#robert westenberg

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