‘Into the Woods’ a moving, human, earthy fairy story
By Christopher Arnott
It’s easy to get into “Into the Woods” at the Connecticut Shakespeare Festival. It brings the woods to you, in all its creepy fantastical splendor.
“Into the Woods” is indoors at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, not on an Auerfarm lawn in Bloomfield as originally hoped. But unlike the new festival’s other major show about enchanted woodland folk, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s devious deconstruction of classic fairy tales seems to benefit from moving inside.
Moody lighting, a crisp sound design, a wonderfully mottled and rustic set design and focused performances sustain a feel that might have been more diffuse and unfettered in the open air.
You get the woodsy vibe immediately anyhow. The preshow
“music” is recordings of birdsongs.
The best “Into the Woods” productions tend to be the moody, thoughtful ones, the ones which accept that this pastiche of classic fairy tales is influenced by Jungian analysis, the ones that don’t sugarcoat the hardcore original Grimm Brothers versions, and the ones that accept that the songs and story require serious vocal and acting chops.
The show offers fresh takes on Grimm that show that even a goose that lays golden eggs can have rotten consequences, and “happily ever after” is not a permissible ending.
Anyone who’s seen more than one production of “Into the Woods” knows how open to interpretation it is. Directors are given license to make bold choices from the get-go, starting with how they choose to portray the show’s narrator. In major
New York production, he’s been a psychologist and a child. At Westport Country Playhouse in 2012, he was a magician. Now at the playhouse, he’s an unobtrusive woodsman who blends neatly into the background. As happens in many, though not all renditions of “Into the Woods,” the actor playing the narrator (in this case Chris Bellinger, one of the stronger singing voices in the show) also plays The Mysterious Man who sends the show’s characters on bizarre, dangerous errands that intersect with radical retellings of the tales of Cinderella,