From Stage to Stream: Disney’s ‘Into the Woods’ Is The Film Adaptation Of Sondheim’s Musical That We Deserve

Movie musicals are a unique genre in that they are often adaptations of another medium: the stage musical. It’s a tricky transition from stage to film, which is why movie musicals are often unwieldy ventures — often subject to an audience that’s ambivalent toward the genre as well as a rabid Broadway fan base who want to see their beloved stage productions get a faithful treatment on film. Writer and performer Ben Rimalower takes a look at how these musicals fare on film — this week tackling Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Into the Woods.

A hundred years from today, long after most shows currently playing Broadway have been forgotten, Stephen Sondheim may be best remembered for Disney’s movie version of the celebrated composer’s fairy tale musical Into the Woods. Rob Marshall’s film adaptation (with a screenplay by original librettist James Lapine) might not completely satisfy ardent fans of the stage show, but on its own terms, the movie is moving, hilarious, and even thrilling.

Despite winning several Tony Awards, the original 1987 production of Into the Woods received mixed reviews. The New York Times’ influential Frank Rich took issue with the work’s structural and thematic inferiority, in comparison to Sondheim’s previous A Little Night Music, Gypsy and Sweeney Todd. However, for a generation of theater lovers that grew up watching and rewatching the excellent American Playhouse broadcast and home video release of the show’s Broadway production, Into the Woods represented not a second tier entry in the Sondheim catalog, but a first exposure to musical theater, or a first exposure to Sondheim’s groundbreaking style of contemporary music and lyrics elevated to Shakespearean dramatic depth. And unlike the critics, these kids, accustomed to the essentially anachronistic style of animated musicals like The Little Mermaid and An American Tail, had no trouble accepting the self-aware, post-modern spin Into the Woods imposes on the Brothers Grimm. So it’s ironic that some of these kids who grew up loving are now taking issue with the movie even though their cherished video is preserved for eternity. They deserve no sympathy.

Of course the film is different from the play, but Rob Marshall and his team did not, as was anticipated by skeptics, “Disney-fy” the piece. There are substantial cuts as necessitated by the new medium, but for the most part, these are smart; they are the right changes.

The biggest change is the elimination of the narrator, a contemporary man in a suit (often confused by children watching the video of the original production to actually be Stephen Sondheim… or was that just me?) who offers wry commentary until the moment when the characters finally notice him as a physical presence in their space and sacrifice him to the Giant. While this stage convention provides a powerful metaphor for a main theme of the work (“Mother cannot guide you, now you’re on your own”), it would have been untenable on film, where the narrator’s periphery presence would have been counterproductive to the movie’s intrinsic verisimilitude. The camera itself is, in fact, a substitute for the stagey presence of a narrator at the threshold of the proscenium divide — the Fourth Wall. Unfortunately, the film finds no replacement for the impact of the loss of the Narrator in the second, darker half of the story.

On stage, the Narrator is double cast with the Mysterious Man a double-talking vagrant who turns out to be the Baker’s long-lost, deadbeat dad. This character is essentially gone, save for brief appearances in a flashback and as an apparition in the Baker’s mind at the crucial moment when he decides not to abandon his own child. A major loss here — maybe the biggest mistake made in the film — is cutting the Baker’s song, “No More.” The Baker is Sondheim and Lapine’s original story crafted to tie together all the fairy tales. He is the hero. With the loss of the Narrator, he even inherits a bit of narration they couldn’t cut (“Once upon a time…” he says, introducing the film). In typical Marshall style, this grounds the entire film in the realistic moment of him telling his child the “story of how it all happened” in the final scene, which only increases his prominence as the heart of the story and intensifies the need for his climactic final song.

Another musical cut that stings is the absence of Jack’s sweet little ode to the cow he’s selling (“I Guess This Is Goodbye”) and the Baker’s Wife’s affectingly grasping rationalization of questionable moral choices (“Maybe They’re Magic”). The other notable change — a wise on e —is the complete excision of both the Act One finale and the Act Two opening. While necessary on stage, these moments are well replaced by the transplant of the Giant’s first appearance to Cinderella’s wedding. This gives the Giant a perfect opportunity to encounter the entire cast gathered together, handily cutting unnecessary corners of the plot.

A wonderful thing about the movie is its luxurious depiction of the events of the story in full, realistic scope. While there is power in any stage production’s physical representation of the eponymous Woods (underscoring the theme of metaphoric, psychological woods), actual trees drive the point home even better.

And it’s a rare treat to hear Sondheim’s beautiful score played by a lush 100-piece orchestra under the knowing baton of longtime collaborator Paul Gemignani. It doesn’t get any better than this.

The movie’s biggest misstep is the treatment of Little Red Ridinghood’s encounter with the Big Bad Wolf. Seeing as how, on stage, the wolf is characterized as a man in an anatomically explicit wolf costume, Rob Marshall was stuck between a rock and a hard place — pun intended. In theater, we accept the convention that a man in a wolf costume singing a song is, actually, a wolf.  On screen, however, we would see only a man in a costume. To make matters worse, Marshall’s wise decision to capture the songs not as reportage but as active experiences necessitated a full realization of Little Red’s experience with the Wolf. An actual wolf, perhaps via CGI, would have been out of place, but Marshall’s amateurish rip-off of stagey African and Asian performance arts is atrocious. Equal blame must be given to Johnny Depp for his hammy, mincing sylvan dandy. Is he supposed to be a cannibal who lives in the forest and dresses like a pimp? What’s with the canine ears and whiskers? I’m one to suspend my disbelief, but this version of the Wolf draws attention to itself. I don’t really know what should have been done instead, but as my three-year old buddy says when he doesn’t like what’s in front of him, “Not dis.”

