Essay: Belvoir’s Into the Woods demonstrates musical theatre’s constant dilemma
Directed by Eamon Flack, new orchestrations by Guy Simpson, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine
Essay by Charlotte Smee
“... Musical theatre has come to be publicly defined by an extremely narrow range of examples. The form seems to be entirely defined by a small set of ‘those musicals’. Now I would firstly say that I love a great number of those musicals. However, I am forever amazed by how much power a small selection of shows have over the perception, possibility and range of this form. I don’t need to name them. You know the ones I mean.”
– Adam Lenson, Breaking Into Song: why you shouldn’t hate musicals
Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is undoubtedly one of “those musicals”, with three Broadway runs and countless high school productions under its belt. What’s so exciting about Belvoir’s new version is that, for the most part, it doesn’t look and feel how you might expect it to. Belvoir’s Upstairs theatre simply cannot accommodate the usual vast forest of a full-size Broadway production – which makes this the perfect chance for director Eamon Flack and the creative team to challenge the perception, possibility and range of the musical form.
The set was overwhelmingly black when I first sat down in the Upstairs theatre for Into the Woods. Black curtains lined the walls; in the centre, black pianos sat on top of a circular black platform. This sea of black says: we’re not in the woods you think you’re in. Here, there are not just trees and not just fairy tales. What might these fairy tale people look like, if they live in a sea of black? The consequence of this dark expanse is that it needs to be filled by something. Usually, your imagination, with the help of some actors and set pieces.
In literary theory world, defamiliarisation, or “making strange”, is a literary device that takes something familiar and makes it different so that we can see it in a new way. It was first described by Victor Shlovsky in this essay. How does this apply to Into the Woods? When Sondheim wrote the musical with James Lapine, most musicals were considered “comforting and unadventurous family entertainment” (Chris Wiegand). Critics of the 1987 production largely agreed that the show was a “refreshing” deeper look at the world of fairy tales and what we teach our children. It takes something familiar (fairy tales) and makes them strange by weaving multiple stories together, adding an “adult” approach to ethical quandaries (Adam Feldman), and using a punny, alliterative and musical language that you wouldn’t usually use to tell those familiar stories.
What’s key about the 1987 production of Into the Woods (that I first saw in this recording) is that it has those unfamiliar literary devices set on a familiar backdrop. Into the Woods is neither comforting nor unadventurous, but it looks like it might be. The entire first act is dedicated to telling the “usual” fairy tale where everyone wins. There are giant trees, witches that have big, ugly noses, and a painted backdrop that you’d find in picture books of Little Red and Co. This world looks like a fairytale, but in the end, it isn’t. It’s a new way of talking about morality, individualism and the way we care about each other – which can be pretty heavy for our brains to carry, so we need a familiar starting point to carry them from.
Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters in the 1987 Into the Woods
So what happens when something like Into the Woods, the “defamiliar” becomes the familiar? The mainstream? Belvoir’s version has taken this “mainstream” Into the Woods and further defamiliarised it. Not a problem in itself, and often the making of great art, but the makers need to know exactly what it is they are defamiliarising, and why.
It’s not usual for a musical to be refreshed, rethought and reinterpreted so completely as Shakespeare or other text-based theatre is, for a lot of reasons you’ll also find in Adam Lenson’s book – including the fact that we seem to think that musicals aren’t as intellectual, and therefore worthy of reinterpretation, as non-musical theatre is.
Belvoir’s version of Into the Woods doesn’t quite succeed in completely reinterpreting its source material. Flack challenges what the fairy tale world of the original production looks like by taking parts of it and setting them in the very adult world of the Weimar cabaret (a clever nod to the German heritage of the brothers Grimm?). Pianists and stagehands wear coattails and top hats, Peter Carroll’s narrator wears tails and Tamsin Carroll’s Witch brandishes a cigarette, very thin eyebrows, a tasselled hemline and a German accent. The music, thanks to new orchestrations by Guy Simpson, is played with only pianos and various percussive accents – stripping the grand texture of the original right back to its bare, beautiful essentials.
But that’s where the defamiliar ends and the familiar stays: the princes and princesses still look (and sound) straight out of a Disney movie, and the Baker, his wife, Little Red and Jack (the beanstalk menace) wear modern-ish clothing with hints of the fairy tale “peasant” look. The Wolf, during ‘Hello Little Girl’, dons a black leather suit and a green feather boa not unlike Harry Styles’ performance outfit at the 2021 Grammys (which was intended to challenge Harry’s usual colourful, retro aesthetic). When he eats Red’s Granny, Wolf wears a cleverly made, picture-book pink doona cover that is big enough to hide two people. Cinderella’s stepsisters wear bright pink and purple gowns, tall wigs, and later bright pink and purple vinyl hats that look like baby bonnets. All of these design styles are not exactly at odds with each other, all being of some kind of fairy tale world, but they don’t seem to come from the same world of the Weimar cigarette-smoking Witch and the top-hatted pianists.
All of these elements start to become confusing. Our brains are too busy trying to work out what is familiar and what is not: being dragged between Harry Styles the wolf, Cinderella the Disney princess, cross-dressing and delightfully camp Stepsisters, and a Stepmother who is a pianist and a participant in the action to be fully immersed in the new world of Belvoir’s cabaret woods. The choices that were made to change the look and feel of this musical are all working together to make this version different to its reference point but without a cohesive vision of what this new world is, it loses some of its power to challenge. The big coin flip of this version is confusing because it's hard for the audience to know whether we are looking at a head or a tail.
A black expanse of stage gives room for so many possibilities. It was beautiful when the vision was clear, like the Witch’s cabaret ‘Last Midnight’ and cute details like the Narrator/Mysterious Man scattering confetti as he disappears. But this Into the Woods holds onto the familiar too much to truly create something new. Musicals demand a world that you can get completely lost in because they already hold so much in their songs. Is there too much already being challenged in Sondheim’s words to be able to move them into a new place? I don’t think you can’t and shouldn’t change Into the Woods. But you need to make a clear and confident guess before you flip a coin, otherwise, the result doesn't really matter.
Into the Woods plays at the Belvoir St Theatre until 30 April 2023. Find tickets here.
Images by Christopher Hayles, collage by Ceridwen Bush, 1987 image by Martha Swope
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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