Into the Woods at the Signature Theater, Arlington: very well done, very touching

The baker (Jake Lowenthal) and his wife (Erin Weaver)

This musical needs no recommendation, but perhaps this particular production as a seasonal favorite does

Gentle readers and kind friends,

The world may be about to burst into flames or drowned seven fathoms deep, people killed senselessly and maliciously or for profit everywhere we look (recently especially the world’s cup with millions watching anyway), a mad-dog version of an older political party about to take over the US House of Representatives, with the aim of doing nothing but destroy, but this year Washington DC can boast of several emotionally fulfilling productions — which (I think) do this by returning to faery tale and fantasy. The usual Folger production is at the Roundhouse in Maryland (and it has been too far for me or I would have seen it more than once), a wonderful Tempest, Wicked at the Kennedy Center, still sparkling, I’d say utterly iconic (the witch looks like Margaret Hamilton), and this past week, I enjoyed the National Theater fantasy caricature of MAAN.

What I liked about this Into the Woods — I’ve seen a number, including a year after Jim died, the Disney adaptation (see the blog for discussion of Sondheim’s motives and ideas about the faery tales) –,  is its clarity. What a wonder.  It is not over- nor under-produced. You were allowed to pay attention to the outlines of the interwoven stories, the characters’ lines, and their simple or archetypal emotions. I don’t know how they managed such a fresh feel, but they did it

At turning points in the plot-design, the whole cast gets together around the storyteller to hear where we are and project togetherness

Perhaps, as may be gathered from Peter Marks’s review (Washington Post), it was just that you were able to grasp the common human emotion driving this fantasy character in his or her ordinary predicament (she cannot get pregnant, the young boy will not be able to make a living, the little girl as a woman is impeded by a predatory male wolf), several of them desperate.

Cinderella in her Russian peasant outfit — the outfits seemed to me redolent of Russian peasants in archetypal movies (especially that of the Baker)

The Cinderella core paradigm of envy among women feels the least humanly convincing, the most exaggerated: the stepmother and three sisters resonated least for me, were most artificial because they were all made so ugly. Curious, the incidents that today hit home: the prince, when his princess has disappeared, aggressively seducing and lying to the baker’s wife, and the witch as the mother who in her need for her daughter’s love rationalizes she’s protecting her, when she’s preventing her from living. I this time admit the witch’s lines to Rapunzel “Stay with me:” “Don’t you know what’s out there in the world? … Stay at home … Who out there could love you more than I? …

Stay with me
The world is dark and wild
Stay a child while you can be a child …

did not resonate as much. I feel the original witch-look (Nova Y. Payton) was too much a caricature, and her black-sequined glamor gown made her not sufficiently a mother, more too much of a “black mamma” sexual object. There is such a thing as over-modernization because our favored cultural images and gestures are so very artificial, relentlessly competitive, and heartless. So there the simplifying didn’t work; the witch role was over-the-top, done somewhat crudely

Alex de Bard as Little Red Riding Hood shrugging off two mothers

I call the ambiance clarity, for this is the first time I realized how many of the characters actually die. Hitherto I thought of this as a story where we are shocked by the unexpected sudden unprepared death of the baker’s wife, but in fact (taking faery as fact), Little Red Riding Hood’s mother and grandmother die, Jack’s mother dies, the storyteller at one point is no longer with us, and I never felt assured the blinding of several characters was reversed. I had taken it the first half ends happily, so we are left to wonder what can keep us to a second half?

The spiky paratextual theme song (“Into the Woods” we go) is essential for keeping the impetus thrust forward going

I wondered what more was there to say? It is really common for Sondheim’s musicals to fall off in the second half (especially clear in Sunday in the Park with George). That was the feel as we re-began . But soon we began to see a lot could happen — that’s why we need all this wishing: the statements “I wish”  begins the production and one more ends it.

Disaster strikes in the form of a never-seen female monster-giantess. Feel free to allegorize? We watch our left-standing characters re-group again and again — after some squabbling. I remembered the death of the Baker’s wife since it was emphasized in the Disney film (and the other deaths skipped or slid over somehow), but that this was the incident in the film which provoked the lyrics that I began to keen over once again: here it was Red Riding Hood who suddenly missed her grandmother

Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Others may deceive you.
You decide what’s good.
You decide alone.
But no one is alone …

Jim has left us (me and Izzy) halfway through the wood. I just moved stiffly further back in my chair as I tried to dissociate myself from the audience, theater, all about me, lobby outside. Once again I was not quite recovered when four of the characters and baby were left bonded into a new family, and then, one by one, the disappeared characters returned  onto the stage, and became part of a singing your soul out ensemble.

Don’t miss it. Magical fairytale, It’s a Wonderful Life without the miracle. Dogged as does it.

Cast towards the end singing their hearts out

I need to tell you how I managed to go. I had a win last week when I went to the Phillips with the same friend who accompanied me to this musical and then in Shirlington to dinner out in a quiet restaurant with delicious Thai food. So I am no longer immured at night even if public transportation has once again been cut — as long as there is not yet another cab or bus to take once I arrive near my destination. Very nervously I obtained the address of the restaurant from a waiter, clicked away on Lyft, went outside when it said 1 minute to go and found the car (by license plate) and man (by name, Khalid).  It is against the backdrop of what’s happening across the world, a reactionary deprivation of the majority, more and more isolation from many causes (though we have had a pushback this election cycle) that these musicals (that do not refer to the Christian myth) can best be understood.

Ellen