![]() ![]() For the most part, the plot changes seem wise. Rob Marshall’s version, I’m happy to report, is faithful enough to please most diehards, without sacrificing the concrete magic that movies can offer. It’s appropriate, then, that ambivalence is the overriding feeling I’ve had about the movie, even after seeing a screening a few weeks ago. What if your heart doesn’t have a goddam clue? Cinderella’s hemming and hawing on the palace steps is worlds away from “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” from Disney’s cartoon version. ![]() “And a little bit not.”) No one in musical theatre does ambivalence like Sondheim, and usually no one tells you what it is until after you’ve experienced it. (“Isn’t it nice to know a lot?” Little Red sings to herself. It’s in every song, undermining prepackaged morals. What I learned from “Into the Woods,” most of all, was ambivalence. Even the shifts in tone were a lesson: amid despair, a dry one-liner (“I was raised to be charming, not sincere”) after an act of courage, ethical revisionism. You got from one to the other through the woods, as good a metaphor as any for the big brutal world. Act II had disillusionment, responsibility, and loss. (Sondheim has downplayed the AIDS connection, but it’s unavoidable.) Still, the show was a psychological bait and switch, a gateway to adolescence and its complicated truths. I certainly didn’t comprehend all the musical’s resonances, among them the communal solidarity during the AIDS crisis, which at the time was stomping around the theatre world like an angry giant. Few musical-theatre soliloquies are as elegant as “On the Steps of the Palace,” Cinderella’s deconstruction of the moment she decides to leave behind the shoe: Sondheim’s score is a puzzle-master’s trove of overlapping motifs, internal rhymes, wordplay (“We’ve no time to sit and dither / while her withers wither with her”), and psychological nuance. Lapine’s book tacks between farce and tragedy, winking at the absurdities of the original tales (How the heck does Little Red Riding Hood climb out of the wolf’s belly intact?) and then guiding their characters through calamity and heartache. More than plot, what’s tricky about “Into the Woods” is tone. In a Talk of the Town piece by Larissa MacFarquhar in June, Sondheim himself seemed to confirm purists’ worst fears, telling a group of drama teachers that Disney had in fact bowdlerized some plot elements: “You will find in the movie that Rapunzel does not get killed, and the prince does not sleep with the baker’s wife.” (Only one of those things turned out to be true.) Disney’s tagline seemed unnervingly apt: “Be careful what you wish for.” So how could Disney possibly adapt the show without betraying its dark spirit? That was the question lingering over the buildup to the movie, stoked by dribs and drabs of paranoia-inducing detail. In other words, it’s the antidote to Disney. ![]() The characters question their original wishes and what they stole and whom they sold out to fulfill them. The couple resorts to blaming and bickering. By the end of Act I, everyone’s wishes have come true: Cinderella gets her prince, Jack gets the giant’s harp, the baker and his wife get a child, and so on. Two new characters, a baker and his wife who’ve been cursed with barrenness, help to tie everything together. The musical weaves together fairy-tale figures like Cinderella, Jack (of the beanstalk), Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Rapunzel and the witch, and more than one handsome prince. Part of it is that “Into the Woods” is easy to get wrong. “Excited and scared,” as Little Red Riding Hood has it.Īs a member of this small but fervent demographic, I’d like to explain why we’ve been so tense. More than once, I’ve heard the show’s own lyrics used to explain how “Into the Woods” devotees feel about the adaptation. The emotions include anxiety, rage, anticipation, possessiveness, nostalgia, suspicion, denial, and dread. For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population-musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber-has experienced a punishing range of emotions about the new movie “Into the Woods,” based on the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical of the same name.
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