THEATER REVIEW: Broadway revival of Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’ still makes for a powerful journey

All great musicals rely on metaphors. But Broadway never has come up with a more pliable one than “Into the Woods,” the beloved masterpiece by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine that uses a fairytale mash-up to explore the universals that please, worry, seduce, calm and destroy us.

That’s why audiences are leaning into this show right now with a hunger that must be lifting a starry cast that includes Sara Bareilles, Patina Miller, Phillipa Soo, Brian d’Arcy James, Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry, some transferring their roles from the City Center Encores! staging, others new to the Broadway journey just for the summer at the St. James Theatre.

At various point in this show, the woods represent adventure, abandonment, ungrateful children, sexual betrayal, worry, pain and, of course, death. It is pliable to any moment, so surely some will have the losses of COVID-19 come to mind as the destructive giant stomps around, or the divisive political turmoil of the recent months or perhaps a perceived threat to democracy or personal freedoms.

Countries go into the woods, too, you might find yourself thinking, just as people do.

The musical, first seen on Broadway in 1987, came at the beginning of the period when Sondheim mostly left irony behind and embarked on a series of emotionally intense shows that (for me, at least) are akin to William Shakespeare’s so-called last plays, those great dramas of error, cruelty, forgiveness and reconciliation.

In this show, the late, great composer and his gifted collaborator used the simplest of ideas: colliding the characters of such archetypal stories as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel” by sticking all of them in the forest together and letting them fight the battles not just of their own familiar narratives but of problems with which we can relate. They suffer. They worry. They let each other down and, in the end, they find some kind of a messy path back out into the meadow. Don’t know about you, but I sure relate to the winding nature of that journey through life.

The Broadway staging by Lear deBessonet remains in the Encores! style: The orchestra is on the stage, performing Jonathan Tunick’s magnificent orchestrations, the scenic ornamentation (from David Rockwell) is shrewdly minimal, as is the choreography from Lorin Latarro, and the show exists in that gray area between a concert and a full staging. The cast spends most of their time downstage, front and center.

This works spectacularly well because the material is spectacularly good and, frankly, the show avoids the typical “Into the Woods” trap of layering a director’s invasive conceit atop the already fragile conceit dreamed up by the writer and composer. It is successful not unlike the way the long-running revival of “Chicago” became successful, by cutting away what it did not need and allowing for an atypical intense, direct communication with the audience.

Bareilles, who has years of concert experience, finds this entirely in her wheelhouse. Her beautiful, sometimes breathtaking work here stakes her claim as a distinguished Sondheim interpreter. Her rich but also normal and truthful vocal prowess is a marriage of technical skill and communicative certitude. She’s such a fine actor, too. It’s a stunner of a performance.

She’s got plenty of A-list company. Miller takes risks and wins bets all night long and her rendition of “Last Midnight” (let’s hope not) brought down the house at the final press performance I saw on Saturday night (d’Arcy James called out of the show just hours before, so I saw understudy Jason Forbach, who was excellent and, frankly, caught the internal confusion that Sondheim and Lapine intended for these characters better than most).

Soo sings Cinderella pitch-perfectly and Julia Lester, who layers everything deliciously, is a witty and anarchic delight as Red Riding Hood.

There is an alternate way to do this show, which is to say in a less stylized and less comic way than deBessonet chooses. It can be played as if these characters were realistic humans and I’d like to see it done that way again someday on Broadway, for I have seen it work a different kind of spell. More than once.

But this is a legitimate way to go and deBessonet and her supremely talented cast certainly deepen their vulnerability as the material darkens and the winds of agony and change swirl around the forests of life.

All our lives.