Hi everyone! Welcome to Big Little Moments - a blog where I explore the culture-defining moments of our past and explore how they affect today’s culture. Last week, sadly, Stephen Sondheim passed away at 91 years old. He left behind him an unmatched body of work in American theater with musical theater mainstays like Company, Sweeney Todd, and the subject of today’s post - Into the Woods.
My first experience with Into the Woods, and by extension Stephen Sondheim, happened in 2005. I was in the fifth grade (for those doing the math, I *am* seventeen years old, impressive, I know), and my sister was doing a local production of the show. She played 3 parts in the play - an evil stepsister, Cinderella’s mother, and Rapunzel. Like many a children’s theater version of Into the Woods, my sister’s production ended at the first act, and left out the second entirely.
I was entranced by it: the fantasy, the songs, the spectacle. I made my sister play the soundtrack on her iPod as we drove around town for weeks after the show finished. When my mom rented the DVD of the original Broadway Cast, I was shocked at what I saw. This wasn’t a children’s musical at all. For one thing, the wolf had a dick and six pack abs. But more importantly, I realized I’d only seen half the play.
For those unfamiliar with the show (what gives?), the first act of Into the Woods covers a set of overlapping fairy tales pulled from the Brothers Grimm, with an original storyline (fanfiction much?) of a baker and his wife trying to reverse a curse set on their family. The show moves at a brisk pace, and by the end of the first act, all of the familiar stories have wrapped up in a nice bow. Little Red Riding Hood is saved from the wolf, Jack tears down the beanstalk, the princesses marry their princes, and the Bakers have their child.
Then, in the second act, it all falls apart. Each character has gotten exactly what they wanted, and then they’re forced to pay the price for it. The princes leave their brides for younger, prettier princesses the moment they get bored. A vengeful giantess climbs down the beanstalk and stomps characters to death one by one in retribution for her husband. Half of the characters die off, and the few left behind pick up the pieces and start over.
I would imagine Sondheim found the idea of children’s theaters doing his show a little sickly funny, but that was his intention. It also reveals his marketing genius - by splitting the show in such a way, both childrens’ and adults’ theaters could license it, and neither had to compromise on artistic depth or a PG rating. Into the Woods is among his most lucrative shows because of it.
It feels a little on the nose to only run the happy first half of the show for children. The whole point of the show is that life is more complicated than that: there is no point of indefinite happiness. Life is joyful, but it is also pain, chaos, and meaningless suffering.
In the second act of the play, it’s clear that Rapunzel has had an emotional breakdown. She runs across the stage, screaming and crying in fits, completely overwhelmed after a life of total isolation, then violent separation from her mother. The Witch, Rapunzel’s uh, adoptive(?) mother had kept her daughter locked in a tower to protect her from the evils of the world.
But in the process, The Witch hadn’t prepared Rapunzel to deal with the cruelty and confusion inherent in life. The Witch kept Rapunzel from the Woods, but the Woods found Rapunzel anyways. In her final moments, Rapunzel runs headfirst towards the giantess in a panic, and is trampled to death. The witch’s admonishment in the first act, “children must listen,” transforms into a lament: “children don’t listen.”
In the final number, The Witch returns from the dead (after committing magic bean-based suicide) to complete the triplet of refrains: “children will listen.” The Witch had transferred her fear and cynicism to her daughter, but none of the gentleness or care to guide her.
Sondheim’s genius shows in the many ways people have interpreted and re-interpreted his work, even within his lifetime. In the 1990s, some critics saw the show as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis. The characters were punished for getting what they wanted, and in the face of a crisis, the government (princes) did little to protect their people.
In 2002, when Into the Woods had a revival in Los Angeles, the show again felt relevant in the face of 9/11. This time, the giantess was a metaphor for the instability and looming threat of terrorism and senseless war. Innocent people casually tossed aside in the face of forces too big to fight.
Now, in 2021, the show applies just as well. We (by that I mean theater people, and the theater-adjacent, if u catch my drift) felt we’d overcome some great hurdle by successfully unseating Donald Trump, but we now watch a slow and ineffectual government fail to contend with the giants of climate change, COVID-19, and domestic terrorism.
But Sondheim didn’t write the show as a direct metaphor for any one tragedy. He said so himself:
''When 'Into the Woods' first came out,'' he said, ''people felt the giant in it was symbolic of AIDS. We never meant this to be specific. The trouble with fables is everyone looks for symbolism.'' (from the New York Times)
Sondheim wasn’t the type of writer to address a big idea head-on. He abstracted, made the specific universal. More so than his other work, Into the Woods sought to transcend some specific place or time and create something immortal. By using fables, he took timeless stories, transformed them, and made something both new and universal.
The shadow of the Disney Corporation looms large over Into the Woods. By 1989, Disney movies and parks were already woven into the fabric of American identity, and with The Little Mermaid coming out the same year, the company burst into the new decade with a slew of wildly popular and lucrative films known as the “Disney Renaissance.”
Into the Woods is a direct answer to the saccharine, blindly optimistic storytelling of Disney, who took the source material of the Brothers Grimm and whitewashed it for a general audience. They downplayed, or outright ignored, the violence and gruesome outcomes of the stories meant to teach harsh lessons.
Naturally, when Disney adapted the show into a feature film, it lost some of its bite in the process. Like an alien slime mold, Disney can swallow up its critics and turn direct critiques of its model into new revenue. In more recent films like Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, and the live-action Beauty and the Beast, Disney has consciously uncoupled from the “damsel in distress” narrative that Sondheim already skewered in 1989. But something is always lost in the adaptation.
Critics were mostly positive to the adaptation, receiving a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, but some felt the second half slow, boring, and disappointing. The audience score was even worse at 22%. More than a few reviews said the movie should’ve ended at the halfway mark. Maybe it should have.
For my money, the PBS filming with the original cast is the one true version of Into the Woods. And I think that version will persist long after James Corden has left our headspace. James Corden is temporary, but Sondheim’s vision is forever. It’s more grand, universal, and ambitious than any Disney adaptation could hope to achieve, wolf dick and all.
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