1. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods Study Guide Sponsored in part. 2 Into The Woods Welcome to Into The Woods. We hope that this study guide will help you further your understanding and enjoyment of one of Stephen Sondheim’s most popular musicals. Into The Woods Into The Woods.
2. Into The Wood – Undated, unspecified draft script by James Lapine, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (Based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine) – hosted by: Walt Disney – in pdf format Into the Woods is a modern twist on the beloved [].

The fairy tale forest of “Into the Woods” has suddenly grown a lot thicker. This 1987 musical by and , which stirs up the shadows of classic bedtime stories, was never what you’d call uncrowded. But Timothy Sheader’s overreaching revival, which opened on Thursday night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, has added a whole new bramble of interpretive undergrowth.

Into the woods book james lapine PDF into the woods book by james lapine PDF a door in the woods jimmy fincher saga 1 james dashner PDF a week on the concord. Into the Woods Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

It’s not just Little Red Ridinghood and other wayward progeny of the Brothers Grimm who lose their way in the leafy, highly picturesque maze that has been assembled by the designers John Lee Beatty and Soutra Gilmour. Theatergoers too may find themselves courting blindness from trying to see the forest for the trees.

Whether reinventing a creepy Victorian horror story (“Sweeney Todd”) or considering the mating habits of swinging singles (“Company”), Mr. Sondheim has never been one for easy happy endings. And more than any of his other works, “Into the Woods” explores and debunks our hunger for such tidy, upbeat conclusions. Still, it breaks my heart to chalk up this production as another example of thwarted hopes.

For there was every reason to look forward to this revival. Mr. Sheader had staged a much acclaimed London production two years ago at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, where he is the artistic director. For the current incarnation by the Public Theater, he rounded up what sounded like a dream team of performers, including the Broadway powerhouse Donna Murphy and the movie star Amy Adams, in her New York stage debut.

Then there was the delicious prospect of seeing “Into the Woods” in, if not the woods, then at least as close an approximation of them as Manhattan offers. Central Park at night, when the moon rises and the wild things roam, sounded like the ideal and inevitable setting for stories of nature enchanted.

Continue reading the main story

Yet very little feels natural in this exhaustingly busy production. On the contrary, pretty much every element smacks of artifice. Mr. Beatty and Ms. Gilmour’s multitiered treehouse of a set (though ravishingly lighted by Ben Stanton) feels less like part of the sylvan views beyond than a plopped-down theme park installation, like the Swiss Family Robinson segment of Walt Disney World.

Baker Into The Woods James Corden

I suppose that’s a reasonable choice if you’re pursuing a family audience. And I presume the same logic lies behind turning the show’s Narrator, originally conceived as an adult of a certain age (who usually doubles in the role of the Mysterious Man), into a boy.

But while Noah Radcliffe is winningly unaffected as this reconceived Narrator (a role he alternates with Jack Broderick), a child’s-eye view is hardly a natural perspective here, unless that child is precociously world-weary and worldly wise. “Innocent” has never been an adjective attached to Mr. Sondheim, the most sophisticated lyricist of his generation, and it’s not one that could ever be used to describe “Into the Woods.”

This production begins with an interpolated prologue of recorded voices, which appear to be engaged in one of those recriminatory parent-child arguments you hear in Lifetime movies and ads for family service agencies. Our young Narrator has evidently run away from home and is sleeping rough, with provisions that include a knapsack of toys like a troll doll, a Homer Simpson doll and a big black, fuzzy spider.

The Narrator uses these totems to summon into being the play’s other characters, who remain the same as usual in name and deed. But they have undergone serious makeovers, to look more like people a contemporary kid might see on television or in the streets. (Emily Rebholz is the costume designer.)

Little Red Ridinghood (Sarah Stiles) is now a skater chick with a red crash helmet. Her predator, the Wolf (Ivan Hernandez), suggests a bare-chested, long-tressed lead singer from a heavy-metal band. Jack (Gideon Glick), of beanstalk renown, is a Pee-wee Herman-style nerd, while his mother (Kristine Zbornik) is a fuzzy-slipper-wearing, Shelley Winters-like housewife. And Cinderella (Jessie Mueller) is a bespectacled, frumpy, shut-in type, while her evil Stepmother (Ellen Harvey) and Sisters (Bethany Moore and Jennifer Rias) bring to mind a glam-goth girl group.

