Stephen Sondheim is often credited with reinventing the American musical; it would be truer to say that he turned it inside out. Musicals grew out of vaudeville, that theatrical melting pot, making new Americans out of glitter and pasteboard glued together with dreams. But at least as early as 1957, when West Side Story stormed Broadway with Sondheim’s sparkling lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s tremendous score, the glue was losing its stickiness and the dark backstage had started to show through.
Born into a wealthy but unhappy family, blessed with a steel-trap puzzler’s brain, Sondheim understood both the moment and the form. But apart from West Side Story and the flamboyantly joyful A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), I have found his stories cynical and (leaving aside a few great songs) his music angular and tuneless. Merrily We Roll Along and Into the Woods share familiar Sondheim preoccupations: roads taken and not taken, choices and consequences, the tricks and ravages of time. Both play with narrative sequence. Merrily, which flopped in New York when it opened in 1981, moves backwards in search of the moment when a friendship went wrong: “Very sneaky how it happens.”Into the Woods (1986) ends twice, moving forward from a happy ending to the unravelling beyond. Yet as theatrical experiences, they couldn’t be more different. In the five hard years between them, something vital changed.
In the long tradition of musicals set in showbusiness, Merrily is about the cost of ambition and the supplanting of live theatre by the movies. Frank Shepard (Jonathan Groff) is a composer who’s made it in Hollywood, destroying his second marriage and selling out his best friend and lyricist, Charley Kringas, in the process. He has also broken the heart of the woman who has always loved him, Mary Flynn, the third in this three-sided friendship forged in the freshness of youth. The plot unspools in reverse from 1976 to 1957, nodding to key moments in American history while dramatizing turning points in the characters’ lives: a brace of divorces; Frank and Charley’s first hit; their bewildered arrival at a cool 1960s party among “the most important people in the most important country in the you-know-what”; their starry-eyed rooftop meeting in college, convinced that they can change the world. The references to history – ceasefire in Vietnam, abortion legalized, Kennedy’s election – feel thrown in for ballast, except when they’re used to comic effect in “Bobby and Jackie and Jack”, a manic revue song about how to tell one Kennedy from another, performed in a Village nightclub.
Filming a stage show is risky business, and the spare set and flat, bright colours of Maria Friedman’s theatre production of 2022 don’t translate well to the screen. Daniel Radcliffe – obviously a film actor by training – is surprisingly convincing as the nebbishy Charley, father of four and faithful to his family and his craft, especially in the show’s darkly comic “Franklin Shepard, Inc.”, in which he skewers Frank on live TV. But the only one of the actors the camera really loves is Lindsay Mendez as Mary, a novelist turned theatre critic turned alcoholic (“We go way back. But seldom forward”). Her mobile face can hover between grimace and smile, not settling on either, filling the screen with feeling. The classic role of the single girl in a buddy movie is often just a beard for same-sex love; in her hands, it becomes the story’s emotional centre.
Although the libretto throws out platitudes about choices – “Tend your dreams / Time goes by / How did you get to be here? / Plenty of roads to try” – beginning from the end of the story produces a sense of hopelessness, as if the characters’ lives were a series of inevitable mistakes. Especially for those of us of a certain age, the journey back from loss to innocence is heartbreaking. “Not a Day Goes By”, sung by Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke), at their custody hearing, turns out to be a reprise of the one she sang at their wedding; Frank and Charley’s first dream project, “Turn Left”, dies before it’s even born. I left feeling moved but also manipulated, pinned down and pierced by a cold stiletto to the heart.
Merrily We Roll Along seems even bleaker without theatre’s key ingredient, a live audience. The enthusiastic crowd at the Bridge Theatre for Into the Woods is an essential part of the performance, from the expectant hush before the opening “Once upon a time” to the roar of applause at the end. Sondheim’s intricate tapestry of fairy tales is beautifully realized here, its pantomime elements relished by the British cast, its play of light and shadow made visible by Tom Scutt’s stunning set, a forest of tall trees where shafts of sun or moonlight stream down through trembling leaves. These archetypal stories lend resonance to Sondheim’s themes: the metaphorical road through life is now a path through a wood, both mythic and literal. Desires become magic wishes. And because we already know them, the stories don’t feel like a trap. They can be juggled and altered, and turned inside out.
