Meryle Secrest explains that after working together on Sunday in the Park with George, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim were looking for a new idea for a musical that was “bright, light-hearted, and funny.” Initially, they intended to write a new fairy tale from scratch, but eventually settled on bringing a group of familiar fairy tale characters into one story. Lapine and Sondheim envisioned something close to a “freewheeling English pantomime” in which a base story would act “as the barest pretext for a madcap romp full of local jokes [and] slapstick humor.” The end-result was a familiar and funny first-act, with a self-reflexive and darker second-act, in Into the Woods.