Reviewed by Jerry Kraft
"Into
the Woods"
is one of Stephen Sondheim's most popular and most produced musicals, partly
because on the surface it seems like such an accessible and agreeable
collection of fairy tales and familiar characters. But Sondheim is never easy
or one-dimensional, and this show, especially with a second act that takes us
into a realm of social, personal and moral responsibility, is both deeper and
greater than just a collection of amusing stories. The woods become the tangled
terrain of the adult world, the characters autonomous individuals whose every
decision and action has consequence both for themselves and for others, and the
"Giants in the sky" become an ambiguous and dangerous divinity to
whom all must answer. The first act is just fun, a romp in Eden, but the second
act is all about life after the Garden. Meticulously constructed from the
singular brilliance of Sondheim's lyric writing and his frequently gorgeous
music, James Lapine's book caries us on a long and complex journey without easy answers
to challenging questions. Done well, it is anything but an easy show.
This
production, with Direction and Musical Staging by Mark Waldrop, has many charms and a number of
excellent performances from the large cast, but ultimately fails to achieve the
resonance and magnitude required by the second act. There is plenty to enjoy
here, but this show should ultimately achieve a transcendence that is both
spiritual and profoundly mortal, and it never quite gets that.
One
of the key decisions was to cast a ten year old girl in the role of Little Red
Riding Hood. Ireland Woods is a remarkably talented child, with a strong singing
voice and excellent diction, and dramatic focus quite beyond her years. Using a
child in the role certainly adds an interesting complexity to her determination
and resilience, but not having a child opposite her as Jack unbalances the
relationships and the integrity of the themes they embody.
I
particularly liked Leslie Law as the Baker's wife and Bob De Dea as her husband. Both of them had
strong characterizations, and Law in particular kept her songs fully integrated
into the character and action. Her performance of "Any Moment" (with Michael
Hunsaker as
Cinderella's Prince) was, for me, the best number in the show. I also liked Billie
Wildrick very
much as Cinderella, with her lovely voice and very sympathetic, unaffected
character equally delightful as mistreated child and searching princess. The extremely
complex role of the Witch, played by Lisa Estridge, was poorly directed, with the
character far too superficial and Halloween caricature in the first act, and
insufficiently dimensional in the second. She becomes a contemporary woman, and
that's fine, but we really should still see in her everything of what the witch
was in the first half of the play, and there was very little of that apparent.
The earlier embodiment was simply lost.
The
physical production was attractive, but a bit cumbersome. The large tangle of
woods set on a turntable made for a strong design element, especially for a
number of chase scenes, but it also restricted the playing area. With an open
orchestra pit, the action was forced onto a fairly narrow horizontal space, and
left a lot of flat blocking. In a show where depth and dimension are such
critical themes, that's a fairly major visual problem. The costumes by Lynda
Salsbury were
very good, and Tom Sturge delivered a clean and effective lighting design.
"Into the Woods" is a big show, not only in terms of cast and
production demands, but also in terms of the scale of its dramatic concerns,
the significance of the questions of personal responsibility, moral and ethical
relationships and existential accountability. This production was very
entertaining, particularly in the first act with its fun sense of play and
whimsical imagination, but not successful in taking us to the greater depths of
the second act. Unfortunately, with this show if you don't achieve that, if you
don't bring the audience to a confrontation with serious and substantial
questions about who we are to each other, and what our choices and actions mean
in the context of the world and of existence itself, then you haven't really
done the show. For all the effort and talent, it didn't get done here.