So Jack and Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, the Baker and his Wife wander through the greenwood like Shakespeare’s midsummer lovers, along with a Mysterious Man and a melancholy Witch. The thread that stitches the stories is the Baker’s quest: the Witch has demanded four gifts to lift the curse of childlessness she put on his family because his father stole the greens (and crucially beans) from her precious garden. It takes a lyricist as deft and swift as Sondheim to explain all this in a song, rapped out with percussive gusto by the brilliant Kate Fleetwood, more eccentric volatile neighbour than scary evil hag.
The first act showers the audience with rhymes and pantomime jokes (“the end justifies the beans”), but darkness is always present. Red Riding Hood (Gracie McGonigal) engages in a pas de deux of exquisite erotic menace with the seductive Wolf (Oliver Savile, suave in tights and dangling furs). “Hello, Little Girl”, he sings to a smooth jazz riff: “Look at that flesh, pink and plump, tender and fresh, not one lump …” “He showed me things, many beautiful things”, she sighs after whatever follows, which takes place off stage. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit, not?” The Wolf’s feast is seen in silhouette through the cottage window; released from his dark and slippery insides, grandmother and granddaughter stagger out spattered with bright blood, remarkably unphased. Red adopts his grey fur cape to replace her tattered one, a talisman of her triumph.
Like many fairy tales, the show is deeply concerned with mothers: lost ones, cold ones, found ones, old ones. As in the Brothers Grimm version, Cinderella goes to her mother’s grave to beg for a dress for the ball. “Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor”, a celestial voice booms down as a gorgeous, glittering woodland gown emerges from a tree. Jack’s mother calls him a fool and sends him out to sell Milky White the cow, his pet and dearest friend. Down from his beanstalk, he remembers how the giant’s wife cradled him in her arms. The Witch turns out to be Rapunzel’s lonely stepmother, who has trapped her in the tower to keep her safe and close. I can’t be the only parent whose eyes pricked with tears as Fleetwood’s voice soared up in pianissimo grief: “Stay with me … the wood is dark and wild”.
But dark and wild are necessary; everyone must grow up. As Act Two begins, Cinderella and Rapunzel have their princes, the Baker has his baby, Jack and his mother have the giants’ goose that lays the golden eggs. What happens after happy ever after? “I wish”, they begin again … and everything unravels. For reasons I won’t reveal, the beautiful fairy-tale forest is now as broken and splintered as the characters’ lives. The two princes meet there in a deliciously camp number that (like the divorce song in Merrily We Roll Along) reprises their more hopeful duet from Act One. “Agony”, they wail, in perfect harmony and competitive despair, “more painful than yours…” Cinderella’s prince (Savile, out of his wolf’s clothing) has heard of a beautiful princess hemmed in by “the thickest of thickets”; Rapunzel’s (Rhys Whitfield) has fallen in love with a maiden with “skin as white as snow”, asleep in a glass coffin. Cinderella’s prince (“I was raised to be Charming, not sincere”) is soon briefly consoling himself with the Baker’s Wife. “You’ve made me feel so alive!” he crows as he walks away.
It’s at about this point that the musical grows up too. As the bewildered Baker’s Wife tries to make sense of what happened, Sondheim’s facile wit fizzes into insight. Why can’t she have both, “a Baker for bread and a prince for … whatever”? Katie Brayben manages the tongue-twister “Moments in the Woods” with dizzying aplomb: “Just remember, when you’ve had an ‘and’ when you’re back to ‘or’, makes the ‘or’ mean more than it did before … That’s what woods are for.” Dream and reality, wishes and horses, the sparkle and the dark are held together in the shimmer of theatrical magic.
But the woods get darker and deeper. People die and can’t be magicked back to life, as Milky White was in Act One. The living want to give up. The music changes too. The often irritating ostinato figures of the first half give way to slower tempos and resonant melodies: “No more feelings. Time to shut the door. No more.” I can’t think of another musical that takes you to that place of despair and makes it somehow bearable. Between 1981 and 1986, between Merrily We Roll Along and Into the Woods, the Aids epidemic swept through America, taking many thousands of young men in their prime. Everyone lost someone. Into the Woods’ last two ensemble pieces, “No One Is Alone” and “Children Will Listen” are love songs to community, hymns of consolation: “Sometimes people leave you, Halfway through the wood, Do not let it grieve you, No one leaves for good. You are not alone.” The words may look trite on the page, but when they’re sung, they soar; that’s what musicals, and woods, are for.
Maria Margaronis is a writer and radio documentary-maker.
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