Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Into the Woods on stage. Nevertheless, I was excited to see the film, because I love going to see a musical whether its on stage or the screen (or the weird combination of both that is the Pirates of Penzance film starring Linda Ronstadt). I had no idea what to expect; the only other Sondheim production I’ve seen is Sweeney Todd, which I liked but didn’t love. I also liked but didn’t love Into the Woods, but the film did what it set out to achieve, and now I really want to see it onstage. I had been warned by a friend by the creepiness of some of the songs based on the age of the actors cast as Red Riding Hood and Jack, when what they are singing is a metaphor for sex. Although I think that I would have been able to figure that out even if I didn’t know going in.
One of Sondheim’s greatest talents is his ability to mix humour with dark subject matter, and it’s in this humour that Into the Woods thrived. The songs the princes sing about how hard their lives are is one of the funniest moments in any musical I’ve seen, and Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen completely sold it. Following on from that, the musical performances were all fantastic – not everyone the most amazing voices I’ve ever heard, but the core actors did, and no one was “Russel Crowe in Les Miserables” bad, which is the scale on which I have judged musical performances for two years. A lot of what I liked about the film – the casting (there were only about three people in the entire film, aside from the young children, that I didn’t recognise) aside however, was more to do with the source material. I loved the way the various fairy tales were woven together, and I thought Sondheim’s music was fantastic. I also really liked that actors were just directed to use their regular accents, and while that meant that there was a mix of North American and British accents, it’s much better than having someone do an accent really badly (the voice that Chris Pine put on for the Prince was slightly strange, but it suited the character perfectly).
Another fascinating aspect of Into the Woods (the play and the film), was the song where the main characters are arguing about whose fault it is that a giant wants to kill them. When I took a university literature class (one semester was enough), the first work we looked at was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In talking about it, just about everyone who was in my class had written a “Who is to blame” essay on the play in high school; all the best tragedies have that element – there’s not just one person to blame, but a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions that have led to the tragedy – The Wire has it, and there were Shakespearean elements in Masquerade, which I reviewed last week. Once again, this is more to do with the source material than the film itself.
What I didn’t like about Into the Woods was the aforementioned way it dealt with metaphors. After hearing Red Riding Hood’s song about the wolf being ‘scary and exciting’, it became slightly creepy that the actress who played her was so young (she was very good though, so I could overlook it). The Baker and his Wife had their song about how The Woods changed them – it makes me wonder about the history of their marriage, which I quite enjoyed. And then the Prince kissed the Baker’s Wife and all he got out of it was a separation, and the Baker’s Wife fell off a cliff. I choose to see Sondheim’s intention is to highlight the societal differences to the way men and women are treated for infidelity (it was just a kiss in the film, but given the metaphors throughout the musical, it’s clearly a euphemism), and not his belief that the Baker’s Wife should have died because of it. She was the best character!
I liked Into the Woods more than Birdman, which isn’t exactly hard, but when the things I liked most about a film were based on its source material, that is problematic. Thankfully the cast (Christine Baranski! Lucy Punch!) gave performances that made the experience enjoyable.
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