Word: beanstalk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...point of being in the theater is to try one idea after another, maybe realize your first was the best, but be able to know -- which just about no other art form can allow." For Woods -- a sort of Fractured Fairy Tales in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack of Beanstalk fame and other beloved characters all meet in the same forest at the same time and blunder into one another's stories -- Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine started sketching ideas soon after the premiere of their first collaboration, Sunday in the Park. Through three workshop productions, a regional tryout...
Into the Woods is a musical fairy tale in which Jack, of beanstalk fame; Little Red Ridinghood; Cinderella, Rapunzel and their respective princes; Sleeping Beauty; Snow White -- and, of course, a wicked witch and a menacing giant -- are living out their stories in the same forest at the same time, bumping into each other and entangling one another's narratives. As funny as Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, as musical as his A Little Night Music, as morally inflamed as his Sweeney Todd, yet more forgiving and affirmative than anything he has written...
...show's first image is a curtain imprinted with pages from three fables about magical keys to happiness: Cinderella, which in this interpretation concerns the illusory promises of perfect love; Jack and the Beanstalk, in which Sondheim and Lapine see a quest for the fool's gold of material conquest; and an invented tale called The Baker and His Wife, about a couple who long to escape the curse of childlessness inflicted by the "witch next door." Inasmuch as the holy grails that will lift the witch's spell are Jack's beloved white cow, Little Red Ridinghood's crimson...
...deemed any musical worthy of an award. Next season promises a resurgence, with perhaps the brightest glimmer on the horizon Sondheim's own Into the Woods, devised with his Sunday in the Park partner, James Lapine. Its premise is that the stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy-tale figures all take place on the same day in the same forest, practically within bumping distance. The show is still evolving through workshop stagings, but according to one Sondheim friend, "It is about the consequences implicit in those stories--what happens during...
...currently airing the sixth of her fanciful tales, The Sleeping Beauty, and plans to show three more by the end of the year. So far, Duvall has enticed Joan Collins, Elliott Gould, Maureen Stapleton and Mick Jagger into such unlikely vehicles as Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk...