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Mickey Jo Theatre (Theatre Critic) (1:31)
At this point. After seeing three completely different productions over the last decade and a half, I am starting to feel as though I will never be fully satisfied and delighted by any production of into the Woods. Not because I don't love the show, but because it is my favourite musical of all time. And this major new revival at the Bridge Theatre in London has without a doubt been my most anticipated new show of the year. And the show that they have built together is utterly respectable, momentarily captivating, occasionally enchanting and very nice. But as we learn in the Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine written musical, nice is different than good. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Geo and I am obsessed with all things theatre as a theatre critic and content creator here on social media. Today we're going to be talking all about the Bridge Theatre's brand new production of into the woods, which has just opened this week in London. The first major revival of the Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical in several years. A musical which to my mind is among the greatest ever to be written, and which is certainly beloved of a great many dedicated musical theatre fans. Which I dare say may mean that several of you listening to this review will have already had the chance to see it for yourselves. And if you have, I would love to know what you thought in the comments section down below, particularly if you disagree with anything that I have to say. For my part going into this, not unlike Little Red Riding Hood, I was both excited and scared because there was such a weight of expectation. And it's true that I hold faith few pieces of theatre to such a high standard as into the woods because I think it's capable of such extraordinary range of articulating so much about the human condition and experience, such that when I perceive any individual production to be falling short of that, it feels disappointing. At which point, wasting no more time, I will begin to tell you everything that I thought about last night's opening night performance of the new London revival of into the Woods. So into the woods made its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego before transferring to Broadway. It tells the story, the interwoven story of all of these different classic fairy tale characters with Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack of Beanstalk fame, Rapunzel, and a couple of original characters, including a baker and his wife who may be rooted in another fairy tale story, as well as their neighbor the witch from next door, as well as a narrator character whose responsibility it is to the story, which in the first act concerns each of these characters desires and the wishes that they share aloud, which they sing aloud in an extended prologue that acquaints us with each of them and these different strands of the story that are going to come together. You have Cinderella, who so desperately wants to attend the festival, being thrown by the prince in spite of the wishes of her cruel stepmother and stepsisters. You have the baker and his wife, who long to have a child and are concerned that all efforts thus far seem to be failing, for which they are about to receive an explanat from the witch who lives next door, who has an agenda entirely of her own but isn't forthcoming enough to sing about it in the narrative. We will find out what it is that she wants a little bit later on, and it is something she wants quite desperately. Jack, meanwhile, though his frenzied mother has more realistic concerns, wishes for little more than for his cow and best friend Milky White, to be able to produce some milk in order that Milky White won't have to be taken to market, sold, and or turned into a hamburger. And as the first act of the musical plays out, so do each of their stories with considerable familiar familiarity. Cinderella happens upon a beautiful ball gown and attends the ball, but flees from the prince, who subsequently tries to discover her identity by carrying around a single shoe. Little Red Riding Hood happens upon a wolf on the way to her grandmother's house, by whom she is distracted. Eventually, she reaches her grandmother's house and questions the appearance of her familiar granny, what big eyes you have, etc. Etc. It's almost never the fur that tips them off. Interestingly enough, that almost never seems to come up. Jack, meanwhile, sells his beloved cow in exchange for magic beans, climbs a newly arrived be stalk up into the sky Kingdom of the Giants, and sings a very popular musical theatre audition song about it, with each of the familiar fairy tale characters coming into contact with the baker and his wife, who are on something of a quest throughout the woods under the instructions of the witch from next door in order to retrieve four the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold. This being the catalyzing detail in the narrative which brings all of these stories together, at least in the first act, there is something different which will unite them in the second, because interestingly enough, everything which we know about their stories and their lives has been concluded by the end of the first act. Cinderella's foot has fit the slipper and she has married the prince. Jack has become wealthy by retrieving items from the kingdom of the giant, some may say stealing. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother have been freed from the stomach of the wolf, and all characters join together to sing a song called Ever after, where they talk about how happy they are now and how neatly their stories have all been concluded. Only the narrator reminds us at the end that after the interval there is going to be an entire extension of this story, and the whole thing is to be continued as a beamstalk begins to grow into the sky. Another one that is, and this is the real brilliance of into the woods is this extension of the whole thing. And it's almost like you don't really even reach the payoff until the second act. The first act is so brilliantly written, but in the second we get to explore this idea of these fairy tale characters being brought into contact with real world problems and scenarios that they were never equipped to deal with, these difficult philosophical questions and human realities that their stories never particularly contended with. And to