Unlike the other Encores! shows of the season - “ The Tap Dance Kid” and “ The Life,” both of which received contested updates - “Into the Woods” arrives largely unchanged. If I were a betting woman, I would hazard that’s the aspect of “Into the Woods” that appealed to deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores! and an artist with a long history of community engagement and activism. But these same years have offered galvanizing examples of mutual care and aid, a mode echoed in the ballad “No One Is Alone,” which argues for support and understanding despite differences. The last two years, maybe the last six years, maybe more, have emphasized the stark divisions in American life, isolating us in our individual experiences of suffering and perceived injustice. But that doesn’t make them any less urgent. Now I understand them differently: as conjectures and hypotheticals. Should the characters deliberately sacrifice one person - Jack - or do nothing and allow many others to die? Instead it feels theoretical, a filigreed representation of the classic trolley problem. That should feel at least as propulsive as gathering potion ingredients. The priority shifts from the individual to the collective as characters band together to save the kingdom and themselves. “Into the Woods” insists on continuing straight past happily ever after, exploring the repercussions of those Act I choices and offering new and somewhat more abstract conflicts. It’s a truism that a happy ending depends on stopping a story at just the right moment.
The second act darkens and destabilizes these tales. What if you get what you wish and you still want more? What if the wish come true isn’t really worth what it cost you? And as in Sondheim shows like “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” they wrestle with the question of whether getting what you want is actually good for you. Characters weigh personal desire against the needs of the greater community. In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the baker’s wife interrogates the ethics of ambition. And unease already glimmers, firefly-like, among the trees. Jack, now rich, reunites with his cow (expertly puppeteered by Kennedy Kanagawa). Little Red and her grandmother (Annie Golden) are released from the wolf’s stomach. Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel, mellow in an underwritten role) gets hers (Jason Forbach, in for Jordan Donica). When tales have circulated since the premodern era, it’s no spoiler to say that they all end happily. Within three nights they must obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.
Desperate for a child, they heed the witch next door (Heather Headley, a diva in a frowzy wig and claws) and head into the forest - here, a bare stage ornamented with the set designer David Rockwell’s elegant birch trunks. At its whirling center are a humble baker (Neil Patrick Harris, with down-to-the-millisecond comic timing) and his wife (the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and recent Broadway baby Sara Bareilles, no slouch). The show, as ever, collides characters drawn from a half-dozen tales in the European folk tradition - Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, a prince or two. So if you know a spell to charm the secondary market, cast it now. Her “Into the Woods” runs through May 15 only a few tickets remain. (Let’s just say that when Rob Marshall has directed a star-crammed film version of a show within the last decade, it is no longer a hidden gem.)īut that mission has expanded, unearthing something as glorious as Lear deBessonet’s revival. Which makes the fractured fairy tales of “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour 1986 musical, a peculiar choice.
#Fews into red review series
For nearly three decades, the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has upheld a specific mission - excavating the hidden gems of American musical theater, burnishing them to a fully orchestrated shine.
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