Stephen Sondheim’s 1986 musical “Into the Woods” is “the work of a genius at the peak of his powers”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. With a “tremendous” book by James Lapine, it draws on fairy tales including “Cinderella”, “Rapunzel”, “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Little Red Riding Hood”, and pushes these “familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn”.
Sondheim’s lyrics are by turns bathetic, audacious and poignant, and his lush score of baroque nursery rhymes “feels as vividly alive as the forest itself”. It’s a “sublime but fiddly” piece that is rarely revived because it’s hard to pull off, and requires a large cast of first-rate singing actors. So enormous credit is due to Jordan Fein: his new production “smashes it”.
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