Even in real life there are a great many people who as adults learn for the first time that they have biological fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and even children that they never knew about, and, for all sorts of reasons (even without being warned by threatening people, or, for that matter, witches, that they will never find their long lost family members) choose to not go looking for them.
This isn't real life.
It's multi-plot deconstructed fairy tale psychomythodramatic musical comedy-drama.
The Baker's decision whether or not to search for his long lost sister, if he might super-theoretically have ever considered such a decision, is simply outside the scope of story, more specifically outside the parts of the characters' lives that we see being played out in the action.
That the Baker and Rapunzel are brother and sister is simply a plot point. It is not meant to develop a story line about whether the Baker didn't care all that much about reconnecting with a sister he had never met, or, alternatively, might have considered more carefully searching for his long lost sister under vastly different circumstances, or whether he in fact did consider all of this carefully (and who's to say he wouldn't have, off-stage/screen?), or, perhaps, cared very much but couldn't devote himself to that care because he a) first had just three days to help reverse the curse, b) then had, immediately, a pregnant wife a newborn child as well as a bakery to attend to and could not have ignored these pressing responsibilities to go searching for his sister even if he had wanted to and c) finally, and while the child is still an infant, has to deal with the potential end of existence as he knows it as well as his own psychological vulnerabilities in not being perhaps the father he would like to be.
These of course might, as Myterious has said, been interesting paths for the story to take, but it took other paths instead. And the libretto is chockfull of paths as it is.
The fact that Rapunzel is the Baker's sister is part of an inciting incident concerning how the curse got placed and the place got cursed in the first place, how the curse gets reversed, and the ever after of that reversal. It is not there as an inciting incident for a story about a search for a long lost sibling. (If you want that story, of see The Menaechmi, Comedy of Errors, The Boys from Syracuse or Oh, Brother instead; if you want to see Sondheim's take on long lost siblings being reunited, go see Forum!).
Btw, I don't find it odd that the Baker wouldn't immediately think the maiden in the tower was his sister just because the Witch said she had touched the hair; there are a thousand other possibilities why the Witch might have touched the hair in question; particularly since the Witch has a motive to obtain hair just that shade of yellow and has often had to stop abruptly when these objects, which she can not touch, are foisted on her by people - including the Baker - who are not listening carefully to her instructions that she must not touch them.
Updated On: 1/7/15 at 04:20 PM
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