by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Stephen Sondheim’s Into the
Woods — not the 2014 movie version, which
pretty much sank without a trace at the box office, but the 1990 video version
filmed during live performances while the show was still in its initial run at
the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway. Into the Woods actually premiered in our neck of the woods — the
Old Globe Theatre in San Diego’s Balboa Park, where it first opened on December
4, 1986 and ran for 50 performances under the direction of James Lapine, who
also wrote the book (i.e., the overall story and the non-musical dialogue
portions) for the show. This was a typical “tryout” production before the
Broadway run — Sondheim wrote and added the song “No One Is Alone” during the
Old Globe performances — and while many of the cast members repeated their
roles on Broadway, Ellen Foley, the original Witch, was replaced by Bernadette
Peters because she’d previously appeared in other Sondheim musicals and the
producers wanted a star “name.” The Broadway opening took place on November 5,
1987 and ran for 765 performances until September 3, 1989, though the video was
done over three performances in 1990; though Bernadette Peters had given up the
role of the Witch after about six months to make the movie Slaves of New
York, she returned to play the part for the
video — and had an unexpected problem. At the end of Act I, the Witch undergoes
an on-stage transformation from an ugly hag with magical powers to a beautiful
woman without them, and this had been accomplished by having Peters duck into a
hollow tree on the “woods” set and remove the Witch makeup and costume while a
double briefly took her place on stage and mimed to a recording of Peters’
voice until Peters herself was ready to go back on. James Lapine and the
technical staff producing the video found that Peters’ stage makeup wasn’t
heavy enough for the cameras, so they made her up more — and this threw off her
timing since she couldn’t get the additional makeup off soon enough and the
other actors had to improvise dialogue until the de-Witched Peters was ready to
come back on stage. (These bits were edited out of the video as eventually
released.)
Into the Woods is
basically a mash-up of four Grimm’s fairy tales — well before the term
“mash-up” was coined — including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,”
“Rapunzel,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” — along with a linking story more or less
invented by Lapine, in which a baker (Chip Zien) and his wife (Joanna Gleason
in a heart-rending performance that won a Tony Award and stole the show from
the better-known Peters) are unable to conceive a child. The Witch tells them
that she’s put a curse on them to remain childless out of revenge because the
baker’s father — also a baker — once trampled on the Witch’s garden. The only
way they can lift the curse is if they can present the Witch a cow as white as
milk, a cloak as red as blood, a lock of blonde hair as yellow as an ear of
corn, and a slipper as bright as gold. Fortunately, Jack (Ben Wright) has the
cow, Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland) has the cloak, Rapunzel (Pamela
Winslow) has the hair and Cinderella (Kim Crosby) has the slipper. Act I
consists basically of the various characters’ journeys “into the woods” to
achieve their wishes, and the baker and his wife attempting to get the various
objects from them, either by buying them (it’s the baker who buys Jack’s cow
for the famous magic beans, created by the Witch in a previous spell), getting
them presented as gifts (the baker gets Red Riding Hood’s cloak for cutting
open the belly of the wolf that ate her and her grandmother, and freeing both
women; Red Riding Hood then skins the wolf and makes a new cloak from his
skin), or outright stealing them (the scene in which the baker’s wife pulls a
strand of Rapunzel’s super-long hair and she suffers the predictable pain as
she pulls it out by the roots is especially delicious). Lapine invents
character relationships to link the stories and make it credible that all those
people would be in the same tale: Prince Charming (Robert Westenberg, who also
ingeniously doubles as the Wolf in the Red Riding Hood plotline), who romances
Cinderella at the big palace ball and then searches the kingdom for the woman
whose feet will fit the golden slipper, is the brother of the prince (Chuck
Wagner) who rescues Rapunzel from the prison-like castle in which the Witch has
imprisoned her, and Rapunzel is the Witch’s daughter and has locked her in to
protect her from male attentions the way Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont) did
with her daughter Ouilotta (Susan
Miller) in W. C. Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Lapine also includes the original grim(m) conclusion
of the Cinderella story, in which the wicked stepsisters are given quickie
D.I.Y. amputations by their mom to try to get them to fit into the golden
slipper (I remember reading that in a Grimm’s Fairy Tales collection I had as a
child and being shocked by that detail, which I hadn’t experienced in earlier,
more anodyne versions of the tale I’d encountered.)
While the main intrigue
involving the baker, his wife and the Witch is going on, there are other side
stories taken from the originals, including Jack’s experience once his mom
(Barbara Bryne) throws out the beans, they land on the ground and grow into a
giant beanstalk, and he climbs it and discovers the home of, not one giant, but
two: a husband-and-wife giant couple. The lady giant holds Jack to her breast
and practically smothers him before the man giant comes upon them, reacts
violently, and chases Jack down the beanstalk, only to be killed when Jack
chops down the beanstalk and it falls with the giant still on it. Act I ends
with the characters having got their wishes and seemingly ready for the
“happily ever after” ending obligatory in classic fairy tales, only Sondheim
and Lapine are ready to throw us a curve-ball, which they do, big-time: it
seems there was one magic bean left over and Cinderella threw it to the ground,
which grows another giant beanstalk and allows the lady giant (who’s seen only
as a huge papier-maché model as she falls at the end of Act II, though her
voice is heard and she’s played thusly by Merle Louise, who also played Red
Riding Hood’s grandmother and Cinderella’s biological mother, who’s dead but
has remained as a ghost haunting a hollow tree in the forest, to which
Cinderella frequently repairs so she can have conversations with her dead mom —
it’s a fairy tale, remember?) to
climb down, menace the kingdom, stomp out the baker’s home and the princes’
castle, and threaten everyone else in the kingdom until Jack and Cinderella
team up to figure out a way to kill her. Though the giant is never seen as an
animate creature (an effect easy enough to do in a movie but virtually
impossible on stage), director Lapine and his technical people do a quite good
job of suggesting her presence with breakaway sets (representing where her
invisible feet have supposedly trod) and sound effects. Lapine also uses the
giant to knock off several of the characters, including the baker’s wife (just
after she has a tryst with Cinderella’s Prince in the forest — in their
subsequent argument, with Cinderella upholding the virtues of monogamy and the
Prince swearing his love for her but also insisting that he be allowed to
stray, Cinderella sounded like Charles and the Prince sounded like me) and
Cinderella’s ghost mom in the tree. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty make cameo
appearances as other damsels in distress those randy young princes briefly have
itches for — in this story princes are from Mars and damsels in distress are
from Venus — and Sondheim supplies a song called “Agony,” first heard in Act I
and reprised in Act II, that (especially in its Act II version) adds him to the
long list of Queer songwriters — Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Noël Coward, Ivor
Novello — with decidedly jaundiced views about the human species’ (and
especially its males) capability for sexual exclusivity in relationships.
