Review: Pittsburgh CLO's INTO THE WOODS Restores the Weirdness at Benedum Center

Stephen Sondheim enthusiasts sometimes speak of the polyglot master's career in terms of "blue book" and "pink book" eras, based on the two coffee-table books Sondheim wrote of his collected works and memoirs. I'm a "blue book" person personally, preferring his earlier, weirder, pricklier material over his "Sondheim is God" era. However, I think I'm in the minority- most of Sondheim's more universally beloved shows fall in the pink book, namely Sunday in the Park with George and, of course, Into the Woods. If Sondheim has a mainstream success (and if it isn't Sweeney Todd), it's Woods. Every community theatre has done it. Your high school has done it. Your middle school has probably done it. Hell, there's even a Disney movie adaptation. Maybe familiarity doesn't breed contempt, but it certainly breeds familiarity, and I went into Into the Woods assuming I knew exactly what I'd get, same as it ever was. To quote another Sondheim lyric, "happily, I was mistaken."

Director Scott Weinstein's production wisely leans into the eccentric, sometimes surreal, nature of these characters, and steps away from many of the decisions bookwriter and original director James Lapine made so standard in the original production. In collaboration with scenic designer Paul Wonsek and costume designer Dustin Cross, Weinstein creates a production that is neither here nor there in terms of time and place. For every touch of renaissance or provincial fairy-tale era, there's an additional touch of the twentieth or twenty-first century in terms of costume design and set aesthetic. Additionally, the protagonists appear to grow more modern in dress as the show goes on, wearing nearly contemporary clothes by final bow. Perhaps this "something old something new" ethos should have been clear to me from the curtain, which featured a painted sign for Into the Woods designed to resemble the stylized ride placards at Disney World.

I'll not bother summarizing the plot, both because it's so familiar and because it doesn't make much sense as a thumbnail anyway: fairy tales intertwine and collide, happily ever happens, and then we see happily ever after challenged by ongoing complications in Act 2. Sondheim is good, James Lapine is good. I don't need to justify producing their work; it justifies itself. Instead, I'd like to praise the uniformly talented, but also uniformly surprising and unique, cast of players. Even when playing stock characters, they refuse to simply submit to the stock character, making these archetypes feel fresh and unique. 

Part of the essential ethos for the conception of Into the Woods, according to Sondheim's book, was the notion of dropping a handful of modern-day (for the eighties) upper-middle-class New York Jews into the classical, very goyische world of The Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. The Baker, the Baker's Wife and the Witch inject that specific sensibility into the fairy tale world: they think and overthink, they crack wise, they fret, they think and speak in the language of college and psychoanalysis and theatergoers. It's subtle, but once you know that intent is there, you'll always see it. (Interestingly, fellow theatrical mainstay William Goldman was exploring the same concept of "modern Jewish sensibility imposed on fairy tale archetypes" in the film adaptation of The Princess Bride at the same time, but his Miracle Max is a much broader Borscht Belt type than anyone in ITW.) Anyone who's ever seen this show probably saw shadows of Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters that are practically baked into the material, but those shadows are gone here.

First off, Carolee Carmello is the big matinee name. As the Witch, she leans into the heartbreak of the role: her Witch has become not a slightly sadistic mischief maker but a genuine curmudgeon, content to keep no human contact but her half-mad adopted daughter Rapunzel (Alyssa Giannetti, lending her stunning voice to a rather slight role). Carmello's famously unique voice, so resonant and cavernous and heartfelt, lends itself well to the Witch's more balladic moments; she's the rare actress in the role who makes "Stay with Me" and the "Lament" just as interesting as "Last Midnight" and the various "Witch's Raps" throughout. Right from the start, Carmello ditches the familiar sarcastic persnickety Witch to give us a thoroughly broken person just shy of monstrous. 

Patti Murin is one of the finest Baker's Wife portrayals I've ever seen, because she leans into her essential Patti Murin-ness. Anyone who has seen Frozen will know what I mean by this: the combination of a bright, strong voice and nuanced acting with endearingly awkward affect and latent horniness. It's this kind of goofy, squirmy, oddly sexy energy that turned Princess Anna in the Broadway Frozen into a standout anti-ingenue role, and Murin plays a winning variant on it here. Her Baker's Wife reads younger than most; she's bored more than just repressed, and eager to break bad at the first opportunity that presents itself. But she's not bad or irresponsible at heart; Murin plays the role as a more tangible foil to the Prince. While he cannot help but do the wrong thing despite wanting to do right, she can't help her essential need to do the right thing, despite wishing she could go a little wilder more often. She may be best known for her voice, but Patti Murin is FUNNY; Amy Sherman-Palladino, if you're reading this, call Patti up for your next project!

Attention must be paid (another Sondheim line) to Manu Narayan, who has finally cracked the code on the cipher that is the Baker. On the page, the character barely exists, serving mostly as the straight man to the more engaging Baker's Wife. Narayan, however, takes the character in a different direction. In his portrayal, the Baker (the character, not the actor or his portrayal) kinda sucks: he's spineless and almost mindless, a Hamlet-like eternal adolescent who finds it almost physically painful to think for himself or assert himself. There are shades of Tony Shalhoub's endless string of "endearing wreck of a human being" characters in Narayan's Baker, who starts the show as a tangible loser and non-entity... until he can't be that anymore. Narayan's choices and visible growth through the show make sense of the musical's Freudian underpinnings and preoccupation with parental issues, and for the first time in my life (anyone's life?), I can say with confidence that the Baker was my favorite character in the show.

There isn't a weak link in the cast, so I feel compelled to make some more shout-outs: Gene Weygandt's droll Narrator perfectly balances his kooky Mysterious Man. The supporting roles are filled by Pittsburgh mainstays, and it's always a delight to see local talent like Melessie Clark, Brady D. Patsy and Christine Laitta get to shine in a AAA-tier production like this. Another Pittsburgher, Theo Allyn, adds to their growing resume of "not quite benign weirdos" with the most delightfully dissolute Jack's Mother I've ever seen. Television star Joe Serafini is a warm, funny and charming Jack, who makes the character make sense as a daydreaming oddball instead of an idiot, and Joe Carroll's leaping and posing Prince makes another slightly hoary character feel fresh.

Finally, the shadow of the recent Broadway revival and tour hangs over this Into the Woods in one unmistakable (but very welcome) way: I don't think we're ever going to see another immobile prop Milky White in any production. Thanks to the 2022 Broadway production's breakout star Kennedy Kanagawa, Milky White is now nearly inseparable from the notion of a hypermobile puppet, operated and portrayed by a single actor Avenue Q style. The puppet is designed by Lisa Liebering and the role is acted and puppeted simultaneously by Lu Zielinski. It's an immediately winning performance and design for this surprisingly large role, and it's telling that the standing ovation started on Zielinski's (and the puppet's) bow.

It doesn't matter how often you've seen Woods, you'll find something new here, just as the Baker's Wife found something new in the Baker when he forced himself out of his permanent comfort zone. Never bet against CLO: like witches and princes, they always manage to come out on top.

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