Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods

Olaf Jubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351967938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

'The Woods are just Trees. The Trees are just Wood.' – All together

In 1987, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine combined several classic fairy tales including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Jack and the Beanstalk to create Into the Woods. Funny and heartfelt, this musical explores what it might mean to act responsibly in society, both as a parent and as a child.

Situating the work within Sondheim's oeuvre and the Broadway canon, Olaf Jubin first offers a detailed reading of the show itself, before discussing key productions in New York and London, and 2014's Oscar-nominated screen adaptation. The radically different approaches to staging Into the Woods are testament to how open the musical is to re-interpretation for new audiences.

A combination of critical explication with performance and film analysis, as well as an overview of popular and critical reception, this book is meant for anyone who has enjoyed Into the Woods, be it as a musical theatre fan, an enchanted audience member, a student or a dedicated theatre professional.

1
'You're back again only different than before'

The show's place in Sondheim's oeuvre

While on first sight radically different from the Sondheim shows that preceded and followed it (Sunday in the Park with George; 1984, and Assassins; 1990), Into the Woods is nonetheless highly typical of the artist who is customarily credited with ushering in the concept musical. Once again taking full advantage of Sondheim’s unmatched ability to extend character through song, ITW explores the necessity of making decisions and the difficulty of living with their consequences (see Company, 1970, and Follies, 1971) while insisting that – to quote John Donne – ‘No man is an island’. The actions of the individual inevitably have implications for those around him/her, highlighting (as in Pacific Overtures, 1976; Assassins, 1990, and Road Show, 2008) that the personal is always political.

In ITW, Sondheim’s melodies have simple structures and don’t exceed a length of 8, 16 or – at the most – 32 bars. The whole score is founded upon three basic musical ideas: the rhythmic ‘journey’ motif (made up of quarter notes), the ‘magic beans’ motif (a melody consisting of five notes) and the chord that accompanies the witch’s spells (Banfield 1994: 393). The composer explained that he modelled his songs to suit the clearly-drawn fairy tale protagonists: ‘I was primarily responding to the color of the characters. They’re primary-colored characters and primary-colored music is called for’ (cited in Banfield 1994: 390). The result is a show and characters whose simplicity and vivacity was unmatched in any previous Sondheim show. Helpful in this respect was the songwriter’s self-professed talent for writing within a predetermined style: ‘I’m a pasticheur. [. . .] I can imitate virtually any style of music after hearing it briefly’ (cited in Hirsch 1989: 75). The composer aimed once again to seamlessly integrate dialogue and musical numbers, and as a consequence some songs are only performed in excerpts: ‘There were some numbers that built to a climax, like “Agony”, but for the others I wrote complete songs and then snipped them away into fragments and blended them in’ (cited in Zadan 1989: 341). Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick explains that those short rhythmic and melodic fragments, which are carefully fitted in and which are partially reprised, imbue the score with a feeling of one continuous composition (Mankin 1988: 62). As a result, the texture of ITW resembles that of a through-composed work, since the show for long stretches eschews the customary alternation of dialogue and numbers, thereby broadening the scope of traditional Broadway entertainment. A testament to the close collaboration of book writer and song writer, the libretto interweaves spoken and sung word in a carefully devised montage that creates a world where characters do not start to sing only when their emotions are too strong to be expressed in dialogue, as they do in the classical book musical à la Rodgers and Hammerstein. Here, song is just as much a means of expression as talk is. This novel approach would be taken even further, in Sondheim and Lapine’s next collaboration, Passion (1994), a musical that did not even list individual numbers in its playbill and may even be categorized as a tone poem.

