By Hap Erstein
“I wish …”
They are the first two and last two words of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, an audacious and whimsical shuffle of lesson-laden Grimm’s fairy tales.
It has long been my wish that a South Florida theater company would take up the challenge of presenting some of Sondheim’s innovative musicals, even though they require large casts of vocally nimble performers and are rarely very popular because of the demands they make on audiences to lean in, listen carefully and think.
Earlier this month, the fledgling Slow Burn Theatre Company produced Sondheim’s Assassins, and for this weekend only, Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre performs a concert version of Into the Woods, the brilliant composer-lyricist’s multi-layered fable for our times. It’s the Caldwell’s second concert version in seven months of one of Sondheim’s challenging and rewarding shows – last fall, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George.
Like Sunday in the Park, this scores-in-hands, performed-at-music-stands concert opened after an insanely short rehearsal period and the results are nothing less than miraculous. Into the Woods may not be the show to convince those who cannot fathom what all the fuss is about Sondheim, but those who appreciate his complex, emotionally dense work will surely enjoy what director Clive Cholerton and his cast of 15 intrepid actors are serving up.
It was Lapine’s notion to interweave several familiar fairy tales – Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer and Rapunzel, among others – with a new story about a baker and his wife who yearn to have a child. His aim was to show that between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” is not good and evil or right versus wrong, but a forest of moral ambiguities.
Everyone, it seems, has a wish. Cinderella wants to dress up and attend the festival at the palace. Jack wants to keep his beloved pet cow, who is destined to be sold at the market. Rapunzel wants out of that darned tower. And the baker and his wife want relief from their infertility problem.
It is not too much of a spoiler to note that their wishes all come true, at least temporarily, by intermission. But Sondheim being Sondheim, the characters’ happiness proves fleeting, and the second act turns distinctly darker as the old saw about being careful what you wish for is played out.
If the first act ends happily and neatly, it is mere preface for the second act, which takes us beyond the fairy tales into more dense thematic territory as the characters learn about death and the importance of community when they take a perilous return trip into the woods.
Sondheim is in a playful mood in the first act, tossing off a Disneyfied ditty for his title tune, his only ever rap song for a conniving witch, a seductive solo for Little Red’s wolf, a duet for two preening princes and a tongue-twister description of the palace ball by Cinderella. As much fun as they are, however, the score really hits its stride late in the second act with four message-filled, melodic numbers – Last Midnight, No More, No One Is Alone and Children Will Listen.
Heading the cast as the Witch is Laura Hodos, who puts a genuinely funny, attitude-rich spin on her dialogue and has plenty of vocal power. Many of the performers are veterans of the Sunday in the Park concert, most notably Wayne LeGette and Melissa Minyard, who were Georges Seurat and his mistress Dot, transformed now into the childless Baker and his wife, the emotional center of the show. (If Company was Sondheim’s show about marriage, a subject for which he has no firsthand knowledge, Into the Woods is his parenting musical, another topic for which he has no practical experience.)
LeGette and Minyard inhabit the most fully dimensional characters, a nebbish and his pushy spouse, the most likely targets for audience identification. Jim Ballard and Shane R. Tanner are slyly self-centered, creamy-voiced princes and Beth Dimon is back with another maternal role as Jack’s exasperated mom.
Among the new members of this informal musical theater rep company is Margery Lowe, who trills her way through the vocal demands of Cinderella. New to me, but I am eager to see more of them, are John Debkowski as mellow-voiced, but fuzzy-headed Jack and Joseph Reed as the show’s narrator and a role that is necessarily designated only as Mysterious Man.
Surely the hardest working person onstage is musical director and keyboardist Michael O’Dell, whose one-man accompaniment is superb. When the Caldwell wins the lottery, it would be great if they could spend a bit more on a couple of additional musicians and body microphones for the cast. With Sondheim, the lyrics are so crucial, and many of the overlapping nuances got lost with the stationery mikes.
Into the Woods can be a production-heavy show, but illustrator Michael McKeever showed how locations could be established with a few well-conceived slide projections.
Cholerton and company have hit upon a format that is very appealing and relatively affordable. Future concerts will surely investigate other composers, but when the Caldwell is ready for more Sondheim, it should look into presenting his latest musical, Road Show, which happens to take place in part in Boca Raton.
INTO THE WOODS, Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday. $25-$35. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.