Tom's Two Cents : Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods"

No, it's not a book, it's a film, based on the Sondheim musical of 1987, which I've read has been trying to get produced for some twenty or so years.  Now Disney and Rob Marshall, the director of the fabulously successful "Chicago," have finally done it, with a cast headed by none other than Meryl Streep, though she plays the central supporting role.  This is late Sondheim, certainly not a mainstream musical, but a considerable achievement nonetheless. 

I wouldn't consider myself a Sondheim fan, and I've come to him late in life, with "Sweeny Todd," of all things, which surely has to contain the most unsuitable story ever used in a musical!  "Into the Woods" falls into the genre of fantasy, but fantasy with a twist: fairy tale characters stepping into humanized roles that make them different and sometimes strange.

Streep plays a witch with her characteristic brilliance, Johnny Depp is a sly, hip Wolf, as eager to seduce Red Riding Hood as he is to swallow her, and Christine Baranski a hysterically over-the-top Wicked Stepmother, willing to cut off one daughter's toe and slice another's heel to make them fit into Cinderella's glass slipper--this, I'm told, from Grimm's original, but surely not from any version I've ever read!

The thing about Sondheim is that he is not so much a musician as a lyricist.  His mentor was one of the greats--Oscar Hammerstein II--and he wrote the lyrics to one of the last century's greatest musicals, Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story."  His music is catchy and smart, but for the most part it's not melodic or even particularly tuneful.  You don't come out humming Sondheim, instead you're trying to remember his clever and at times extremely sophisticated use of words, especially his use of rhyme.  The opening ensemble number, the title song, is a perfect example.  Characters and words are coming at you so fast and furiously that you're hardly aware of the music, which seems almost like background.

Viewers should be forewarned that right slap in the middle of what seems to a typical fairy-tale ending, this musical literally goes to hell in a hand basket.  A seeming earthquake (which turns out to be a revengeful giantess coming down Jack's beanstalk) wreaks havoc and introduces a whole new set of complications that must be unraveled.  It's rather an exhausting two+ hours that could have (and did in the original musical) had an intermission.

All this being said, "Into the Woods" is a brilliant piece of musical theatre, exceedingly well translated into film.  It runs in Mt Pleasant for one more week.  See it if you dare!