NY Public Library for the Performing Arts Curator Doug Reside on INTO THE WOODS

BroadwayWorld.com continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out the latest piece by Doug Reside (Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division) on INTO THE WOODS:

After several decades of hopes sparked and then deferred, the film version of Into the Woods has finally been produced and will open on Christmas Day. Like many fans of the show, the news "makes me feel excited...well, excited and scared." Will the adaptation capture the magic James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim mixed on Broadway, or will Disney turn the masterpiece into exactly the sort of simple fairy tale the original production deconstructed? The recently released trailers give me hope that Milky White hasn't simply been taken to market to fetch the best price he can, but rather suggest that the film will let us have a few new moments in the same kind of woods that were built on Broadway nearly thirty years ago.

Adapting Into the Woods may at first seem an odd choice for Disney. The musical frequently comes just short of parodying the Disney versions of dark and often violent German fairy tales. In the first act, the musical all but celebrates the grotesque violence of the original Brothers Grimm (e.g. cutting off toes, birds pecking out eyes) that the Disney films excised. And the musical's even darker second act explores the ennui, betrayals, and loss that in real life often follow the moment another brand of fairy tale often declares that everyone ("who deserved to") lived happily ever after.

Disney's films aren't necessarily known for diving quite so deep into the darkness plumbed by Sondheim and his collaborators, but films like The Lion King and Bambi certainly do teach the truth that "sometimes people leave you / halfway through the woods." Likewise, in more recent Disney offerings, the company occasionally satirizes the tropes of their early films (the NYC rats who help Giselle clean the apartment in Enchanted). In fact, at their core, Sondheim's Woods lyrics ultimately celebrate many of the same values Mickey and the gang have always championed. In both Into The Woods and most Disney films, families (though not necessarily, or even usually, biological families) are held up as something sacred to be protected and maintained even at great personal sacrifice.

Sondheim has generally worked in collaboration with others, so it is dangerous to use his musicals to talk about the progression of his thoughts, since any one example may represent the choice of a director or bookwriter. Still, within Sondheim's lyrics there are certain thematic patterns that are not always clearly tied to the ideas expressed in the larger musical. For instance, though by most reports Hal Prince was interested in the social critique inherent in the story of Sweeney Todd (and the original production underscored this), Sondheim's lyrics seem to express just as often the frustration of one unable to truly connect with other people, and the retreat into work as an escape from this discomfort. Thus, when society rejects and abuses Sweeney Todd, his razors become his "friends," and when he recovers them he is "alive at last" because "the work waits!" Likewise, in Sunday In the Park With George, George Seurat is always "turning back too late" from his painting and has to remind himself to try to "connect" with his fellow human beings. In Into the Woods, though, the pleasures of escaping to that giant-inhabited sky country are tempered by a realization that social responsibilities have their own inexorable pull--that even the domestic life of "your mother at the door" offers a "world you never thought to explore." When the Baker is ready to abandon the community he is leading, his father warns him:

Trouble is, son, the farther you run,

The more you'll feel undefined.

For what you have left undone, and more,

What you've left behind.

The lyrics suggest that individual work is no substitute for the work of living in a community. The thematic anthem of Into The Woods then is that, for good or ill, "no one is alone." This affirmation of the importance of living (and working) in community is a moral that would not be out of place in any of Disney's early musicals. After all, Snow White's "Heigh-Ho" (reportedly a musical inspiration for the title song of Into the Woods) articulates the pleasure of communal work--"it's off to work we go." The same idea is expressed in "Whistle While You Work." If the characters in Into the Woods are learning that "it takes two" to accomplish most things that are truly worthwhile, this is something of an a priori assumption in Snow White.

Disney, I suspect, is fully aware that a film version of Into the Woods must walk a very narrow path. Fans of traditional Disney animated films looking for a charming tale and a happy ending may be shocked. Those who relish the darkness of Into the Woods may be disappointed if the film strays too far from the source. Still, as the Into the Woods princes suggest, having too much of a "thing" about either blood or dwarves is probably "sick." At least, at long last, the wishes of so many for the release of the long-promised film have been granted.