According to the front matter of the book of the musical, Into the Woods was workshopped at Playwrights Horizons in New York City; subsequently it was produced at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, in December 1986. The musical began previews on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre (now known as the Al Hirschfeld Theatre) on September 29, 1987. According to Richard F. Pender, “After forty-three previews, it opened on November 5, 1987; after 765 performances, it closed on September 3, 1989.”
The original Broadway production won three awards at the 1988 Tony Awards: Best Book of a Musical for James Lapine, Best Original Score for Stephen Sondheim, and Best Actress in a Musical for Joanna Gleason. (It also had seven nominations at the Tony Awards for: Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Robert Westenberg), Best Scenic design for Tony Straiges, Best Costume Design for Ann Hould-Ward, Best Lighting Design for Richard Nelson, Best Choreography for Lar Lubovitch, and Best Direction of a Musical for James Lapine.) The original Broadway production also won five awards at the 1988 Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Book of a Musical, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical for Westenberg), Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for Fleason, and Outstanding Lyrics for Sondheim. (The production also received eight nominations at the Drama Desk Awards.)
Artistic and Production Team
- Composer: Stephen Sondheim
- Lyricist: Stephen Sondheim
- Book-Writer: James Lapine
- Director: James Lapine
- Scenic Designer: Tony Straiges
- Costume Designer: Ann Hould-Ward
- Lighting Designer: Richard Nelson
- Choreographer: Lar Lubovitch
- Orchestrator: Jonathan Tunick
- Musical Director: Paul Gemignani
Original Cast: Narrator/Mysterious Man (Tom Aldredge), Witch (Bernadette Peters), Baker (Chip Zien), Baker’s Wife (Joanna Gleason), Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland), Grandmother/Cinderella’s Mother/Giant (Merle Louise), Cinderella (Kim Crosby), Jack (Ben Wright), Jack’s Mother (Barbara Bryne), Wolf/Cinderella’s Prince (Robert Westenberg), Rapunzel (Pamela Winslow), Rapunzel’s Prince (Chuck Wagner), Cinderella’s Stepmother (Joy Franz), Florinda (Kay McClelland), Lucinda (Lauren Mitchell), Snow White (Jean Kelly), Sleeping Beauty (Maureen Davis), the Steward (Phillip Hoffman), and Cinderella’s Father (Edmund Lyndeck).
Reviews & Criticism
According to Richard F. Pender, “Into the Woods was recognized by most critics as Sondheim’s most accessible show. Howard Kissel in the New York Daily News praised the ‘spellbinding score’ and termed it as ‘an evening of total enchantment.’”
William A. Henry III of Time magazine assessed Into the Woods as “the best show yet from the most creative mind in the musical theater today. It is also that joyous rarity, a work of sophisticated artistic ambition and deep political purpose that affords nonstop pleasure.” In an age when many hits on Broadway were exports from London, Henry further praised the work:
What Into the Woods does, gloriously, is make the case for what musicals might be, blending innovation and old-fashioned storytelling into an elixir of delight. It makes audiences think of Freud and Jung, of dark psychological thickets and sudden clearings of enlightenment, even as they roar with laughter. Its basic insight, plainly influenced by the revisionist scholarship of Bruno Bettelheim, is that at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong — which is to say, almost everything that can—arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions.
Henry notes that Lapine’s book is “at times self-consciously literary and deconstructionist, [and] does not play fair. He encourages audiences to laugh at violence visited on unpopular characters in the first act, then chides them for doing so during the second.”
Frank Rich of The New York Times—who Pender notes “fervently supported” Sunday in the Park with George—was “less enthusiastic”. Rich illustrates, “To understand how much ‘Into the Woods’’ disappoints, one must first appreciate its considerable ambitions and pleasures.” Rich applauded some of Sondheim’s songwriting and the basis of the characterization. Rich criticized the book, characterizing it as “as wildly overgrown as the forest.” He summarizes: “The interlocking stories, coincidences, surprise reunions and close calls…the various narrative jigsaw pieces often prove either cryptic or absent, and, with the aid of a sort of post-modernist anti-narrator (Tom Aldredge), they must finally be patched together to achieve a measure of coherence.” Rich criticizes Sondheim’s songs:
Too many of the other songs bring the action to a halt, announcing the characters’ dawning self-knowledge didactically (“You’ve learned . . . something you never knew”) rather than dramatizing it. And sometimes the soliloquies describing psychological change are written in interchangeable language, as if the characters were as vaguely generic to Mr. Sondheim as they are to the audience.
NOTE TO READER: For more photos of the original Broadway production of Into the Woods, visit: https://playbill.com/article/celebrate-into-the-woods-with-a-look-back-at-3-decades-of-the-beloved-show.