INTO THE WOODS
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For Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, writing their musical comedy Into the Woods, the stories of Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Jack the Giant Killer represented variations on themes of 1980s urban living: the breakdown of the family, loss of faith, random violence, and an epidemic of a disease, AIDS, whose social ravages seemed to confirm the sternest and most restrictive attitudes toward sexual freedom. The authors’ decision to use fairy-tale literature to explore these troubling issues was a brilliant stroke. The natural urge for people perplexed by modern reality is to turn to traditional fantasy; Into the Woods, which investigates the darkly ambiguous implications of the old legends (and the Walt Disney retellings of them with which most of us grew up), plays to the audience’s desire for escape as a way of showing that audience that there is no escape.
To link the fairy tales together songwriter Sondheim and playwright Lapine constructed an original story, “The Baker and His Wife,” about a childless couple who learn that their barrenness is the result of a magic spell. To undo the spell they must acquire a collection of unusual items, a quest that takes them away from their secure but incomplete home and into the woods, where they encounter such figures as Red Riding Hood and her wolf, Jack and his giant, and Rapunzel and Cinderella and their respective charming princes. Presiding over all of this is a not exactly wicked but clearly overwrought witch and a mysterious, almost troll-like man–real and surrogate parent figures whose own failings have had terrible effects on the young people around them. The different narrative strands wander through the witty script, exquisite music, and rhyme-heavy lyrics (whose singsongy style maintains a children’s-story quality while probing adult insecurities) like people lost in a maze, leading the characters to a final showdown with a lady giant who, seeking revenge for her husband’s death at Jack’s hands, has laid waste to the land. How the giant is conquered and how the survivors rearrange their lives to form a distinctly modern alternative family are the subjects of the play’s final minutes.
But nothing intrudes on the beauty of Russ Borski’s wondrous set and lighting. Making full use of the sprawling Pegasus stage, Borski provides a trio of brightly colored storybooks that open into cutely inviting pop-up homes for the various family groups, then are wheeled off to leave the characters in a simultaneously threatening and tempting woods lit by a huge yellow moon and a sky that changes from deep, lush blue to apocalyptic red. More than any other element in the show, Borski’s designs capture the dreamlike mystery of this rich and stimulating work of musical theater.
