Director Scott Farthing invites you INTO THE WOODS!

One of the most beloved and oft-performed shows by the great Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods has so many stories to tell. This is not just layers of different fairy tales involving golden shoes, red capes, wolves, beanstalks and beautiful princesses in towers — rather, it is the deeper philosophies of moral absolutism, moral relativism, authoritarianism, pragmatic ethics, and more. Each character is faced with the differences between wishes and wants, right and wrong, and making choices that have very real consequences. The show progresses from innocence to knowledge, childhood innocence to very adult realism, life and death, and shows that every choice we make, whether large or small, can have a rippling effect.

Into the Woods reminds me of an incredibly well-crafted cartoon, the kind that both a 6-year-old and a 60-year-old can watch together and each get something different from it, yet still, enjoy the shared experience. In typical Sondheim fashion, the music glitters and bustles with incredibly nuanced lyrics and a lush and demanding score. The setting for this production of ITW is a familiar space to all of us, one that reminds us of childhood innocence and play, and each set piece is a symbol of decision making and the character’s inner monologue.  The costumes for this production are playful and exaggerated, allowing the audience to see character definition simply in the patterns, colors and silhouette of each clothing choice. Playful details in Little Red’s Act 2 costume (look for her wolf accessories) and Jack’s Act 2 costume (look for his magic beans) further the whimsical storytelling in this production.

Theatre tells stories. It also both entertains and instructs while it moves the audience into different times and spaces. Perhaps it even causes its participant to think in different ways. The cast of this production of Into the Woods, has delved into broad and deep philosophical discussions of what the differences are between a want and a wish, growing up, making decisions, taking responsibility or deflecting blame, dealing with death and birth, being kind or cruel, being ambitious and naive, as well as myriad of other topics that have arisen from the complexities of this wonderfully complex script. In other words: a deep, hard look at what it means to be a human in a complex world filled with fewer black and white choices than we ever can imagine.