Into the Woods is one of the most ambitious productions we have undertaken at Del Oro. Stephen Sondheim’s musical score, which won the Tony Award over the more popular and better known Phantom of the Opera in 1988 when they both debuted, is as complicated as it is beautiful. Sondheim wove together many different overlapping parts for the singers in a variety of time signatures, and provided little support in terms of melody. The singers are essentially on their own, much like the characters in James Lapine’s clever script.
The story takes the well-known stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Ridinghood, and Rapunzel, and ties them together with a new fairy tale about a baker and his wife. The baker’s family has been cursed with infertility by a witch who, for purposes of her own, tells the baker how he can lift the spell. His quest to find ingredients for a potion drives Act I of the story and intersects all the other fairy tales, all of which feature characters who strive to fulfill their own personal wishes in journeys that take them into the woods. Act II explores what happens after “happily ever after.”
The play is about “groping our way to happiness,” and the woods act as a metaphor for the journey through life. Each character must struggle through moral ambiguity in pursuit of that happiness, and must face responsibility for the consequences of their choices, and their unintended impact on other characters. The audience will find that the stories challenge them with questions every bit as much as the musical score challenges the singers, and I expect many of you to have interesting discussions with your friends and family about the show afterwards.
