As anyone who has ever worn out a snooze alarm can attest, the worst bits of the day often come after you wake up. The old story of “Sleeping Beauty” always struck me as a kind of paradise: that girl must have felt rested for life. But Perrault’s original, here taken up by a touring Young Vic production, lets the story unspool a bit further than the Prince’s arrival. Beauty opens her eyes to a complicated life, with an ogre for a stepmother, and a pit of vipers to avoid. Director Rufus Norris’s adaptation compensates for being a bit long-winded (especially for the New Victory’s usual pint-sized audience) with some well-placed savagery.

By now, the first bit of “Sleeping Beauty” should seem familiar. Baby gets cursed by fairy (here, incompetent and flatulent, but well-meaning), baby grows into lovely young lady, young lady takes century-long nap. A group of princes, each played by the irrepressible James Loye, make an attempt to wake her, but only one with any success. The lucky guy also happens to be the son of an ogress, whose interest in his new wife and children seems a little gustatory. The ogress (Daniel Cerqueira) chases the unlucky in-laws into the forest where another ogre and irritated thorn bushes wait. The fairy must rediscover her magic and her sense of responsibility before the family drama can turn out right.

Helena Lymbery’s fairy has a shock of red hair and broken wooden wings – she does seem a bit grotty for one of Mab’s court. Several of Mr. Norris’s many cautions are issued against those who rule out dirty people, as well as against overfussy parenting, and fighting with those we love. Unfortunately, many of Mr. Norris’s didactic points come courtesy of the singing ensemble. Whether they are slaves or roses or retainers, they sing in madrigal-harmony throughout. In a show already encumbered with aimless secondary plots and a strung-out climax, six people singing unamusing chorales slow it down still further.

On a stage clogged and cogged with Katrina Lindsay’s set, fairy lights twinkle, drawbridges flop open and closed, and a series of rattling trapdoors disclose the fairy’s entourage. It’s got bells and whistles enough, but it never comes up with a convincingly lovely image. The occasional flabbiness of Mr. Norris’s production, though, doesn’t detract from its central feature. It is dark. It is deliciously, angrily, spookily dark. When luckless princes get eaten, they don’t come back.

We now deride fairy tales for giving the young overly rosey-colored expectations. But real fairy tales, ones with boggarts and ogres and wolves, do their job best when they hint at the real world’s terrors. It’s a very, very Black Forest out there, and “Sleeping Beauty” won’t let us forget it.

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A more damaging fairy tale, one we tell ourselves every day, claims that racism has begun its slow fade into non-existence. In “Disposable Men,” a one-man media spectacle at HERE, James Scruggs does his level best to jolt us awake. Enraged by the number of unarmed black men gunned down by local police (the program lists dozens of them), Mr. Scruggs takes a long look at the stereotypes forced down the African-American throat. His hour and a half flaps a bit at the edges – neither the stage picture nor the text’s arrangement assembles into a tight structure. But the evening stocks enough shocks to get us over the rocky bits and into the heart of Mr. Scruggs’s justifiable rage.

Whether screening movies in which the black guard dies first or counting out the rhythms of the grinning entertainer, Mr. Scruggs embodies and then explodes the icons of “disposable” blackness. With screens full of Frankenstein movies exposing the ecstatic, fearful mob, Mr. Scruggs tries to be the one man standing against them. He takes on, in a series of monologues, personalities from either the invented present or the real past. He becomes a man denied medicine in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Amadou Diallo hit by the NYPD’s 40 bullets, or a lynching re-enactor at an old South theme restaurant (“underground, you know, like Planet Hollywood”).

Mr. Scruggs, under the direction of HERE’s own Kristin Marting, goes with the “more is more” ethic when it comes to projection equipment. There are televisions with his own image watching him perform, a flat screen suspended by a noose that can “hang” his image, and a handful of larger screens stretching around and behind him. When the effects are supposed to be most sophisticated – at one point he is supposed to be wrestling his own disembodied image – the equipment fails him. But in one gorgeously affecting scene he sits down close to the audience, an open, blank scrapbook on his knee. Projections of violence, the “strange fruit” of this country’s history with the black man, appear magically in its pages. Mr. Scruggs and Ms. Marting clearly have a lot of big ideas, but it’s the smallest of them that win the evening.