Throughout his oeuvre, Sondheim rarely makes use of one of the main staples of Broadway song types, the love duet. This kind of ballad is often one of the highlights of traditional musicals, and that is also true for fairy tale musicals, with examples ranging from Cinderella ’s ‘Ten Minutes Ago’ and Once upon a Mattress’ ‘In a Little While’ to Aladdin’s ‘A Whole New World’ or Frozen’s ‘Love Is an Open Door’. But in Sondheim’s world the protagonists only rarely achieve the kind of unison that would make the disappearance of all emotional and intellectual barriers – which is implied by the intuitive deployment and joint singing of the same words and notes – plausible. It is rather telling that ITW has only one duet for the traditional couple – the Baker and his wife – in ‘It Takes Two’, yet includes two duets for the pompous, self-centred princes, ‘Agony’ and its reprise in Act II. This musical clearly is not concerned with the ups and downs of traditional romance, but rather uses its duets to demonstrate the costs of selfish acts and competitive behaviour and how they must be overcome to create a harmonious living space where everyone can survive and thrive.

As with all Sondheim shows, the initial reaction to ITW was decidedly mixed. Many people were surprised and even irritated by the songwriter’s choice of source material. Fairy tales are known and beloved for their stereotypical simplicity and customary happy endings, and Sondheim is an artist with a clear inclination towards stories whose prevailing mood is bleak and which feature primal emotions. As he himself once admitted: ‘I love to write in dark colors about gut feelings’ (cited in Savran 1988: 225).

At first glance, the disturbingly sad, at times nearly morbid, literary fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen seem far better suited to Sondheim’s sensibility than the folk tale collections of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. But it is precisely the fact that the composer and his collaborator Lapine highlight and amplify the harsh and violent elements of these classic fairy stories that makes their musical so startlingly original: as a reminder of the darkness that hovers beneath even the happiest of endings – the ‘ever after’ – they show us the fragility of both individual contentment and a peaceful society. Sondheim and Lapine also indicate that both come at a cost and are intricately linked.

Act II, which sees events turn progressively more tenebrous and deadly, proved especially controversial and was often rejected by both reviewers and audiences. Martin Gottfried complained that the libretto runs out of ideas and loses momentum in the second half, which is not compensated for or obscured by the demise of several characters and an ending full of priggish homilies (Gottfried 1993: 180). In addition, Meryle Secrest questions why the Baker’s Wife has to die halfway through the second act, especially since this means that the authors rid themselves of one of their most believable characters (Secrest 1998: 356). There were also opposing views regarding the quality of Sondheim’s score: while Stephen Banfield praises ITW as Sondheim’s most mature and impressive achievement up to that point (Banfield 1994: 382), Michael Walsh denigrates the songs as ‘lesser Sondheim’ (Walsh 1989: 215).

The songwriter has underlined repeatedly that for him the drama of his work lies within the characters, which explains why nearly all of his protagonists are torn, insecure and undecided. As an expressive means and a way of colouring his characters, both his music and his lyrics represent this internal conflict and insecurity. Although Sondheim’s lyrics never lose their conversational tone once it is established early on in the show, the (self-)doubts and conflicting impulses of the cast of characters in a Sondheim musical are revealed in the following stylistic devices: ‘throwaway lines, parenthetical statements, cut-off lines, hesitations and ellipses, irregular lengths, varying metrical pattern’ (Cartmell 1983: 33–34). The indecisiveness of the protagonists and their often futile attempts to solve or even address their problems are also expressed musically: ‘Sondheim’s melodies avoid the clarity of progression: they swerve, advance, float, circle back like the very plots which they sing’ (Young 2000: 83). In this respect, ITW proves the exception to the rule as its fairy tale characters show remarkable clarity of purpose and vision at the beginning of the show, only to lose that certainty once the consequences of their actions become noticeable. The confident ‘can do’ attitude of especially the younger characters displayed in Act I (the adults are more likely to question their own behaviour, but quickly convince themselves that a certain ruthlessness is both apt and justified) gives way in the second half to moments of (self-)doubt, apprehension and guilt.

