Into The Woods
January 7-16, 2011
A Barn Jr. Series Production

Dramaturgy by Ross Harmon
Cast | Original New York Cast Production History | Original New York Production Photos | About The Authors | Enchantment, Into The Woods, and Bruno Bettelheim

ORIGINAL NEW YORK CAST PRODUCTION HISTORY

Into the Woods is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. It debuted in San Diego at the Old Globe Theatre in 1986, and premiered on Broadway in 1987. Bernadette Peters' star performance as the Witch brought acclaim to the production during its original Broadway run. Inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment, the musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales. The main characters are taken from the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, tied together by a more original story involving a baker, his wife, and their quest to begin a family.

Martin Beck Theatre, New York, NY

Preview: Sep 29, 1987
Total Previews: 43
Opening: Nov 5, 1987
Closing: Sep 3, 1989
Total Performances: 765

Opening Night Cast:

Tom Aldredge: Narrator / Mysterious Man
Joanna Gleason: Baker's Wife
Bernadette Peters: Witch
Robert Westenberg: Wolf / Cinderella's Prince
Chip Zien: Baker
Barbara Bryne: Jack's Mother
Kim Crosby: Cinderella
Danielle Ferland: Little Red Riding Hood
Joy Franz: Cinderella's Stepmother
Philip Hoffman: Steward
Jean Kelly: Snow White
Merle Louise: Cinderella's Mother / Giant
Edmund Lyndeck: Cinderella's Father
Kay McClelland: Florinda
Lauren Mitchell: Lucinda
Chuck Wagner: Rapunzel's Prince
Pamela Winslow: Rapunzel
Ben Wright: Jack

ORIGINAL NEW YORK PRODUCTION PHOTOS

Images © Martha Swope & James Lapine.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS...

STEPHEN SONDHEIM (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (eight, more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has been described as "the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theatre." His most famous scores include (as composer/lyricist): A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins, as well as the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. Previously, he was president of the Dramatists Guild from 1973 to 1981.

Sondheim's father was a successful dress manufacturer, and his mother, Janet Fox, a fashion designer. Young Stephen was given piano lessons from an early age, and showed a distinct aptitude for music, puzzles and mathematics. His parents divorced when he was only ten, and he was taken by his mother to live on a farm in Pennsylvania. The area had attracted a number of well-known personalities from the New York theater world; a close neighbor was the playwright, lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who had a son Stephen's age. Stephen Sondheim and Jimmy Hammerstein soon became friends, and Stephen came to see the older Hammerstein as a role model. At the time, Hammerstein was inaugurating his historic collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers. When Sondheim was in his teens, Rodgers and Hammerstein were enjoying unprecedented success with the shows Oklahoma! and South Pacific. Sondheim resolved that, like Hammerstein, he too would write for the theater.

Sondheim studied piano seriously through his prep school years, while Hammerstein tutored him in writing for the theater. With Hammerstein's guidance, he wrote scripts and scores for four shows, a project that occupied Sondheim through his student years at Williams College. On graduation, he was awarded a two-year scholarship to study composition. He studied with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbit, writing a piano concerto and a violin sonata while trying to break into the theater. Sondheim's first efforts at securing a Broadway assignment fell through, but he found work writing for television, and made the acquaintance of two playwrights who were to play a significant role in his career: Arthur Laurents and Burt Shevelove.

Although Sondheim aspired to write both words and music, his first Broadway assignments called on him to write either one or the other. At age 25 he was hired to write lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's music in the landmark musical West Side Story. Before West Side Story opened, he made his Broadway debut as a composer, with incidental music to N. Richard Nash's play, The Girls of Summer. He then won a second lyric-writing assignment for the Broadway musical Gypsy. Both shows had scripts by Arthur Laurents and were directed by Jerome Robbins.

The credit, "Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim" finally appeared on Broadway for the first time in 1962. The show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was an unqualified success, and introduced the first of Sondheim's tunes to become a show business standard, "Comedy Tonight." The script for Forum was cowritten by Sondheim's friend, Burt Shevelove. Sondheim then collaborated with Arthur Laurents again on Anyone Can Whistle (1964).

Sondheim returned to the role of lyricist-for-hire one more time to collaborate with Hammerstein's old partner Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965. From then on, he would insist on writing both music and lyrics, although nearly five years would elapse before a new Sondheim musical opened on Broadway. Royalties from West Side Story, Gypsy and Forum, all of which were made into motion pictures, freed him to develop projects of his choosing. In the meantime, he published a remarkable series of word puzzles in New York Magazine. Many critics have related his love of puzzles and word games to the dazzling word play of his lyrics, with their intricate rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, puns and wide-ranging allusions.

Sondheim made a historic breakthrough as both composer and lyricist with Company (1971), a caustic look at love and marriage in contemporary New York City. The show marked a sharp break with Broadway's past, and established Sondheim as the most inventive and daring composer working in the musical theater. Company was Sondheim's first collaboration with director Harold Prince, who had produced both West Side Story and Forum. Sondheim's second collaboration with Prince as director, Follies, paid masterful tribute to the song styles of Broadway's past, while deploying them to ironic effect in a poignant commentary on the disappointment of middle age. His next production, A Little Night Music, charmed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, while its signature song, "Send in the Clowns," became an unexpected pop standard.