that end, it becomes a story about all of us about society and community, a timeless one about the way in which we try to protect each other and do right by each other. And there's just so much in there brought about by this life altering event, by the arrival of a destructive giant on a rampage throughout the kingdom, ridding them of any kind of concept of class division and leaving all of the characters that we've met thus far scrambling around the world trying to come up with some kind of a solution that they can agree upon. And we see desperation and selfishness and the inclination to flee and to absolve yourself of responsibility, to protect your children, to protect yourself, to do the right thing, to seek vengeance, to question what the right thing even is, to try and grapple with the concept of how to possibly go on with your life after circumstances like this. It's all, all there and into the woods. And ingeniously it equips, I think, audiences everywhere to be able to understand this story by rooting it in something that we not only knew in childhood, but we learned from in childhood. These stories, these characters were our original perspective on morality. These were fables, these were lessons to be learned about doing the right thing. And these honorable, earnest, well intentioned characters winning the day, like Cinderella, who gets her prince, who gets everything she ever want, we never dared to question at that time whether that really would be fulfilling for her or what the next chapter might hold after happily ever after. This ignition point of childhood memory and fairy tale stories is echoed by one of the major themes running through the show, about parenthood and the stories passed between generations. And this is particularly carried by the new characters created for the show. The baker, his wife, the witch from next door, who in contrast with their fairy tale neighbours, have slightly more human, everyday goals and perspectives. The baker and his wife have been previously compared to a more traditional, recognisable, relatable couple who happened to buy in a cheap and slightly bizarre neighborhood, finding themselves living next to a witch, finding giants running around, etc. At the show's conclusion, it is the witch, who throughout the increasingly dark proceedings has offered her own sort of chilling wisdom, who issues to us the instruction as the baker is telling the story of everything that has unfolded to his young child. Careful, the things you say children will listen in into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine remind us that there is so much to learn from the fairy tale stories we may have forgotten as we grew into adulthood, not just from what was on the page, but also from what lies beyond it. Now the show has enjoyed a couple of major Broadway revivals is produced extensively around the US and is seen a little less frequently here in the uk. There was an original London production which happened subsequently, not a replica of the Broadway one. There was also an outdoor staging at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre that later transferred back to New York, as well as a handful of smaller scale and regional productions. But this, in many ways is the most major revival of into the woods that we've seen in more than a decade here in London. All of which hopefully helps you begin to understand why I had such high hopes for the thing. Let's talk about this production. Now. I'm generalizing a little bit here, but I do think British productions, by and large, really lean into the darkness of the whole thing. And this is something that I've said before, where a lot of British revivals of American musicals try and find this sort of bittersweet and bleak and slightly heartbroken quality. We did it not too long ago with hello Dolly. We like to really try and find what darkness and humanity there is. And I don't know if it's just that we want everything to be Les Miserables or that our point of reference for fairy tale stories in the case of into the woods, might be closer to a Brother's Grimm kind of a realm. Meanwhile, over in the us into the woods is performed in a great many high school schools. And the way that a lot of people will encounter it for the first time is being performed by teenagers. That doesn't really happen here. That's not really part of the show's British identity. And this production, directed by Jordan Fine and designed by Tom Scutt, is no exception to that idea. This is one that decisively leans into the darkness of the whole thing almost to the extent that we're kind of tonally doing Act 2 in Act 1 already, which understandably is a little to the detriment of that first act. And I've seen enough productions of into the woods where we dial back on the comedy of the whole thing a little bit, and where perhaps the witch's first arrival is more just overtly sinister. But this is a puzzling example because the witch is still quite funny in this, and we're still going for a lot of comedy lines. And you have things like the princes arriving in these sort of 70s pantomime costumes with headbands and tights and codpieces and puffy sleeves. And there's an awful lot about it visually that does arrive with a very deliberate wit. Milky White is a great example of this and if there's any truth to the notion that the creative intention of a production, the woods, can be understood by the way that they have conceived Milky White, I don't think that holds up here, because this Milky White, more closely resembling a childhood toy that Jack is clinging to than anything else which, you know, works on an emotional level, is a small handheld puppet being very deftly puppeteered, hilariously reacting to things that are being said about him and pronouncements being made that, you know, Milky White will have to be taken to market. Milky White is to be sold, etc. Steam emits from the udders, which thought was hysterically funny. But later on, when Jack and the baker are feuding over who is the rightful owner of Milky White, at which point in the material Milky White falls down dead, they actually wrestle with the puppet. And Milky White gets Caucasian chalk circled in half with his head being torn off, which makes the delivery of the line as Jack picture this now is holding the separated head of Milky White that has just been torn from its body. For Jack to then pause and say Milky White is dead becomes quite funny. But all of this funny is very much at odds with the aesthetic of the