Woods Steven Sondheim\'s Musical \"Into

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Steven Sondheim's musical "Into the Woods," as evidenced by the filmed version of this popular production, may be one of the most thematically ambitious musicals of the late 20th century Broadway stage. This may seem like a paradoxical statement, as it is a musical about fairy tales. Fairy tales tend to confirm common moral norms and behaviors rather than subvert accepted truths, with the ostensible purpose of teaching children the right way to behave. But Sondheim's narrative construction of fairy tales takes the form of juxtaposed stories. By pairing stories with different lessons together, Sondheim infuses such stories as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella" with ambitiously ambiguous instructional qualities.

This is why "Into the Woods" is not simply 'cotton candy' entertainment, like a traditional musical confection. Nor is it an easy tale of moral development and instruction like much of children's theater. Rather, the musical uses music and myth to teach lessons valuable to adults and children alike and to complicate modern morality. It questions rather than confirms the 'right' relationship between parent and child, price and princess, and self and society, rather than to simplifies common wisdom into morals of age-old fables.

Over the course of the play, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack of "Jack and the Bean Stalk," and "Rapunzel," must all grow up and attain maturity. They come of age as they proceed into the woods of the title and come out sadder and wiser people. But a deeper version of the wood's wisdom does not come until the play's second act. In the first act, all of the characters merely get what they want -- in the second act, the characters must deal with the consequences of getting what they wished for, including power, a prince, riches, a child, and eternal youth.

The true teaching quality of the musical only comes to the forefront in the song, "Children will listen," at the musical's end. Then, the ambiguous figure of the witch counsels the now widowed baker how to raise his motherless child and notes that children learn, not by being dictated to in the form of tales, but through looking at the example of their parent's lives. The witch herself has learned this sad lesson the hard way, in her dealings with her own, now dead, adopted child Rapunzel.

As different as all of the characters and tales are, all characters speak the same words "into the woods," throughout the play, signifying their evolving journey of experience. They must make a journey and take a risk to realize their quest to feed a grandmother, keep a cow named "Milky White," or to engage in the difficult endeavor of having, then raising a child. The four main plots begin in separate 'houses' in the musical's staging. Each character, before he or she enters the drama of the woods, is segmented like the pages or chapters of different storybooks (even though the baker's tale is largely Sondheim's own invention).

But through the tests and quests they embark upon, the characters leave the comfort of their own books and linear constructions of the tales, and take to the woods -- and mesh their voices in the lyrics of the title song, even though many of the characters have their own solo arias. Every time the character speaks words about the woods it is to the same tune, yet with slightly different resonance, as that character is now farther in his or her journey -- both emotionally as well as in terms of the plot. This is perhaps most notable in the punctuating words of the witch. "One midnight gone!" cries the witch at the mid-point of the first act, then sings "It's the last midnight," before she leaves the play. The return to the words and themes of the woods is the only constant of the play. This is because the play is about journeys, not about coming to some final moral conclusion. The woods, unlike the safety of the home, is unpredictable -- not even the witch knows that the spell she weaves to regain her beauty will deprive her of her magic, or that the golden floss first provided by the baker will come from her own beloved, adopted child Rapunzel.

Interestingly enough, Rapunzel is the one character who never says 'Into the Woods,' and when other characters provide often humorous reflections on what they have learned in the woods, such as Cinderella's maimed sisters note ruefully that "now we're really blind," Rapunzel merely sings meaningless notes. "I only did it because I loved you," says the witch when Rapunzel justly accuses her adoptive mother of overprotecting her in a tower. But unlike traditional fairy tales, in "Into the Woods," love is not enough -- the learning process, rather than the end 'learned' product or tale is what is important.

Unlike the baker's child, Rapunzel dies -- mad, depressed and angry about being unprepared for the woods of her married, childbearing life. The witch casts away the magic beans in the second act she fought so hard for in the first, when she realizes her powers and beauty are meaningless without something to care for in the form of her adopted daughter. The beans that were so important in the first act become meaningless to the witch, literally nothing just beans, even though they began the saga of the baker's childlessness in the first place, after his father stole them from the witch.