An Amusing, Then Moving, ‘Into the Woods’

Just before the start of the Fiasco Theater Company’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through Jan. 8, actors and characters begin to wander onstage, greeting each other, eying the cluttered set, which seems like a park of throwaways and makeshift stuff. They wave to the audience, walk down the aisles, shake hands, introduce themselves.

It’s all a little jolly, as if we’re being invited to a picnic. And while warm and friendly and audience-inviting, it’s not necessarily an indication of what we and the characters are in for. For the baker and his childless wife, for Jack and his mother, for the two princes, Cinderella, even the doorman at the castle and the giant and wolf (not to mention Little Red Riding Hood and grandma), life is far from a picnic.

This sort of casual approach has become something of a thing of late. It’s been seen in a variety of shows, most recently in the stark staging of “A View of the Bridge” where a portion of the audience was seated on the stage itself, in “The Merchant of Venice,” where Venetian partygoers interacted with the audience and audience members became a part of the play and in “Once,” where a makeshift Dublin bar could be visited by the audience during intermission.

“We’re practically in the show,” one audience member at “Woods” was heard to say, with some excitement. I’m not sure that’s an entirely good thing, but for this production it had the effect of making the audience have an invested interest in what happens to the people in the show.

Lest you think this is all fun and games, remind yourself that you’re in a Stephen Sondheim show, that you must listen, that attention must be paid, rhymes must be caught on the run. You can’t nod off even a little. Words will change their meaning, illusions, even of the fairy-tale kind, can be lost in the woods and tragedies — sudden, violent and swift — are a part of fairy tales, story-making and real life.

“Into the Woods” is not a premiere, of course. It has emerged and reemerged many times since its birth in the 1980s, when Sondheim took us into the woods and the dark world of Grimm’s fairy tales. There is a baker and his wife who long for a child, there is a mysterious man lurking about, there is a witch, and Rapunzel and Jack and the rest. Things happen: Rapunzel betrays her mother the witch and pays for it, the baker goes on a search for capes for the witch who’s promised them a child, Cinderella goes to the castle, the stepsisters suffer badly, the wolf is sated but then slain. People wish, make wishes, tell stories, sing songs.

All of this happens in the first act. Ever After hasn’t happened yet, nor happy endings. (Spoiler: they won’t.)

The time for banter is over in the second act. It’s time for collateral damage, lost lives, angry giants bent on revenge, truth-telling (“I was trained to be charming,” quips the prince, “not be sincere.”). We are not at a picnic but on a merry-go-round, where people cling for dear life, improvise and fall off, never to be seen again. The characters who remain at the end are not what they were before. They are survivors.

The result of all that is that we as an audience go “Into the Woods” bemused and amused and end up, with some shock, to be powerfully moved. Sondheim is not so much the prince of darkness as the king of nuance and complication, with odd, jester-like moves.

Give credit too to the cast, which is nothing less than exceptional. Each and every member of the company can not only sing powerfully when needed and in unison when necessary, but can act. As a result — because they are up close and personal and total strangers, and because the staging invites not necessarily familiarity but the active participation of imagination — the show seems fresh, and surely fresher than the literal-minded film version.

The most earthbound and big-hearted performance was that of Eleasha Gamble as the Baker’s Wife, who is both squarely grounded and totally vulnerable to what happens around her; we feel her predicament and fate deeply. There are two princes, Anthony Chatmon II and Darick Pead, who have a fine duet in “Agony”; there is Jack and the castle steward, two sides of a similar coin done deftly by Philippe Arroyo; and a perfectly modern, very cool Little Red Riding Hood as played by the quirky Lisa Helmi Johnson. The whole cast plays instruments, to boot.

In the second act, they split up and trot out into the forest, where await real life and the thunderous noise of an angry giant. In the end, the best news is, as the cast sings, “No One Is Alone.”