Into The Woods

Musical (1986)

With Will McGarrahan (Narrator), Erica Spyres (Cinderella), Gregory Baila (Jack), Beth Gotha (Jack’s Mother), John Ambrosino (Baker), Lisa Yuen (Baker’s Wife), Maureen Keller (Cinderella’s Stepmother), Christina English (Florinda), Elise Arsenault (Lucinda), Arthur Waldstein (Cinderella’s Father), Maritza Bostic (Little Red Ridighood), Aimee Doherty (Witch), Maurice Emmanuel Parent (Wolf/Cinderella’s Prince), Teresa Winner Blume (Granny/Cinderella’s Mother), Amanda Spinella (Rapunzel), Sam Simahk (Rapunzel’s Prince), Jeff Mahoney (Steward)

Don’t even ask what goes on in this melange of Grimm Brothers’ tales, and some others, that interweaves, intersects, overlaps, and cuts and pastes from one into another. Little Red Riding Hood is in the Baker’s Wife’s business, and Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant terrorizes Cinderella. No longer do these stories hover in bubbles of their own. Sondheim and Lapine have broken the barriers and made them spill into one another, and the result is moving, revealing, and existentially sobering.

There is something a bit Jungian in the approach, and all of a sudden archetype becomes more important than individual character. We get a sense of the heroic prince as a type rather than just as a character in a particular tale. And the giant is the horrible shadow character that appears in everyone’s backyard, and, in that sense, common to everyone’s destiny.

Taking this turn towards commonality and generality in the Jungian vein, this captivating musical eventually derives the vulnerable and human aspects of the fairy-tale personas, envisioning a sense of mutual destiny much more human than mythological.

All of this is pulled off entertainingly with Sondheim’s amazing facility for language. His is the Broadway wit par excellence and here he takes it to the Nth degree. All of Sondheim’s lyrics are witty, but in this show he uses such rapid-fire alliteration and quick turn-around rhymes that blend, feed, and play off one another that the results are linguistically pyrotechnic. One sits back in amazement at Sondheim’s sheer capacity to turn, bend and juggle words into magical arrays.

The first act makes its spoofy business the blending of tales and the formation of a mythological molecule out of what had formerly been a series of separate atoms, and the lyrics that accompany it are frequently hilarious. When the two princes – from Cinderella and Rapunzel – get together in “Agony” to sing a mutual lament about how challenging it is to be a hero the result is hysterical.

In the second act, things get more complicated and what seemed like a fairy tale ending at the end of the first act takes a more dismal turn. The wife of the giant that Jack, from Jack and the Beanstalk, has killed in the first act, comes back to haunt the community of fairy tale characters in the second act. All of a sudden, gladness and light turns into a grim Godzilla story. The results are not pretty and the sanguine everything-works-out-in-the-end finale of the first act turns austere, almost tragic, by the end of the second act.

This, of course, is a mark of Sondheim’s (and, here, Lapine’s) narrative greatness, wrestling with the difficult implications of stories, bringing out the dark and unsettling sides. Because of the jazzy showbiz orientation and the sheer ingenuity of the lyrics, the sometimes painful revelations gain an uplifting, and generally entertaining, dimension.

In the trajectory of this show, there is a gesture that points beyond the level of mere narrative. There is a storyteller, here assuredly portrayed by Will McGarrahan, who the fairy-tale characters, at one point, decide to sacrifice. This is well in keeping with a theme Sondheim sometimes raises – that the mediation of storytelling becomes something itself to overcome if one is to arrive at the most honest level of human feeling. Demonstrating a love of story and a suspicion of it, Sondheim brings, via Broadway, something reminiscent of Plato, an author who felt that the narrative medium was compelling and important, but who also saw its potentially misleading ways.

The show has a large cast and collectively they do a nice job.

Erica Spyres, an expressive actress with a fine, operatic voice, contributes a charming Cinderella.

Aimee Donovan, a brilliant comedic musical theater performer, holds down the character of the Witch with pizzazz.

Gregory Baila, who plays Jack, has a sweetly straightforward voice and also carries off the innocence of his role well.

Maritza Bostic is an animated Little Red Riding Hood who brings down the house when she intentionally garbles her lines as she stuffs her mouth with morsels taken from the Baker and his wife.

Lisa Yuen, as the Baker’s Wife, has a vivid presence, dramatically punctuated and consistently funny throughout.

Director Spiro Veloudos and Musical Director Catherine Stornetta have done a good job of managing the moves of this small city of actors in the Lyric’s intimate spaces. The live band is small and the orchestration a bit brassy, but it is highly competent and adeptly supports the frequently complex interactions of vocals onstage.

-BADMan