One of the most emotionally potent and narratively cunning Broadway musicals ever produced, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods parlayed a weekend run in City Center’s “Encores!” series into a Broadway transfer at the St. James Theatre that, frustratingly, was originally booked for only eight weeks, but which has been subsequently extended to October 16.
Every production I’ve ever seen of this alternately frolicsome and tragic show has been brilliant, yet each iteration feels substantially different depending on the cultural context. The latest, stripped-down edition arrives a generation after the first revival, which in 2002 was shadowed by the stygian emanations from Ground Zero a few miles south. Seen today, the show unintentionally points up a little-discussed aspect of American life: the 9/11 era and its attendant alertness to reality are over, and we exist in a new period in which clinging to fantasy has become the norm. Understanding anything that is happening today, from congressional hearings down to the offerings at the multiplex, requires acknowledging that a large proportion of the public is simply viewing all matters through the filter of hyperactive imaginations.
When Sondheim’s last great musical premiered on Broadway in 1987, he and his librettist Lapine could not have known that fairy tales and comic books were about to seize the commanding heights of mass culture. Just two years later, Disney revived its dying brand with The Little Mermaid, the first of a new run of Broadway-influenced
