Ever After or Change: Review of MTW’s Into the Woods

In Willy Russell’s two-hander play Educating Rita, there is a monologue where the main
heroine talks of her desire for more. She speaks of being in the pub with her family and
friends, all singing some song from the jukebox, turning round and seeing her mother
crying. “I said ‘Why are you crying Mother?’ She said, ‘There must be better songs to
sing than this.’ And I thought ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do isn’t it? Sing a better
song.’”

The heroes and heroines of Into the Woods all wander between this same dilemma, between grieving and wishing for something better.

The heroes and heroines of Into the Woods all wander between this same dilemma,
between grieving and wishing for something better. Cinderella (Zsa Zsa Hope) and Little
Red Riding Hood (Daisy Morris) lose their mothers. Jack (Jonathan Havercroft) begins
with his father lost and ends mourning his mother (Sophie Hedley). The Baker
(Alessandro Felice) too is cut off from his parent, later revealed as the Mysterious Man
(Sam Shores), and sister Rapunzel (Kate Campbell) by the Witch (Grace Wilson) who
took her at birth and, later in the show, will lose her adopted child. This long list of the
bereaved, an unusual body count for a musical, does not reflect the show’s mood — it
never veers too sentimental and always finds absurdities in its harrowing moments.
Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book writer James Lapine take fairy tales
that everybody knows and mash them together. Colliding the innocent and the profane,
the hilarious and serious into a tragi-comic masterpiece. Yet out of all the praises that
this musical and Musical Theatre Warwick’s latest production can receive, the best is
the musical’s core duality that Director Madeleine Wilding has captured and made soar
on the WAC’s main stage.

This large cast tackles the mash up plot and Sondheim’s intricate score masterfully

Comprising of 25-person ensemble, with puppeteers for the various story book animals
such as Cinderella’s birds or Jack’s cow Milky White (Rosemary Wake), this large cast
tackles the mash up plot and Sondheim’s intricate score masterfully. Unlike earlier
productions, Wildling is not shy about breaking the fourth wall. The big showstopping
numbers like the Wolf’s (Glenn May) ‘Hello, Little Girl’ and the Princes (Max Strong and
Sean Wilson) ‘Agony’ are examples of the cast given license to play as big they want
with tremendous pay off. It’s needed when such intricate narratives are set in motion
from the first bars the opening number. The show follows five people and their five
wishes. The Baker and his wife (Arwen Jenkins) wish for a child and therein a new hope
for their humdrum lives. Simple wishes like Little Red wanting to see her granny and her
mother, and Jack wanting to stay with Milky White. Cinderella wishes to go to the festival
and find a prince to marry, escaping the domestic prison that her wicked Stepmother
(Ellie Croston) and Stepsisters (Izzy Invest and Amy Atwell) have trapped her in. To
make these wishes come true, they go on a journey into the woods and into an
uncertain world. Corresponding with the plot’s five wishes, five notes ground this show.
They appear everywhere, constantly reharmonised or put into rhythmic patterns. From
the Witch’s main theme to the Baker dishing out the beans to Rapunzel’s aria –– even to
‘Giants in the Sky’ making up the song’s core melody. Out of these small melodic
themes, Sondheim builds epics.

In the beginning, these wishes seem blissful and foolish. As the five go on their
adventurers however, they become all too real. Little Red sings about what she’s
learned from her thrilling experience with the Wolf and concludes that “Isn’t it nice to
know a lot? / And a little bit not.” In going out on their adventures, the adventurers
change and the fairytale logic that we the audience have assumed they will follow melts
away. Though the five start as isolated fables, little time is spent before they literally
crash into each other’s stories, with The Baker bargaining with Jack and the Baker’s wife
bargaining with Cinderella. Not that they’re not charming and funny, but as Act One
bounces along, the five protagonists are certainly all looking out for themselves, for
better or for worse. Act One closes with the false ending song ‘Ever After’ where the
conventional fairy tale morals are preached but not with full sincerity, as none of the
characters have fully learned anything. Another instance doubling, the role of the
narrator is spilt in two – an older, strait laced American (Joe Licence) with story book in
hand and a younger Brit (Sam Perkins) guilelessly following along with a microphone.
It’s the production’s most simple and effective change, underscored in the Act One
finale as this bickering double act are still unreconciled, even as they sing “All the
curses have been ended, / The reverses wiped away”.

Although the characters are, through most of the show, concerned with their own
troubles, Into the Woods has a lot to say about parenthood – the act of taking care
and, above all for Sondheim, teaching somebody else. This is seen with the Witch and
Rapunzel. Wilding perceptively keeps the often-cut song “Our Little World” a gentle
duet that is both ways tragic and endearing, setting up the devastating break that will
occur between mother and daughter. It’s also gives us more understanding to the Witch
who, though played rightly larger than life and cooky, is the most direct, the most
honest out of all the characters. Jack’s and Cinderella’s late Mother (Rachel Bosworth)
offer similar strident clarity. Jack’s mother, unafraid, squares to the Giant whilst
Cinderella is guided and receives wisdom from her mother’s ghost. The Witch, in her
final song ‘Last Midnight’, delivers a brutal reality check for the four remaining
adventurers. She scorns the Baker’s father, curses his infant son call them all out as
liars and thieves. Hard, uncomfortable truths that spark the last three songs ‘No More’,
‘No One is Alone and ‘Children Will Listen’.

We are not alone in the world, a world that is not what it seems and so we are bound do somebody bad and somebody good along the way

For it is these three songs that the whole evenings have been building up to. The Baker,
Little Red, Jack and Cinderella – the last four who have survived the catastrophe in
which the rest have gone under, have no other choice but to confront their own pasts
and the harrowing prospects for the future. The Baker cries out “No more curses you
can’t undo / left by fathers you never knew” and reconciles with his. Little Red and Jack
grieve and cower, but are taught “No is alone / Careful, no alone acts alone”. Certainly,
the crowning achievement in Sondheim’s score, orchestrated beautifully by Edward
King, is ‘Children Will Listen’. Powerful enough to make cast and audience cry at the
same time, the dead, the living and those in-between gathers back to deliver a moral.
Only the Baker stands alone, insecure about whether he even should have had the son
he is holding in his arms, until comforted by the memory and gentle melody his late wife
“Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood / Do not let it grieve you, no
one leaves for good.” The moral Into the Woods leaves you with is, like everything in the
show, doubled. Don’t be bogged down by the past or future but always keep an eye on
them. Speak you what you feel but careful who hears you. We are not alone in the
world, a world that is not what it seems and so we are bound do somebody bad and
somebody good along the way. To sing a better song than to those who came before
you, but be mindful that their generation never had the chance.