Review: All Wishes Granted at New York City Center’s Revival of Into the Woods

Everything about this production is handled with a light, inviting touch.

Into the Woods
Photo: Joan Marcus

There’s a lyric in the second act of Into the Woods that sums up the Stephen Sondheim musical’s purposeful dismantling of fairy-tale tropes—and the fantasies we attach to them—with wry efficiency. An unnamed baker’s wife has just emerged, stunned, from a sudden sexual liaison in the forest with a prince, and she tallies the unlikely, unprocessable events that have recently befallen her: “First a witch, then a child, then a prince, then a moment,” she sings, before adding a bewildered, “Who can live in the woods?”

When well-acted, that’s one of Sondheim’s funniest lines, condensing what Into the Woods does so well into one idiomatic inquiry. The show imagines what it would mean for actual, real live human people to find themselves inside storybook worlds, like those belonging to Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack (of beanstalk fame), and for the paths to crisscross. As the Baker’s Wife, a fairy-tale invention of book writer James Lapine, Joanna Gleason received a huge laugh in the original 1986 production (a performance immortalized in a pro-shot video), but, search as I might, I’ve never heard another actress after her find the humor—and the accompanying humanity—within this moment.

Enter Sara Bareilles, radiating humor and humanity throughout her performance as the Baker’s Wife in the Encores! production of Into the Woods at New York City Center. Her “Moments in the Woods,” the song in which that aforementioned lyric appears, is a crystalline tangling and untangling of what it means to commit to the life she finds herself living, as her “Who can live in the woods?” rings with hilarious disbelief mixed with exasperation.

Into the Woods certainly hasn’t suffered from lack of exposure. In addition to the star-studded 2014 film adaptation, it remains omnipresent with youth performers, especially in a cheerier “junior” adaptation for elementary and middle schoolers that cuts the entire second act, with its occasional adultery and rampant killings at the hands—well, feet—of a rampaging giantess.

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But what director Lear deBessonet does so rigorously, for an audience largely familiar with the script and score, is to excavate every moment in the woods for depths of interpersonal honesty that hover, often unseen, behind Sondheim’s cerebral words and complex harmonies. Every dissonance and every layered rhyme ripples forth not from storybook characters or psychological experiments, but from genuine human beings learning how to cope.

As Cinderella, Denée Benton grows beautifully throughout, stepping into a maternal maturity to guide Jack (Cole Thompson) and Little Red Riding Hood (a deliciously sardonic Julia Lester) late in the show. Neil Patrick Harris, a flashy late replacement for Christian Borle, as the Baker delights as a gently comic foil for Bareilles, the burdens of a unhappily childless marriage sculpting their tender, tense rapport. Even the cow feels fully human, with puppeteer Kennedy Kanagawa breathing emotional credibility into a slinky-like Milky White.

Ann Harada, Cole Thompson, Kennedy Kanagawa in Into the Woods
Ann Harada, Cole Thompson, and Kennedy Kanagawa in a scene from Into the Woods. © Joan Marcus

But Into the Woods hinges now, as perhaps it has never done so potently before, on the character of the Witch, rendered in soft, understated tones by a magnetic Heather Headley, a far-too-infrequent performer since her Tony-winning turn in for Aida way back in 2000. This Witch is both quietly menacing and heartbreaking at the same time: When she pleads with her rebellious adopted daughter Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel) to stay with her, telling her “You are the only family I know,” it’s the cry of a mother realizing for the first time that, in hurting people to protect her own, she’s frayed that cherished relationship beyond repair. (The one disappointment uncovered by this production is that the Witch doesn’t get the same psychologically satisfying ending as other characters but vanishes in an unexplained puff of smoke that doesn’t measure up to Headley’s pointillistically specific portrayal.)

Vocally, this score has never sounded better, with Benton, Bareilles, and Headley, each extraordinary artists trained in very different styles, subtly blending their distinctive timbres with the demands of Sondheim’s melodies. Comparisons between Sondheim and Shakespeare often sound overwrought, but the experience of this Into the Woods reminded me of nothing so much as a really extraordinary Shakespeare production, one that makes you hear and grasp every word as if for the first time and that makes the dense language seem easy and inevitable.

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Everything about this production—the effervescent performances, the glowing orchestra under the baton of Rob Berman, and Lorin Latarro’s delicate choreography that always seems to emerge from the characters—is handled with a light, inviting touch. Into the Woods is a show about despair, but it’s not a despairing show; deBessonet, who treats the first act’s relative frivolity with the same sincere thoughtfulness as she does the second act’s dark twists, avoids any fluffy conceits in her staging that might distract from the show’s emotional clarity. In fact, the limitations of the production—Encores! shows rehearse in about two weeks—lend themselves to some of the cleverest self-aware moments of exposed theater magic.

I’ve often been frustrated by the musical’s final scenes, particularly with “No More,” a duet for the Baker and his “not completely” dead father (David Patrick Kelly) that frequently has felt in other productions like a cumbersome restatement of the show’s themes. As the culmination of deBessonet’s fervent staging and the apex of Harris’s subtly mounting performance, “No More” lands here with aching clarity as the Baker realizes that he can’t live in the Eden he envisions without taking responsibility for the dystopia he’s inherited: “Till that happier day arrives/How do you ignore/All the witches/All the curses?” he wonders.

“Life was so steady and now this!” Cinderella’s stepmother (Lauren Mitchell) laments after the kingdom has been literally uprooted by the giant’s arrival. “When are things going to return to normal?” They aren’t—and that’s always been Into the Woods’s clarion message, whether or not audiences ever really understood it. And as frightening as that realization may be, it arrives bathed in the truth-telling, sober warmth of Sondheim and Lapine’s reassurances that surviving requires people to live not just with but for each other.

Into the Woods is now running at the New York City Center.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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