Into The Woods At Drayton Entertainment
Forty years after it debuted in 1986, Into The Woods is getting a crackerjack revival at Drayton Entertainment’s St. Jacobs Country Playhouse under the incisive eye of director/choreographer David Connolly.
Add a superb cast, great sets, costumes, lighting, projections, and tastefully muted sound design and you have a musical production that’s better than most that Shaw serves up and that can rival the slicker fare at the Stratford Festival.
With music by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine, Into The Woods takes some of the most famous characters from the collection of fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century and tosses them into a twentieth century artistic Cuisinart.
The resulting pastiche is a new sort of fairy tale, a psychologically acute examination of some very grown-up concerns set against our more light hearted memories of favourite childhood bedtime stories.
Into The Woods is not a show for children. While I imagine many kids would enjoy the high comedy of much of the first act, the second act turns dark. Very dark.
Like all good fairy tales, Into The Woods is told to us by a master storyteller, in this case Randy Hughson, billed as both Narrator and, later, Mysterious Man.
The central figures in Lapine’s twisted fairy tale are the Baker (Robert Markus) and his Wife (Kaylee Harwood) who long for a child. A Witch (Kristen Peace) appears to reveal that she has cursed the Baker’s bloodline because his father stole vegetables from her garden. For good measure she stole the father’s other child, a daughter named Rapunzel (Emma Vickers).
The Witch offers to reverse the curse if the Baker and his wife can bring her four items in three days time: “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold.”
And so it’s into the woods on their search. In this tale the woods are a liminal space in which wonders and horrors lurk.
Those wonders and horrors include Jack (Joema Frith) of beanstalk fame, Little Red Riding Hood (Julia Pulo), the Wolf (James Daly), Cinderella (Danielle Wade) and her step-family, Cinderella’s Prince (Daly again), the aforementioned Rapunzel and her Prince (Michael Vanhevel).
The light-hearted first act is filled with laughs and somewhat deceptively proceeds in true fairy tale fashion, culminating with what looks very much like one of those “and they lived happily ever after” happy endings.
But Lapine and Sondheim have other, darker fish to fry. The second act has as much loss as the first act has laughs as Into The Woods examines the unintended consequences of the decisions we make. In short, be careful what you wish for.
Sondheim’s music, so different from the more lyrical fare from the so-called Golden Age of musicals that my generation was weaned on, can be bracing, but it is ideally suited to Lapine’s book.
When characters in Into The Woods (and I suppose every other Sondheim musical) burst into song it’s not to tell us how happy or sad they feel but to grapple with their thoughts as they struggle with existential questions. Sondheim’s razor sharp lyrics also carry a sting.
Into The Woods has important things to tell us about personal responsibility, parenthood, and a world which is immeasurably more complicated than the black and white morality of bedtime stories.
Yet, Into The Woods ends on something of an upbeat note. If not happily ever after, then clear-eyed ever after. Samuel Beckett might have approved.
It would be hard to imagine a better cast. Everyone is terrific, but Daly pretty much steals the show as the deliciously libidinous, Jim-Carrey-inflected Wolf and as Cinderella’s vainglorious Prince. (“I was brought up to be charming, not nice.”)
Markus, who remains preternaturally young, is in excellent voice and he is ably accompanied by Harwood’s Baker’s Wife.
Peace makes a marvelously malevolent Witch, whose transformation when she loses her witchy powers is eye-popping. Wade is a fetchingly leggy Cinderella who knows how to take a fall. Pulo is a delightfully dumb and ditzy Red Riding Hood, and Hughson is a commanding guiding force as Narrator.
There are so many wonderful line readings from so many characters in Into The Woods that I strongly suspect director Connolly deserves some credit for teasing them out.
Ryan Howell has a created a set that fills the broad stage with moveable curtains and panels, and ramps and is not quite as simple as its simplicity suggests. He is ably assisted by the ingenious and ever-present projections of Greg Emetaz and the lighting by Kevin Fraser. Thanks too, to sound designer Allan McMillan, who gives us one of the best mic’ed show I saw this season.
Dariusz Korbiel scores, too, as costume designer. His all-white outfit for Cinderella’s Prince and the Gandalfian get up for the Mysterious Man are wonderful, as are the silly dresses for Cinderella’s step-sisters.
Sondheim musicals are not known for their flashy dance numbers but Connolly’s choreography makes a major contribution. Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s Princes have a few numbers together and Connolly has loaded them with any number of flourishes straight out of a he-man exercise video. They are a hoot.
The St. Jacobs Country Playhouse is a wonderful venue for musicals. The stage is big enough to accommodate ambitious proiductions, while the house is intimate enough to bring the audience into the action.
If you’ve never seen a musical here, Into The Woods would make an excellent introduction.
Into The Woods continues at the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse through October 25, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Drayton Entertainment website.
[image: Drayton Entertainment]
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