him at the ripe old age of eight. This story is clearly far more ambiguous than "Once More, With Feeling" but it has a similar self-awareness about genre/for lack of a better word storytelling method. Godpapa Drosselmeier literally tells a story to Marie at her bedside, which draws the reader's attention to The Nutcracker and the King of Mice as a very unusual bedtime story. The sheer all-over-the-place-ness (for lack of a better... word?) of both the story and story-within-the-story manages to parody the fantastical nature of children's bedtime tales, what with the overly-vengeful mice and the cooking-for-hundreds queen. The main story is told in the exact same manner as the fairytale inside it, save that it perfectly blurs the lines of imagination and reality, just as a good children's tale should. Yet Hoffman uses this hazy both real and not-real world to show horrors potentially present in a child's life: even if we decide to believe that the eight-year-old's marriage is part of the fairytale charm (and I'm sure few, if any, would decide to do this), the cruel laughter and disbelief of Marie's parents is troubling enough. Likewise, Whedon uses Anya and Xander's song to show the horrifyingly mundane problems that can plague any relationship. I think all in all, these last two texts in our semester go to show the versatility of Gothic storytelling: it may be a musical, it may be a fairytale, but it can still give you chills and reveal something about humanity.