#james lapine
Christine Baranski and Ruthie Henshall, curtain call at Follies in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
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It’s hard to believe that my favorite musical has finally made its way onto the big screen. As Phil said, we’ve been obsessing over every detail for over a year now. Our family tradition is to go see a movie on Christmas Day and there was no debate over what our choice would be this year.
Into the Woods weaves together several classic fairy tales. We see Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel all in the same story. But how do you connect them? Easy. Invent a witch!
The witch on the big screen is played by Meryl Streep. Hailed by many to be the greatest living actress, I personally think she is the worst. Most of the time, I cannot stand her performances. She doesn’t really seem to understand subtlety or nuance and that really gets to me. So needless to say, I was majorly upset when I heard she had been cast. But I’m glad to report that she was fine as the witch. That’s about the highest praise I can give. I’m so used to Bernadette Peters as the role that it’s hard not to compare. Streep did interpret the character a little differently, but she’s worked on her vocals a lot since Mama Mia (because UGH that was terrible) . So all in all, I wasn’t mad at the end of the film concerning her, and that’s pretty good.
Anyway, the witch is the connecting factor between all the stories. She cast a spell of infertility upon her neighbors, the Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt). In order to reverse the curse, they must retrieve four items before three days has passed: the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold.
It’s through this adventure that we meet the other characters of the story. Cinderella is played by the wonderful and always fantastic Anna Kendrick. Kendrick has made a series of musical films lately and she’s definitely on the right track. I’m sure she doesn’t want to only do musicals, but she has a natural talent for it. Her performance as Cinderella is charming to say the least. This Cinderella is much less passive that the classical telling and I’m all for that! As you all know, I love a strong female. While the typical love story is still present, we see a much more level headed princess who doesn’t get swept away by “happily ever after”.
Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) is the proud owner of a cow named Milky White. Huttlestone really knocked me off my feet in Les Miserables. For one so young, he has such a strong presence. This is no less true in Into the Woods. As a naturally curious boy, Jack enters the world of the giants, much to his mother’s (played ever so perfectly by Tracy Ullman) dismay. The transition from poverty to riches at the hand of the giants is not lost on Jack’s mother who eventually comes around to his involvement with the giants. Little do they know how much small acts of thievery will effect everyone.
Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) must face her wolf (Johnny Depp) deep in the woods. On her way to her grandmother’s house, she meets the creature bent on her demise. Red is another strong female character and my personal favorite. Although she survives the wolf only with the Baker’s help, she evaluates what has happened and actually learns from it. She is feisty and funny and I’ll always want to be her.
The highlight of the film for me was the duet between the two princes, Cinderella’s prince (Chris Pine) and Rapunzel’s prince (Billy Magnussen). Brothers who are always in competition with each other, they play off one another perfectly. They escalate their bravado with every new phrase and I haven’t laughed so hard in a while.
Fairy tales are stories meant to inspire us to find happiness. At least that’s how we view them now. But when these tales were written, they often held much darker moral teachings. Stephen Sondheim in his infinite brilliance returns to this idea after “Happily Ever After” in the second half of Into the Woods. We see that things are often not happy at all. Fairy tales last only for a little while and then life gets in the way. Our choices effect those around us, hurting the ones we love and doing things we thought we could never do.
While the Broadway version is plenty dark, Disney made a few choices to lighten the mood in small ways. There are fewer deaths, no unwed pregnancies, no sexual affairs. And for a family friendly movie, I’m fine with it. I understand why they scaled back on the dark tone of the second act. It was sad to see a few of my favorite songs cut, but it’s hard to fit it all in a feature film.
Visually, the film was stunning. Rob Marshall definitely has a way with visuals and this movie is no exception. It’s lavish without looking fake. There is CGI, but it’s sporadic. The woods look and feel like woods. What more could we ask for? The orchestration was also totally on point. It was a beautiful adaptation of the original score, weaving in songs that didn’t make the cut in with the songs that did. The cast is fantastic and all of them play their parts well. I was majorly impressed with the vocals of a few of the cast members who I didn’t know could even sing, especially Chris Pine.
Even with all the changes, the movie itself was enjoyable and true to the spirit of Into the Woods. Life may seem perfect, but it never is. Tales are just stories, not real life. Life is hard, but worth the journey.
-Angela
Three hundred sixty four days have come and gone and here we are on the last day of our year long project of posting a movie review every day. It’s been just over a year since Andrew suggested we do this and I think it’s been more of a challenge, but also more of a rewarding experience, than any of us anticipated. I’ll have more to say on the whole year another day, but we’ve saved a special set of reviews for our last day.
We’ve mentioned several times over the course of our reviews this year that we are a very musical family. We all love musicals and we’ve reviewed plenty over the last year. But there is one musical that is special to our family above and beyond all others, Into The Woods.
Into The Woods is the greatest work of master of the musical, Stephen Sondheim and his frequent collaborator James Lapine. It’s a brilliant show that blends wonderfully smart humor and a series of profound insights into humanity all wrapped up in a story involving some of the best known and most loved fairy tales.
The stage musical opened on Broadway in 1987 and was a huge critical success winning several Tony awards. Since we lived in the Midwest, our family never had the opportunity to see it live. Our exposure to the play came from a recorded performance that originally aired on PBS in 1991.
I was 10 or 11 years old the first time I saw Into The Woods and it blew my mind. Much of the writing was a little too mature for me at the time, but I fell in love with the music and the creative way the different fairy tales were woven together.
The original cast featured some incredible Broadway talent including the incomparable Bernadette Peters as the Witch, Chip Zien as the Baker, and Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife. Our family would watch it over and over again, learning all of the songs and many of us able to quote many memorable lines verbatim. It became a bit of an obsession for some of us. I estimate that I have watched that recording of the original Broadway cast close to 100 times, much to my wife’s dismay. (She does not enjoy musicals.)
So when the news broke a year and a half ago that finally, more than 25 years since it originally premiered, Disney would be bringing the musical we loved more than any other would finally be made into a movie. With each bit of news that came out about casting and the adaptation of the story we all became more and more excited. The only thing that I, along with Angela and Andrew, worried about was the casting of Meryl Streep as the Witch. Meryl was pretty much awful in her only other movie musical Mama Mia, and the Witch is a hugely important role.
Into The Woods is a special musical to our family and the only thing higher than my expectations for the movie was my sense of dread that this show that I love would be ruined by the compromises and cuts required for a film adaptation. I won’t get into the film itself because that’s Angela’s portion of this review, but let’s just say that I left the theater smiling.
-Phil
Trailer for the 2018 La Clef Des Chants production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, starring Jérôme Pradon as the Baker.
“cancelling the bar mitzvah” oh? what’d the bar mitzvah do?
anyone else? (also yes i said falsettoland, bcs i mean specifically act 2 whizzer + marvin)
