Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by James Lapine

What I think is brilliant about INTO THE WOODS is that it doesn’t end at Act One. We start in a familiar place – “once upon a time” and extend past “happily ever after” into the unknown. What excites me about this show is that it takes us from the black and white moral land of the fairy tale and by crossing the threshold into the liminal space of the woods, thrusts us in to the greyness of real life. Unlike fairy tales, where the moral is intelligible, INTO THE WOODS forces us to question our assumptions and take a reflective eye toward our behavior and consider the potential ramifcations of our choices. This show is about “the rights, the wrongs, and in-betweens.” I think it’s incredible how Sondheim and Lapine found a way to reveal the inextricable realities of our human experience – life’s glorious complexity. When thinking about this design, I believe the critical detail to remember is that “the woods” serves as a liminal space not only for the characters, but also for the audience. I want the audience to watch INTO THE WOODS and realize this isn’t a surface level adaptation of classic fairy tales, and like the characters, start to examine why we do what we do, why we believe what we believe, who we are versus who we want to be, and how we’ve potentially fictionalized our reality.