Into the woods
I watched this play in some summer stock show last weekend with my mother and grandparents. I’ve seen the movie version of the play (filmed with Bernadette Peters), a show with the Concordia theatre students and once on Broadway, when it was revived recentlyish. My mother had only ever seen the first half — the half that is, mostly, all the old fairy tales (with the exception of Little Red Riding Hood, whose story goes a bit farther in act 1, in the same way that all the others go in act 2).
Fair warning: I am going to tell most of the story now. And also, quote extensively from the songs, because I am way too lazy to make this one short.
The story goes more or less as follows: the first act ties together four fairy tales (Cinderella, Jack & the Beanstock, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel) through the story of a baker and his wife who are cursed and unable to have a child. The baker’s father was cursed at the same time as the witch took his daughter, Rapunzel, because along with stealing lettuce, he also took the witch’s magic beans.[1] The witch visits the baker’s family, saying they can get the curse reversed if they find four objects (in the woods): a slipper, a red cape, a white cow, some golden hair. LRRH also comes in to buy food for her grandmother.
Everyone heads out into the woods to do their fairy tale thing — the baker ends up being the woodsman who kills the wolf who eats LRRH & her grandmother, also. There are hints of the second act, even there — the princes sing a song, ‘Agony’, which suggests perhaps that they are not quite what one would wish for, (Agony! . . . When the one thing you want / is the only think out of your reach); Cinderella, in a song with the Baker’s Wife, doesn’t really know who the prince is:
C: He’s a very nice Prince.
BW: And-?
C: And- It’s a very nice ball.
BW: And-?
C: And- When I entered they trumpeted.
BW: And-? The Prince-?
C: Oh, the Prince…
BW: Yes, the Prince!
C: Well, he’s tall.
BW: Is that all? Did you dance? Is he charming? They say that he’s charming.
…
C: He has charm for a Prince, I guess…
BW: Guess?
C: I don’t meet a wide range.
…
BW: Is he sensitive, clever, well-mannered, considerate, passionate, charming, as kind as he’s handsome, as wise as he’s rich, is he everything you’ve ever wanted?
C: Would I know?
BW: Well, I know.
C: But how can you know what you want till you get what you want and you see if you like it?
…
C: What I want most of all-
BW: Just within reason.
C: Is to know what I want.
BW: When you know you can’t have what you want where’s the profit in wishing?
and LRRH has a song, ‘I know things now’: isn’t it nice to know a lot? / And a little bit not.
Mostly, though, the characters allow fate to take them (except for the baker and his wife) — when Cinderella gets caught on the steps, she decides not to decide and leave a shoe and force the prince to find her.
Although how can you know
Who you are till you know
What you want, which you don’t?
So then which do you pick:
Where you’re safe, out of sight,
And yourself, but where everything’s wrong?
Or where everything’s right
And you know that you’ll never belong?
But beside a few asides, a few lines in some of the songs, things turn out as they are supposed to. Jack kills the giant. Cinderella marries the prince. Rapunzel marries the other prince; her mother gets her youth and beauty back but loses her power. The baker’s wife becomes pregnant.
And then there’s act two. My mother had never seen act two, and having finally seen it, she doesn’t want to again. Act two is unhappy; act two is about loss and ambiguity. The giant’s wife comes down on an extra beanstock (the baker’s wife gave it to Cinderella in exchange for a shoe) and kills LRRH’s mother and grandmother, destroys the bakery and Cinderella’s palace. Rapunzel has gone mad. Cinderella’s prince has found a princess hidden in a thicket of thorns (sadly, he’s afraid of blood); Rapunzel’s prince has found one in a glass casket, guarded by dwarves (which he finds very disturbing). Jack’s mother dies; Rapunzel dies. The giant wants to kill Jack in retaliation for his killing her husband; everyone else wants to kill the giant in retaliation for her killing other people. They sacrifice the narrator, but the giant is not fooled.
Cinderella leaves her prince, who has just had a moment in the woods with the baker’s wife. The baker’s wife is killed by the giant, too. Eventually the four remaining characters (the baker, Cinderella, Jack, LRRH) entrap and kill the giant.
The black and whiteness of the first half is greyed, as is the simplicity of making decisions — right or wrong, they’re hard to make, and life in a lot of ways is responding to things that just happen, deciding what happened first — good, bad? — then going on. Going out and acting to get your wish is good and fine, but it’s not *enough*, life keeps on going, people come and go in life, you lose things, and sometimes the wish is a bad one, or ends up being too unreal.
And it’s true, or truer, but damn, it’s sad.
[1] I have often thought that the entire play came out of one line: the end justifies the beans.
July 13th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
It seems like the problem is that you never know what the beans will grow into and you can’t judge your life by ends because the ends keep changing but neither can you live by beans alone.
It’s frustrating to always feel in control of your actions, but rarely feel in control of the course of your life.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
Tend to lurk will come out to comment to just say this:
Sondheim is a genius.
That said, I am not objective, I’ve been in a few of his musicals (incl. into the woods) and once upon a time, was a theatre nerd (now I’m an academia nerd).