This piece was originally written in the fall of 2022.
I’ve had the good fortune to see the current Broadway production of Into the Woods twice now, once at Encores! and once at the St. James last night. To say that the reception has been positive would be an understatement. “Euphoric” would probably be an understatement. The ovation the audience gives the fully-assembled cast at the top of the show competes in my memory only with the applause that greeted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entrance at the top of Hamilton back in 2016.
It’s easy to understand the excitement. Into the Woods is uniquely beloved amongst musicals, thanks in large part to its ubiquity in high schools, and the ready availability of a filmed performance of the original Broadway production. It’s been ten years since the show was seen in New York City, and twenty since it was last on Broadway. The audience was ready.
The cast, too, seems to have been ready. You can feel love for the material undulate off the stage. In both performances, Sara Bareilles in particular gave off a sense of being thrilled just to be doing this. It was readily apparent at Encores! that Heather Headley, Gavin Creel, David Patrick Kelly, Annie Golden and Julia Lester all love the show. It was also readily apparent, as it always is, that Neil Patrick Harris loves an audience.
At both Encores! and the St. James, I got the feeling that I wasn’t watching a production of Into the Woods so much as I was watching a production of a production of Into the Woods. The energy suggested the March sisters performing Jo’s plays in the attic. That kind of joy in the material is infectious, and I wish we saw more of it in professional theatre. With this material, though, that approach is a double-edged sword. Everyone is having too good a time to be thoughtful. The audience and the performers were so obviously in love with the material already that none of them seemed terribly concerned with doing the work to embody what makes it great.
With a show like Fiddler on the Roof, say, that wouldn’t be a problem. Get me a cast and an audience that loves the material in Fiddler and I’m going to have a great night. Into the Woods is different. It is a messier, trickier creature. Its themes are subtler, and the fluctuations in its moods will get away from you if you don’t work very hard to pin them down.
Not only does this production fail to offer any substantive work as far as the themes are concerned, worse than that, this is Into the Woods as vaudeville. This is a first-class production of Into the Woods directed as though it were the school version that omits the second act. It’s all comedy, no contemplation. Not that Into the Woods isn’t written to be funny; the show is filled with space for comedy, with lines that can be milked for laughs as much or as little as the actors want. Director Lear deBessonet appears to have told everyone to milk the show dry as Milky White.
This makes the first act a breeze, but the second crumbles into dust. Into the Woods is based on classic fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The first act, which more or less depicts these fairytales unchanged, is followed by a second act that interrogates the assumptions at the heart of those stories. What if you escape the tower and your mother, but the world really is dangerous and unpredictable? What if life with Prince Charming isn’t all you expected? Was Jack right to take from the giant?
Without deep and sincere character work in the first act, which is the egg that holds this bake together, the audience has nothing to hold onto when the tempo and mood suddenly shift. The darker and more thoughtful turn taken by the second act is so ill-served by the choices here that I found myself wondering during the Encores! performance if “No One Is Alone” makes any sense as a song. It was unmoored from any dramaturgical sense of place.
Though most of the major issues persist, the Broadway production is a marked improvement. The production itself hasn’t changed at all, but the cast has. Phillipa Soo was magnificent as Cinderella. She brought a subtlety to “On the Steps of the Palace” that most of the first act lacked. Brian d’Arcy James, as dependable a leading man as you can get, made sure that the Baker is a coherent individual rather than a series of laugh lines. When their rendition of “No One Is Alone” started, from the moment Soo’s phrasing choices crystalized on “Mother cannot guide you,” it was a revelation.
D’Arcy James and Soo are such experienced, thoughtful actors that they are able to push against the limitations of what the production is asking. They can feel in their bones what the show is meant to be, and they instinctually steer it in that direction. My greatest disappointment in all of this may be that the two of them were not in the production their performances deserve. That would be worth all this euphoria and then some.
I find myself thinking again and again about what the reviews and audience response would be like if this had been the first-ever production of Into the Woods. Rest assured that the reviews would be nowhere near as kind. They’d fall more in line with the gentleman I overheard leaving the St. James, who said “I loved the first act but the second act was kinda…” If this were the show’s debut, it would have almost immediately vanished into obscurity. What I saw a month ago at Encores! and last night at the St. James was a good musical comedy with a messy second act. Lord knows we have enough of those. Into the Woods is, as both the cast and the audience know, so much more than that.