In her essay, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play”, Elinor Fuchs asserts that “dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other.” When analyzing the world of a play, she encourages one to ask: “How many performances are signaling to you from inside this world? How many echoes of other dramatic worlds do they suggest? How do these additional layers of theatricality comment on what you have already discovered?” The following sections asserts connections between other works of theatre and Into the Woods; consider the shades of other works that one can see in Woods. (Also, consider how past works of Penn State Centre Stage and the Penn State School of Theatre can inform the experience of artists and audience members who interact or will interact with Woods.)

• Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman: Like Woods, Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses reinterprets very old stories for modern audiences. Both Metamorphoses and Woods can be seen as interacting with not just the singular, linear process of adaptation from an original text (from Grimm, from Ovid), but as interacting with the collective understanding of these stories, the adaptations and references that exist in the popular consciousness. The tale of Psyche can also be connected to Cinderella, in animals or ants being asked to sort lentils. 
• King Lear, William Shakespeare: Lear explores the process of aging and, like Woods, the relationship between parents and their children. Like in the “Cinderella” story, there are two false daughters (the stepsisters, Florinda and Lucinda; Regan and Goneril) and one genuine one (Cinderella; Cordelia.) One may see similarities between Lear’s will to be loved unconditionally by Cordelia and the Witch’s will for the love of her child, Rapunzel. 
• Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine: Both Sunday and Into the Woods make use of the two-act musical structure to propose a model for understanding works of art in the first act and to deconstruct and analyze the understanding of those works of art in the second act. 
• Brigadoon, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe: Both Woods and Brigadoon are about community and collective responsibility. In Woods, the remaining four (Little Red, Jack, Cinderella, Baker) must work together to counter the force of the giant, and in Brigadoon, the people of Brigadoon must take care of each other to ensure that no one leaves; both times, this is for the survival of the community. 
• The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown: The Last Five Years and Woods interact with the passage of time. Years may be seen as a contemplative piece of memory, the juxtaposition of moments past informing an evolving understanding of what went wrong in a relationship. Woods, while linear in plot, does interact with the past and future, with songs like the Witch’s rap, “Giants in the Sky”, and “On the Steps of the Palace”, recounting past events in the present, and with wishes, like the opening to both acts referencing imaginations of the future. Structurally, both Woods and Years play with the presentation of time, in a non-linear format. 
• Mountain Language, Harold Pinter: Language depicts the oppression of the mountain people’s culture, through their language; this oppression of communication may be understood as suppressing the universal human will to be understood by others. Woods may also be seen exploring the universal will to be understood through “No One is Alone”. Both works draw attention to the collective nature of human existence, how communication and understanding is a two-way street. “No One is Alone” may be comforting in assuring that one also has community support, but it is also a call to the community to be present to support individuals of it. 
• John Proctor is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower: Like Little Red Riding Hood discovering and exploring a budding sexuality, John Proctor depicts young people exploring sexual education and their understanding of themselves and their bodies in relation to the world. Predators abound in John Proctor and in Woods. 
• Mock, Miriam Colvin: Like John Proctor, Mock shows young people negotiating their sexuality and experience with others in an educational setting, similar to how Little Red Riding Hood in Woods undergoes a process of learning in the woods with her encounter with the Wolf. Mock also shows a community banding together to support an individual, echoing the collective responsibility of “No One is Alone.” 
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare: Both Dream and Woods see the setting of the woods as a place of exploration of desire. In Woods, the “wishes” of the characters lead them to their journey, and in Dream, the romantic desires of the lovers lead to hijinx and betrayals in the forest. Both feature magic as a force that guides desires and possibilities.
• Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein: In the 1945 musical, father Billy Bigelow must make up for the harm he caused his wife and daughter on Earth after his death; Carousel deals with how harm can be transferred from parent to child, with generations. Into the Woods also interrogates generational harm, with the Baker’s father writing his wrong to help the Baker, and with the Baker learning how to be a good parent to his own child.