production. With the arrival of the production and with this slightly puzzling initial framing device in which the narrator walks out on stage tentatively and then waits to be joined by the other initial players as though into the woods is a story that they are telling. There's no other reference to this throughout the production. And though a similar sort of thing is replicated at the start of the second act, it's never really contextualized. We are never able to understand or I wasn't at least what this is supposed to mean. Now, the narrator himself is dressed like a 1970s geography teacher, and as per most productions, he also plays the role of the mysterious man who is burdened, I must say, with much of the show's weakest material. There are moments as they are trying to bring all of the found items together to create this potion for the Witch at the climax of the first act, in which he has to deliver a lot of messy lines that magically fix things quite quickly. And each of his little arriving rhyming couplets didn't really work for me in this production when he's given it. You know, when first I appear, I seem deleterious. When explained, I'm nothing serious. There is a nice choice, one that I interpret as perhaps even a deliberate homage to the pre Broadway production of the show, in which it is vaguely suggested that perhaps the narrator is the adult version of the baker's child who is being told the story. Hence why he is then able to tell the story to us, the audience. There used to be a line, I think, either in previews on Broadway or before the show even made it to Broadway, when after the baker is encouraged to tell the story to the child, the narrator returns, having disappeared partway through the second act and saying upon his return, I remembered every word. But back to this prologue and this initial black box setting and this one shared table around which all of the characters appear, fostering perhaps something of a sense of community. I don't know whether that idea is beneficial in the first act or if it's something that needs to be established in the second. In general, I think what we're beginning to itch at here is one of my larger dissatisfactions with this production, which is that Act 2 wasn't able to feel particularly transformative because so much of what it finds, so much of the harsh light of day that is suddenly shone on the show, as it were, is already present in the first act. A lot of these characters already feel like entirely realized people with genuine human problems. Problems. And to my surprise, I think this production showed me that Cinderella is deceptively important in the narrative of the first act. And she's a character I've always written off a little bit in comparison with some of the meteor arcs in the show. She's also perhaps the most tangentially connected to everybody else, encountering the baker's wife on a couple of occasions and eventually offering her her one remaining slipper so that she can better run away from the prince in exchange for her shoe. But I think what I realized is that Cinderella is carrying a lot of the burden of fairy tale whimsy in the first act. And she is perhaps the best understood to be truly longing for and wishing for something. In the fairy tale sense, Jack just loves this cow. The baker and his wife just want a child. But Cinderella is wishing, as she did in her story, for something very romantic and fantasized and impractical. She just wants to go to the ball and she becomes a princess. And it's deeply whimsical. And in this production, as Cinderella is portrayed by the fantastic rising star, Misa Dawnford, May she feels gutsy and real and there is considerably less whimsy or naivety. And don't get me wrong, I really love this sort of industry wide arrival of new takes on ingenue soprano roles that have a little bit more bite. I've really been enjoying that. But when reflecting specifically on her Cinderella, it seemed to me that she didn't have an enough to wake from in the second act when she was finding out how the world really was, what kind of a prince that she had married, because she was already sort of disillusioned at the beginning. And if all these fairy tale characters that we meet at the start already seem to be acquainted with the harsh realities of an impoverished life and already seem to know such hardship, then generally speaking, there's just less for them to come to terms with. Now, the end of the prologue, the black backdrop behind our characters opens up and reveals this very realistic woods setting with all of these different trees. It's quite breathtaking when we see it for the very first time. And it's landed specifically by the lighting design as well. Like, the set looks absolutely fantastic, but the way that they create dappled light coming through those trees in a handful of different ways, a glow that comes from upstage right, this harsher white light coming through upstage left as if by moonlight, it's really gorgeous. The lighting throughout this production is exemplary and stunning. This won't be the last time that I mention it. And though it's largely a static set thereafter, with the woods occasionally parting to bring forth Rapunzel's Tower as an example, or Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage, it's a set rich enough in theatrical possibilities, with enough exciting entrances and exits, that that'll do, really, for this production of into the Woods. It's a really brilliant, functional set, one which has changed by the start of the second act because we again have an introductory segment, they are around the table once more, only this time, when they decide more, each for their own reasons, that they must return to the woods, and the woods are revealed in the same way. We see an entirely different set, one which has become the victim of deforestation, with several felled trees as a result of the havoc wreaked upon the kingdom by the giant. My favorite detail of which is that the floor has split open, leaving this small gulf in the center of the playing space, widening as we get closer to the front of the stage, which feels a little akin to perhaps a giant's footprint, which there are various references to in the script. But also, meaningfully, it's this idea of the familiar fairy tale woods, the ones which they recognize, the paths which they knew having been changed and altered and sort of torn apart. There is a vast deal more to say about this production. I'm going to continue by telling you what I really enjoy.