The
second act is considerably grim(m)er than the first, though without the classic
fairy tales to fall back on and left to his own imaginative devices Lapine is a
considerably less interesting writer than he was in Act I — and the beautiful
but de-powered Witch is simply not as compelling a character as she was in the
first act. Into the Woods is a
fascinating story, showing off Sondheim’s (as well as James Lapine’s) virtues
and flaws in almost equal measure — it’s audacious and sporadically moving, but
it’s also just a bit too clever for its own good and it alternates between
emotionally wrenching drama (particularly the plot line featuring the baker and
his wife) and camp. It also shows Sondheim’s strengths and weaknesses as a
composer; he writes most of the songs in a mid-tempo staccato rhythm, which
seems to be Sondheim’s default style even though his biggest hits (notably “Send
In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music) are long-lined melodies. Also, the songs in Into the Woods are so closely tied in with the book and the overall
production that few of them could be performed outside the show and still make
sense — the song variously known as “Children Won’t Listen” (when the Witch
sings it to her daughter Rapunzel in the middle of Act Two) and “Children Will Listen” (in the big finale where it’s reprised) is
about the only song from Into the Woods that has had even a modest performance history out of context. It also
didn’t help that Into the Woods
immediately followed Sunday in the Park with George, the first Sondheim-Lapine collaboration and the
show I consider Sondheim’s masterpiece; like Into the Woods it had a second act vastly different in tone from
the first, but overall the pair seemed to be operating at a higher level of
inspiration and Sunday in the Park with George (despite that silly title) took on more serious
theatrical and philosophical issues: the clash between art and commercialism,
between art and a “normal” family or sexual life, and the pursuit of one’s own
identity via what one creates. The issues of Into the Woods are summed up in the old proverb, “Be careful what
you wish for; you just might get it,” and the show appears at times to be a
critique of fairy tales as well as an exploitation of them — it’s largely
dependent on our knowledge of the original stories so we can appreciate the
different “spin” Lapine and Sondheim are putting on them. The 1990 video is
impeccably staged — seven cameras were planted in the Martin Beck Theatre to
ensure a fluid, cinematic presentation instead of just a film of what the stage
audience saw — and Lapine ensured the integrity of the project by directing it
himself.
In the interim between Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods George Martin — the music critic, not to be confused
either with the Beatles’ record producer or the author of the Game of
Thrones books — published an article in The
Opera Quarterly about Sondheim called
“Almost Opera,” which questioned why Sondheim was clinging to the musical form,
with its songs interrupted by spoken dialogue, instead of writing a
full-fledged through-sung opera, and at the end concluded that Sondheim
probably doesn’t like opera and
that’s why he was content to expand the horizons of the musical form without
breaking them completely. He also noted that Sondheim, like most Broadway
composers but unlike opera composers, does not orchestrate his songs himself
(when Kurt Weill arrived in New York and insisted on doing his own
orchestrations, his producers were aghast — most American musical composers,
including George Gershwin, just turned out the songs as voice-and-piano lead
sheets and other people orchestrated them, and Weill’s producers feared that
his insistence on orchestrating himself would just slow the process down and
make the preparation period longer); it’s the difference in perception between
the classical world and the Broadway world that caused such grief for Gershwin
when it came out that, though he had composed Rhapsody in Blue, Ferde Grofé had orchestrated it, and led Gershwin
to give himself a quickie self-study course in orchestration and credit his
later “classical” works, “Composed and Orchestrated by George Gershwin.”
Anyway, Into the Woods is
probably the closest Sondheim ever got to writing an opera; though there are
bits of spoken dialogue they’re no more significant than they are in works like
Mozart’s The Magic Flute or the
original version of Bizet’s Carmen,
both of which are part of the regular operatic repertory even though they
contain dialogue, and the singing-to-talking ratio in Into the Woods is far more heavily weighted towards singing than in
most musicals (even classics like West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by
Sondheim). I admire Stephen Sondheim immensely as the greatest musical composer
of the second half of the 20th century, but he also has his flaws —
in some ways he’s another example of the Gay artist who responds to the world
in general and emotional and romantic commitment in particular as if he is
observing it from outside instead
of directly participating in it (as opposed to a Gay composer like Tchaikovsky
whose great weakness was the enormous degree of self-pity that made some of his
works too emotional to be
listenable), and as too often happens in Into the Woods he and his writing collaborator sometimes resort to
cleverness to get them out of a dramatic hole, leading to scenes which are
engaging and funny but just get in the way of the drama. Still, Into
the Woods is a quite entertaining piece and
well worth watching, especially in this blessedly preserved performance by the
original Broadway cast — and it makes me more curious than I’d been before to
see the recent film version, with Meryl Streep (who else?) as the Witch.
