Theatre in Review: Into the Woods (Delacorte Theatre)

	Donna Murphy and Tess Soltau. Photo: Joan Marcus

In our revival-happy world, the distance between productions is getting shorter and shorter. Broadway has seen A Streetcar Named Desire three times in the last 20 years. This season, we're getting Cyrano de Bergerac and Glengarry Glen Ross five and seven years after their last revivals, respectively. The currently running The Best Man was last done only ten years ago. And Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, seen in 2007, is returning for a 50th anniversary production. It's the same with musicals; on average, Guys and Dolls has been produced every ten years since 1950. And one might be forgiven for thinking that the works of Stephen Sondheim are in permanent rotation.

We all know the commercial reasons for this, but this preponderance of yesterday's plays puts an unusual burden on any creative team. If you're doing a show last seen only a few years ago -- and a few years before that -- what fresh insights or original staging ideas are you bringing to it? Is your production really necessary?

For the Public Theatre's Into the Woods, the third staging in 25 years, the answer is a qualified yes. Timothy Sheader's production, co-directed by Liam Steel, has a simple, but unmistakably clever, premise, replacing the show's avuncular, man-of-a-certain-age narrator (Tom Aldredge and John McMartin in previous versions) with a little boy. He enters, toting a backpack, haunted by memories of verbal battles with his father; staking out a bit of campground, he begins to tell his story. This approach recasts the narrative's betrayals, tragedies, and sudden reversals of fortune as the projections of a young imagination struggling to master the ugly realities of a treacherous world. It's a concept that pays big emotional dividends in Act II, leading to an emotionally binding finale not to be described here. By itself, it probably justifies this revival.

But if Sheader and Steel's production capitalizes on the strengths that make Into the Woods so easy to admire, it also magnifies the weaknesses that make it so hard to love. James Lapine's libretto, which intertwines the plot lines of Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and a bit of Rumpelstiltskin with an invented narrative about a childless baker and his wife, is often wearingly intricate. Each character, on a quest, becomes entangled with everyone else, leading to a farcical series of developments set to the naggingly repetitive melody of the title tune. The structure of the libretto is both clever and redundant: We get two troubled parent-child relationships, three absent or ineffective fathers, and two young people given crash courses in adult realities. The lighter, wittier first act treats the characters as figures in an elaborate game, holding them at such a distance that it's difficult to care about them. A sharp change of mood ensues after the intermission, when these artfully drawn cartoons begin to bleed, die, and suffer the consequences of their poor moral decisions. It all finally comes together in the last half hour, when Sondheim unrolls one devastating ballad after another, providing the emotional grip that has eluded us all night long. (Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations, here slimmed down for a band of 11 musicians, beautifully evoke the undertow of longing and regret that is a hallmark of Sondheim's work.) Still, even if the finale leaves you in tears, you may feel that the entire enterprise is both willful and a little bit schizophrenic.

Sheader and Steel's direction is filled with inventive touches, such as when the cast, bearing an array of props, instantly forms the interior of the bedroom housing Red Riding Hood's grandmother, or when the giant who menaces the characters first appears as a collection of outsized puzzle pieces that, assembled, make a most convincing monster. The transformation of Donna Murphy's witch, from a screeching hag to a gimlet-eyed glamourpuss, is rendered as a lightning-fast a vista costume change; later on, she makes a memorable exit, sinking into the ground. Often, however, the staging is needlessly busy, putting the cast through one distracting passage after another of stylized movement while failing to focus our attention on the principals.

It doesn't help that Emily Rebholz's fussily conceived and often unattractive costumes, completed by Leah Loukas' oddball hair designs, have the further effect of reducing the characters to one-dimensional attitudes. (Amy Adams, as the Baker's Wife, is dominated by an enormous Gibson-Girl wig that rests on her head like a cat curled up for an afternoon nap; your eye is drawn to it and away from Adams' face.) Then there's the set design by John Lee Beatty and Soutra Gilmour, a multi-level wooden tree house, capped by an eagle's nest where Rapunzel is confined. It's an ingenious, but distancing, piece of work; too often the characters are stuck on it, far from the audience. (On the plus side, Ben Stanton's dappled lighting adds a great deal of depth and visual interest to the set and cannily makes use of changes of color and angle to track the show's rapidly shifting moods. Acme Sound Partners provides its usual sterling audio reinforcement, as well as some suitably terrifying sounds whenever the giant appears. The Acme teamalso works some aural magic with the voice of Glenn Close, heard as the Giant.)

The casting choices, all of which looked good on paper, are equally mixed. Murphy's Witch is something to behold, both as a stooped and half-human sorceress -- she looks like a tree come to life -- and later, when, beautifully gowned and coiffed, she makes use of her considerable hauteur to indict the follies of the lesser mortals surrounding her. Her voice is alive with pain in "Stay With Me," a plea to her changeling child Rapunzel, and she tears into the savage truths of "Last Midnight" with true diva fervor. Of course, she also knows her way around a laugh line, and she can be unexpectedly tender, as in the reprise of "Children Will Listen." This is a performance that compares well with that of Bernadette Peters, the role's originator. Adams, a fine film actress, lacks a certain stage presence, but her Baker's Wife benefits from her considerable intelligence and warmth, and she is a more-than-competent singer. (Unfortunately, her frumpy costume and that wig make her a most unlikely target for a lusty prince in the number "Moments in the Woods.") Nobody has ever come close to Joanna Gleason, who, in the original production, made the Baker's Wife the heart of the play; still Adams offers a likable performance that becomes authentically moving in the finale.

Jessie Mueller is an appealing Cinderella, if less distinctive than her predecessors, Kim Crosby and Laura Benanti, who respectively infused the role with notes of high comedy and melancholy. Denis O'Hare offers a probing interpretation of the Baker; his slightly flat and rough vocals are not the finest, but he brings real power to "No More," that cry of disgust at an unfair world. (It can't be easy for O'Hare to appear opposite the great Chip Zien, the original Baker, here cast as the Mysterious Man, the Rumpelstiltskin figure who inserts himself into the action.)

Noah Radcliffe (who alternates in the role with Jack Broderick) makes an effective narrator, and there are fine contributions from Gideon Glick as an amiably clueless Jack; Ellen Harvey as Cinderella's hard-as-nails stepmother; Kristine Zbornik as Jack's slatternly, sarcastic mother; and Ivan Hernandez, double-cast as Red Riding Hood's lascivious wolf and Cinderella's superficial, narcissistic prince. (At the performance I attended, Rapunzel's prince was played by a standby, Paris Remillard; he and Hernandez sparkled in both versions of the number "Agony," a comic lament for the man who has everything.)

Interestingly, the role of Red Riding Hood is cast not with a young girl but with the twentysomething Sarah Stiles, who combines a little girl's voice with an alarmingly knowing manner and a remarkably dirty laugh. It's a different approach, and Stiles, a skilled comedienne, gets her laughs, but it reduces the character to a punch line; Red's big number, "I Know Things Now," loses much of the sincerity that normally makes it so touching. (Glick's rendition of the similarly themed "Giants in the Sky" comes off much better here.) And so it goes, a collection of debits and credits that, when added up, are destined to leave you halfway between elated and ambivalent. The directors' vision, whatever you think of it, is distinctive enough to give Sondheim fans something to talk about. This is an Into the Woods they will want to see, argue about, and maybe even see again. However, whether it closes in a couple of weeks or, as rumored, heads to Broadway, it might be time to put this one back on the shelf for a good long while. After all, there's a movie version on the way.--David Barbour