Sondheim received Tony Awards for the music and lyrics of all three of these shows. The following year, the winning composer thanked Sondheim, "for not writing a show this year." Sondheim did find time in 1974 to write a show for a performance in the Yale University swimming pool, an adaptation of the classical Greek comedy The Frogs, with a script by his old friend Burt Shevelove. From 1973 to 1981, Sondheim served as President of the Dramatists Guild, the professional association of playwrights, theatrical composers and lyricists.

Never content to continue along comfortable or familiar lines, Sondheim and Harold Prince explored further new territory with Pacific Overtures (1976), an imaginative account of relations between Japan and the United States, from the 1850s to the present. Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), adapted an early Victorian melodrama into a combination of gothic horror, bitter satire and Sondheim's most complex score yet. Sweeney Todd enjoyed a healthy run and brought Sondheim another Tony Award. While a number of Sondheim's shows have enjoyed successful revivals in the commercial theater, Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music have found a second home in the opera houses of the world, where classical standards of musicianship can do justice to their soaring scores.

Sweeney Todd marked the climax of Sondheim's long collaboration with Harold Prince. Merrily We Roll Along (1981), adapted from a bittersweet Kaufman and Hart drama of the 1930s, was the last of their shows together. Although Sondheim and Prince remained close friends, they sought renewed inspiration in collaboration with others. Sondheim then embarked on a partnership with playwright and director James Lapine.

The first fruit of their collaboration was Sunday in the Park With George (1984), a work inspired by Georges Seurat's pointillist painting, "Sunday Afternoon On the Isle of the Grande Jatte." The play intertwines the story of Seurat and his mistress with that of a contemporary painter and his lover. Sunday in the Park With George was a solid success, and brought Sondheim and Lapine the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a rare instance of the Pulitzer committee honoring a musical play. Into the Woods (1987), another collaboration with Lapine, sought the meaning inside some of the most familiar childhood fairly tales, and has been produced successfully all over the United States.

One of Sondheim's most disturbing productions was Assassins (1990), an examination of the motives and delusions of the men who murdered American presidents. Passion (1994), another collaboration with James Lapine, took a dark, intimate story of unrequited love and set it to music of heartrending poignancy. As the Broadway theater has turned to more predictable fare, Sondheim and his collaborators have sought out new venues for his increasingly daring work. Bounce / Road Show, recounting the follies of the 1920s Florida land boom, opened in Chicago and Washington in 2003. Its script, like that of Pacific Overtures and Assassins, was written by the playwright John Weidman.

In 2008, the American Theatre Wing presented Sondheim with a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. At the time, two of his shows, Gypsy and Sunday in the Park With George, were enjoying successful revivals on Broadway.

Over the last 50 years, Sondheim has set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and artistic integrity in the musical theater. His music, steeped in the history of the American stage, is also deeply informed by the classical tradition and the advances of modern concert music. His words, regarded as unequalled in their wit and virtuosity, have recorded a lifetime of profound, unblinking insight into the joys and sorrows of life and love.

JAMES LAPINE was born in 1949 in Mansfield, Ohio and lived there until his early teens when his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut. He attended public schools before entering Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he majored in History. He went on to get an MFA in Design from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

After graduate school, he moved to New York City where he worked part-time as a waiter; a page and tour guide at NBC; a free-lance photographer and graphic designer; and an architectural preservationist for the Architectural League of NY. One of his free-lance jobs was designing the magazine of the Yale School of Drama,Yale/Theater. The dean of the School of Drama soon offered Lapine a full-time job designing all of the printed materials for Yale Repertory Theatre as well as a faculty position teaching a course in advertising design.

While at Yale, his students urged him to direct a play during the annual January period when both faculty and students undertook a project outside of their areas of study or expertise. Here Lapine directed a Gertrude Stein play, Photograph. The play was five acts, and just three pages in length. Assembling students and friends, the play was presented in a small performance space in Soho for three weeks. Enthusiastically received and won Lapine an Obie award.

Lapine was then approached to create a new piece for the Music-Theatre Group. He wrote and produced a workshop version of Twelve Dreams which was later presented at the Public Theatre and revived by Lincoln Center Theatre. Lapine eventually left the visual arts for a career in theatre where he has also written and directed the plays Table Settings, Luck, Pluck, and Virtue, The Moment When, Fran's Bed, and Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing. He has written the book for and directed Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George, Into The Woods, Passion and the recent multi-media revue Sondheim On Sondheim. With William Finn he has collaborated on Falsettos, A New Brain, Muscle and the soon to be produced, Little Miss Sunshine. On Broadway he has also directed Golden Child, The Diary of Anne Frank, Amour, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Lapine is a member of the Dramatist Guild Council and for the last nine years and currently lives in New York City.

ENCHANTMENT, INTO THE WOODS, AND BRUNO BETTELHEIM

BRUNO BETTELHEIM (August 28, 1903 - March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children. He is best known for deconstructing fairy tales as the primary tool for promoting childhood cognitive development through his 1976 study entitled The Uses of Enchantment.

Bettelheim breaks down all the Disney-adapted fairy tales like Snow White and Cinderella and exposes the "true" lessons they teach children. For example, Hansel and Gretel helps a child get over separation anxiety when he or she comes of age. Snow White is about a teenage girl who breaks away from her Freudian evil stepmother and is rescued by males, teaching the natural order of transferring attachment and loyalty. Harvard professor Maria Tatar was the first to challenge his Freudian analysis of fairy tales in her book "Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood." She calls his work, "unjust, misleading and inaccurate."

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Barn Players Into The Woods Dramaturgy © 2011; Ross Harmon.

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