The central figures of the Baker (Denis O’Hare) and his Wife (Ms. Adams), who meet these fantasy folk while embarked on a quest for a child of their own, look like townspeople from a rustic English movie of the 1940s.

As for the Witch who may be able to make their wish come true, she is played by Ms. Murphy in a cumbersome, funguslike ensemble (with long prosthetic fingers) that suggests Julie Taymor interpreting Maurice Sendak. And oh, yes, the Mysterious Man (Chip Zien, the Baker in the original Broadway production) has been recreated in the image of a bearded, begrimed, beer-chugging street person.

This high-concept repackaging of beloved archetypes feels like the work of an overeager Hollywood production team desperate to tap the tweener market. (The second-act special effects, which are impressive but misguided, conform to that sensibility.)

It’s an approach that sabotages the show’s original wit, which hinges on the paradox of classic-looking fairy tale figures acting and sounding like latter-day urban neurotics. Worse, these souped-up creatures exude little flesh-and-blood warmth. It’s as if they really were just animated versions of the Narrator’s plastic dolls, an effect underscored by Liam Steel’s semaphoric choreography. As a group, they make the toys of “Toy Story” seem like figures of Dostoevskyan complexity.

Ms. Adams, the beguiling star of the films “Enchanted” and “Julie & Julia,” overcomes the handicap of a furry tea cozy of a wig to deliver a lucidly spoken and sung performance. But she remains an attractive blank throughout, without the nervy, dissatisfied restlessness the part requires. (It might be better if she and Ms. Mueller, whose Cinderella comes across as a prickly doormat, changed parts.) As her husband, Mr. O’Hare goes for a deadpan affectlessness, even as we yearn to connect empathetically with his beleaguered Baker.

Newsletter Sign Up

Continue reading the main story

• Opt out or contact us anytime

Ms. Murphy (who gets to shed the fungus for a goddess gown midway through) works hard to bring emotional substance to a character that has always been little more than a device. But only Ms. Stiles’s Red Ridinghood, played as a been-there Betty Boop who isn’t as tough as she thinks she is, has come up with a stylish caricature that also feels affectingly real.

For the most part these are not performances to make light going of a script that is heavy on homily and exposition. But all flaws could be forgiven — or nearly forgiven — if this production had found its authentic voice in song. For it is in its score that “Into the Woods” burrows from its bright, sardonic surface into the shadowy, thorny recesses of the conflicted heart.

Into The Woods James Lapine Pdf Creator

Songs like “Giants in the Sky,” “Agony” and “Moments in the Woods” do what enduring fairy tales do: they give precise but ineffable form to the longings and wonder and sorrow that life inspires in us. Like much of Mr. Sondheim’s work, they feature seemingly meandering melodies that coalesce into revelation.

In this version, though, the music is never allowed to hold its own or even to take center stage. Admittedly, much of the cast isn’t up to the demands of an intricate Sondheim score. But even those who are, like Ms. Murphy and Ms. Mueller, find their numbers undermined by the distractions of frantic and unfocused staging. When the songs in a Sondheim show get lost in the woods, you know it’s time for some serious deforestation.

Into the Woods

Public Theater - Delacorte Theater

81 Central Park West

Upper W. Side

Sarah Kernochan

212-967-7555

Phoebe Lapine

CategoryOff Broadway, Musical

CreditsMusic and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Book by James Lapine, Directed by Timothy Sheader, Co-Directed by Liam Steel

Into The Woods James Lapine Pdf Creator Download

CastFeaturing Amy Adams, Jack Broderick, Gideon Glick, Cooper Grodin, Ivan Hernandez, Tina Johnson, Josh Lamon, Jessie Mueller, Donna Murphy, Laura Shoop, and Tess Soltau

OpenedJuly 23, 2012

Table Settings James Lapine

Closing Date August 25, 2012