2
'There are rights and wrongs and in-betweens'

Selfish aims giving way to considerate cooperation

The following five sections will explore how Into the Woods sets up its narrative, unfolds its plotline and develops its characters in the sequence in which they occur in the show as a helpful way to highlight how the musical introduces its themes and to illustrate how they generate meaning as well as depth throughout the piece. Sondheim and Lapine’s work shows that:

• dreams, desire and happiness are not static, but are constantly being re-defined
• all members of a community are intricately linked
• society can only thrive/survive if the impulse to self-centeredness and competitiveness gives way to consideration and cooperation
• in the often volatile relationship between parents and children, the best intentions may lead to consequences that are both unexpected and unwanted
• every gain in experience involves a loss of innocence
• growing up means learning how to see beyond one’s own wishes and feelings and accepting responsibility
• the true meaning of learning includes the realization that there are no moral certainties in life, but that all our ethics and values need to be questioned occasionally
• (fairy) stories help us to explore, to explain and to deal with the world around us.

These ideas emerge bit by bit; they unfold in stages, accruing meaning as well as becoming enriched in the context of the events described and interpreted below.

'One midnight gone': starting on the quest

Like every traditional fairy tale, ITW begins with the words ‘Once upon a time’ (p. 3). For adults, these words evoke early childhood memories of being read to by parents and other guardians, while for younger theatregoers this immediately signals the start of a fantastic tale of magic and adventure.

That opening line, though, is immediately followed by ‘I wish’ (p. 3), signalling to the audience that Sondheim and Lapine will shift the focus away from the quickly developing plot of fairy stories towards the motivation that propels their events forward: the ardent yearning of the protagonists (‘More than anything . . .’, ‘More than life . . .’; p. 3) for something outside their reach, be it excitement, wealth or emotional support.

The musical does not waste any time. With the help of a narrator who is positioned ‘outside’ the stories at the side of the stage, it sets ups the parallel narratives of three famous fairy tale characters whose adventures can be told in bold strokes because their stories are utterly familiar: Cinderella who wants to attend the king’s ball, Jack who is forced to sell his beloved cow and Little Red Ridinghood, on her way to bring wine and bread to her sick grandmother. Sondheim and Lapine’s conception of the first song as a ‘Prologue’, however, is a clear indication that the musical will not be content merely to retell these popular tales, but that something else will dominate the proceedings.

The show’s opening number runs to nearly 13 minutes as it needs to introduce the setting, various subplots, and 10 characters (not counting the Narrator), which it accomplishes with admirable efficiency. The sequence not only establishes the background of the three young protagonists, but also introduces a fourth story line of the Baker and his wife, a fairy tale invented by the two writers. These two characters, following the reductive story-telling style of tales passed down orally from generation to generation, never acquire first names but are identified solely by their profession or function in the story-telling. The couple longs for a child and that longing and their increasingly desperate and callous attempts to get what they want will interfere with the fates of everyone else in fairytale land.

Little Red Ridinghood, visiting the Baker’s shop to buy bread for her granny as well as to secure sweets for herself, an initial sign of her self-centredness, is the first to announce that she is ready to venture into the forest, the place where adventure beckons and danger lurks. The girl exhibits the heartless pragmatism of children who have not yet understood the consequences of certain events when she ponders the fate of her grandmother: ‘For all that I know, she’s already dead’ (p. 10).

It’s important to keep in mind here that the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and others circulated at a time when the great forests of Europe were still wild, preventing easy navigation on one’s journey through nature. For thousands of years the woods held a fascination for anyone having to find a path through or around them – a fascination that could easily turn to dread if one lost the way.

Of course, psychoanalytical readings of fairy tales by Bruno Bettelheim and Carl Jung have revealed that the tall, dark trees in these stories, never bare, can be interpreted as projections of the unconscious, the places in our minds and hearts, where our hidden, not yet acknowledged desires and fears...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction or 'Once upon a time': a fairy tale musical like no other
• 1 'You're back again only different than before': the show's place in Sondheim's oeuvre
• 2 'There are rights and wrongs and in-betweens': selfish aims giving way to considerate cooperation
• 3 'Valuable things that I hadn't thought to explore': interpreting Into the Woods on stage
• 4 'Nice is different than good': Rob Marshall's 2014 movie adaptation
• Conclusion or 'Be ready for the journey'
• References
• Discography
• Filmography
• Index