Also problematic is recent Broadway Annie star Lilla Crawford’s performance as Little Red Ridinghood. She’s actually fine in the film’s second half when her character, no longer innocent, becomes a smart-mouth tween, but her first few scenes and her big song are painful. Watching Crawford indicate every lyric with the most obvious literal gestures — as if choreographed for the deaf — I can’t help but wonder if people who don’t like musicals see it and think, “This is why Broadway is lame.” Along with the bizarre concept and Depp’s performance, Crawford’s one-dimensional rendition is the final blow that brings down Sondheim’s once great story song, “I Know Things Now.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aasECsxrSzQ]

Happily, the rest of the performances are, across the board, excellent. Meryl Streep’s Oscar-nominated turn as the Witch is a galvanizing presence from start to finish. She manages to milk every drop of comedy from the role in her own idiosyncratic, masterly way, and brings to the table new layers of emotion absent from previous renderings of the Witch. In a decades-long career on stage and screen, only occasionally peppered with singing, Streep here delivers a thrilling vocal take on Sondheim’s score, offering tender inflection on the quiet moments and blasting the big parts to the rafters as well as almost any Broadway diva renowned for such skills.

At the core of any version of Into the Woods are the Baker and Baker’s Wife. The ready availability of the original Broadway cast on video has been a painful liability for every subsequent production, particularly in the case of Joanna Gleason’s Baker’s Wife. Musical theater fans constantly contend with revivals where new casts fail to live up to indelible cast album memories. With Into the Woods, the imprint extends beyond the songs to cover the entire show. Many of us who grew up on the Broadway video know every nuance of Gleason’s every line reading by heart. Of course other actresses should find their own way through the story, discover their own organic approach, but in the case of Gleason and the Baker’s Wife, different is hardly ever better.

This is an arena where the Into the Woods movie profits handsomely from its medium. While Chip Zien and Joanna Gleanon’s highly comedic characterizations resembled contemporary New Yorkers — Woody Allen or Seinfeld characters — more than anyone in a fairy tale (and this style was well suited to their stage function as conduits for the audience into the world of the play), James Corden and Emily Blunt play it straight, so to speak. This tactic clarifies Corden and Blunt as the emotional center of the story. That’s not to say they don’t find humor in their roles. On the contrary, they’re both quite funny, but it’s not the kind of presentational comedy that Zien and Gleason employed to such brilliant effect. Moreover, the charismatic Corden and Blunt have warm, attractive singing voices that do more than justice to their share of the score.

Anna Kendrick is something of an anomaly in mainstream media; a not particularly stunning, fairly legitimate actress (she has both a Tony and an Oscar nod under her belt) with a pop music career and mass box office appeal. This makes her the perfect choice for Cinderella in Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods, a characterization that always put a brainy, quirky, even nerdy, spin on the traditional damsel. Unsurprisingly, Kendrick is completely satisfying.

Even more fun are movie star Chris Pine and up-and-coming stage and screen actor Billy Magnussen as the two princes. Implausibly handsome and with comedic chops to boot, they tear into their parts (and Sondheim’s tuneful, hilarious duet, “Agony”) with inspired, joyous abandon.

My personal favorite portrayal in the film is Daniel Huttlestone as Jack. This pint-sized powerhouse was appealing as Gavroche in the movie version of Les Misérables, but his work here is in a truly different league. He brings absolutely moving conviction to his every moment, with a breathless energy and one of the most naturalistic (and well sung) musical performances I’ve ever seen on screen. It doesn’t hurt that his big number, “Giants In The Sky,” is always one of the most melodic and touching parts of the show, and one which profits enormously from the film’s expansive scope, including an actual beanstalk and Jack’s epic perspective scrambling down its height. Tracy Ullman provides appealing, affecting support as Jack’s mother.

The funniest moments in the movie come from Christine Baranski as Cinderella’s stepmother and Lucy Punch and Tammy Blanchard as her stepsisters. They have the upper hand in the comedy department, as their tertiary roles don’t really require humanity, freeing them to milk as much campy hilarity out of the material as their stage counterparts. Baranski, in particular, as you would expect, shines. All the minor roles are deftly handled and casting Frances de la Tour as the Giant makes for an opulent coup.

As our society advances and is also dumbed down over the years, our tastes change. Perhaps our standards get lower. Maybe Into the Woods is not as well crafted a piece of theater or not as seamlessly profound as some of Stephen Sondheim’s other shows. If you grew up watching The Little Mermaid, Into the Woods is pretty great. Every generation has disdain for what comes next. If you grew up watching the Broadway video of Into the Woods, you might balk at Rob Marshall’s good, but flawed film. Then again, if your frame of reference is Pitch Perfect, you might find the movie to be just that.

Ben Rimalower is a writer and performer, best known for his one-man shows Patti Issues and Bad With Money.

 

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Photos: Everett Collection