Stars Shine Brightly in Fairy-Tale
'Into the Woods'
Detroit Free Press
Let's check this over one last time before going into the woods. What's in there? There are: giants in the woods, witches, ghosts, wolves, somebody with 40-foot feet, darkness, scary noises, a giant breast (on a lady giant), graves and some birds that'll peck out your stepsisters' eyeballs.
Naturally, because "Into the Woods" is a Stephen Sondheim show, there also are lies, false hopes, adultery, good-byes, disappointments, burdens and wondering what even worse is still in store.
Surely anyone past kindergarten age would prefer the category beginning with lies, false hopes and adultery. Sondheim already did that show, several times, so this very wary man went for the Grimm brothers. I'll bet he wanted a breather from his shows about how rotten marriage is.
Is the result childish? Yes, the result is childish, just as the ballets of Sleeping Beauty and the operas about Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel are childish. "Into the Woods" is nursery-school operetta. It is precisely the sort of intelligent, beautifully detailed kind of work you wish children could see onstage every Saturday morning.
For adults, there is always an actress named Mary Gordon Murray as the baker's childless wife who goes into the woods. (I mean, everybody goes into the woods. You will hear the phrase "into the woods" roughly 300 times in this show. You will get tired of hearing the phrase "into the woods.") Murray is so poised and graceful an actress that you are prepared not to care whether she can sing at all, let alone sing this Broadway bel canto.
She still wears the Broadway original's dismayingly awful maroon-orange wig (with the burgundy snood); I barely remember Joanna Gleason's performance from staring at that gleaming material on her head. But Murray, wig or no, is thoroughly lovely. Her opposite number, Ray Gill, also is more proficient than the Broadway original and he does not wear a maroon wig.
Ultimately one asks: Why bother? You wonder if Sondheim and librettist James Lapine perhaps thought that no adult other than they had tumbled to the deep Freudian significance of fairy tales. I think we must give them credit for wishing to stretch beyond Broadway banality and to take us away from what's simply puerile ("Legs Diamond") into what they may see as the purity of childhood stories.
The obvious citation is child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, whose book "The Uses of Enchantment" goes on at length about scary woods. Metaphor: The traveler on a quest, going through dark uncertain places (e.g., woods), confronts problems.
"Into the Woods," on a quest to cover many, many theaters, goes into dark places like the Fox Theatre and meets the bogeyman -- the sound system!
Two of the best-looking men in western civilization are in this play, tall blond Hussars named Douglas Sills and Chuck Wagner as the kingdom's princes, and the sound system fairly assassinates them.
The body microphones on opening night for Sills especially made him sound as if he were singing on a beach where surf was breaking behind him. If the egregious amplification were modified, "Into the Woods" technically would seem a wonder. Visually, it is a beautiful production, a fair replication of the Broadway version with the familiar scary trees, handsome series of blue and deep rose lighting in the woods and costumes to dazzle. Cleo Laine is the witch, in fabulous shape with that full-bodied voice that sounds as if it is coming from a glass oboe, it is at once so delicate and so mellow. Laine is also a good comic actress. Her evil-witch makeup also is comic, a kind of costumer's inside joke. With her small stature, the raddled gray wig, flowing cloak, wooden staff and heavy, hooded eyes, she looks exactly like Morris Carnovsky in "King Lear."
-Lawrence Devine, Detroit Free Press
July 18, 1989
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