Into The Woods - London Cast

One English theatre critic has seriously compared the dark and dazzling Into The Woods to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is not the sort of thing English critics are inclined to say about musicals at anytime but, with its malicious supernaturals, goofs, quarrels, confusions, spells, moonshine and theatrical magic of every kind, the comparison is not far-fetched.

Stephen Sondheim's eleventh stage-musical and his second (after Sunday In The Park With George) with James Lapine, is one of his most immediately accessible shows. Right from curtain-up it touches on parenthood, society, the difference between love and infatuation, and the search for a true way to a useful and self-fulfilling life. Trials and temptations litter the way, and little Red Ridinghood is only the first of several characters to discover that as she puts it, "Nice is different than good" - I Know Things Now. It ends a little like Leonard Bernstein's Candide, with the survivors of violence planning lives of less excitement, yet even after that everybody comes back into the story and falls over themselves to deliver an upbeat moral directly to the audience. That, after all, is what fairy tales are for.

Everyone of Sondheim's shows suggests a moral journey of some kind, but only Into The Woods reaches journey's end halfway through (Finale: Act 1) and has it overturned by further catastrophe at the start of the second half. The hard lessons of courage, selflessness and honesty have to be learned all over again, and at some cost to the six characters who make a wish in the opening scene Once Upon A Time only four - Cinderella, Red Ridinghood, the Baker and Jack - survive the revenge of the Giantess for the death of the Giant. Presumably the two Princes are still prancing about somewhere in pursuit of new, deliciously unattainable loves, but I wouldn't give much for the chances of Cinderella's wicked Stepmother and Stepsisters in the shattered forest after the end.

Not in the London production, anyway, which firecrackered onto the stage of the Phoenix Theatre, Charing Cross Road, on September 25, 1990, three years after Lapine's own original version opened on Broadway. Directed by Richard Jones and designed by Richard Hudson, it won just about every Best Musical award going in Britain and was hailed by some to be the best ever all-British casting of an American show. It was, in the tradition of European classical theatre, an ensemble of marvelous equals whose qualities complimented one another on stage: the perfect gravity of the Baker (Ian Bartholomew), for example, and the furious comic energies of his impulsive, dimpled wife (Imelda Staunton); the pubescent dimness of pimply Jack (Richard Dempsey) and the melancholy fatalism with which his sluttish old Ma (Patsy Rowlands) put up with it; a brave tomboy Cinderella (Jacqueline Dankworth) and a cowardly Prince (Clive Carter) laced into his corset for life and blow-waved like George IV. And so on through the entire company.

Jones and Hudson placed the adventures of Cinderella and her naive, aspiring churns firmly in the hard-edged, brightly painted, robustly heartless world of Victorian theatre and children's books. The lighting was either deceivingly golden, thrown up into the actors' faces from footlights across the front, or ghastly-sharp white, projected from some weird parallel plane of existence known, perhaps, only to the Witch. This was the light of the wood: not nice. (The Witch knows just about everything in this show except (a) how to hold onto her daughter without shutting her in a tower (b) how to retain both her hard-won, born-again beauty and her powers as a witch, and (c) how to stop the future from coming, however awful she knows it to be.)

Most of Jones's success had been with opera companies in Glasgow and Leeds, while Hudson was fresh from a triumphant season designing classical revivals at the Old Vic, some of them with Jones. Together they delighted in traditional tricks of the theatre and in simultaneously revealing to the audience how the tricks were done: four glittering, fluttering yellow birds descended excitedly on wires from the lighting-rig whenever Cinderella needed help; a pair of quizzical rats shot down a track round the rumpled old legs of Jack's mother who lifted her skirts above them for the umpteenth time while continuing to speak and sing; doves and ravens flew out of, and back into, the wood on great machines of sprung-steel; the Witch shot up into the air on a four-foot stool with a whoop that suggested not even years of practice had staled her delight in doing so; Jack's cow expelled an iron chain from its posterior.

When the time came for the six to undertake their various endeavors Into The Woods, the curtain painted with domestic interiors rose slowly to reveal a wood that was in no sense a "real" wood at all, not even an imitation English-pantomime-type real wood, but a chilling black and white semi-circular wall held in a circlet of brass leaves. It might have been engraved by Gustave Doré in nineteenth-century Paris or Edward Gorey in twentieth-century America. A wood entirely of the urban imagination, in other words, the scariest kind of all: one which can possess the mind of those who never leave town.

Indeed, this clearly might have been somebody's home, a nouveau riche bogeyman perhaps, freaked out on the possibilities of big game in Scotland or Bavaria. Punishingly uncomfortable stools, upholstered in deerskin with antler-back and hooved feet littered the stage. Over all loomed an enormous Alpine clock with pine cone pendulums and a stag's head. (There was one outside the theatre too, contributing much needed gaiety to the landscape of Charing Cross Road.) There were doors all round the wood, or room, offering yet further possibilities of choice (and error) to the characters along the way. That they continued to behave with great swagger, courage, determination and humor in this hostile environment you can hear from Sondheim's playful, witty, touching and inventive songs.

But of course this is the show where it not only gets worse before it gets better, it gets worse again after it has got better. Jones and Hudson were up to that. As the grieving Giantess ripped the new domestic interiors of the happy ending apart at the start of Act II, a shockingly wrecked wood was revealed: the clock knocked sideways, its springs cork-screwed out like guts; the walls of the wood torn to reveal the polite English wallpaper applied, as it were, by earlier, more tasteful owners. (The oak-leaf design bore a suspiciously close resemblance to the logo of the National Trust, which, with more than two million British members, is chief provisioner of the rustic idea to urban imagination today.)

Time having literally left Lapine's story (there are no deadlines in Act II, just panic and mother-wit) disorientation is complete when the characters, led by the Witch, feed the cheerful but patronizing Storyteller to the Giantess. In London, a horribly plausible dummy of Nicholas Parsons was dropped the full height of the Phoenix stage and fell with a sickening thud on the floor. Even if you had seen the show several times and knew what was coming, the effect never failed. It seemed a world away since Cinderella's ballgown had floated so prettily down the same way an hour and a half before.

The tireless energy and imagination of the staging enhanced those of the show at every point, and London audiences were far better prepared than those in New York for the darkening of the second act. Jones's company was never fazed by the competitive environment in which he and Hudson required them to perform: indeed, led by Julia McKenzie's glorious Witch, flashing fire-spells from behind her ear, rocking her way across the stage like an old chair, transforming herself into a glittering party hostess, they raised their game to match it.

- Michael Ratcliffe