Thoughts on Into the Woods

We kept up our New Year's Eve tradition of going to see a movie with a friend, this time going to see Into the Woods.

The movie had its flaws, but from the available choices it was the one that best fit the parameters of what we wanted for the night, and it had it's moments. It also generated a few interesting thoughts.

Those thoughts may be best summed up by a question Julie asked me: "What was the point?"

My initial response was "No point really", but that isn't quite fair. The most basic point is that you can wish for things, and you can get those things, but that doesn't solve all of your problems. Maybe it wasn't everything you thought it would be. A fairy tale ending is that your wish is granted and then it ends, quickly, before anything else can go wrong. That isn't generally how life works.

I was also thinking of how Freudian the imagery was, not just Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but with the overall motif of things being different in the woods. Actually, my thought with that was that I felt like I could see Bettelheim's grimy little fingers all over it.

That is not impossible. The Uses of Enchantment is from 1976, and has been fairly influential, so it could easily have had some impact on either Sondheim and Lapine or even just the production designer for this film. That reminded me that Freud's influence has lasted a lot longer than I realized. I know he was still big in the 60s, but I sort of thought that as you were getting into the 80s people were starting to take him less seriously, and that may not be the case.

(Actually, I was reading some interesting things on his theories of dream interpretation Saturday, so that may come up again.)

I guess that's what got me thinking about different versions. I saw a local production a few years ago. The first act ended with a big musical number where everyone was out onto stage and everyone had what they wanted, singing together "And happily ever after!"  It seemed really great, but then there was an announcement to come back after the intermission, and a giant starts trampling around, and there is death and adultery and complications. The no fairy tale ending point was really driven home by that.

I saw that show because a friend's wife was playing the Narrator, but I saw it with another friend who had studied it in college, and as we discussed it there was some insight there. This was a while ago. Both of those friends have children now who weren't born then but are getting kind of big.

Going even farther back, a different friend made some points from it speaking in church long ago, and what I suddenly remembered at the movie is that there were two things he mentioned that I was looking for in the play, but didn't happen. I thought maybe they would be in the movie, but they weren't there either.

One was just a line, maybe even ad-libbed, with the Baker and his Wife, while getting ready to undertake some subterfuge, saying "The end justifies the beans!" It wouldn't have fit into the movie.

The other was that "Children Will Listen" seems to have been more of a highlight. There is a version of that song that people do as solos, but in the show I saw they only used the despairing version of it, and in the movie it was sort of background music over the end.

Putting all of that together got me kind of amazed at how many different plays you can find within one play, by choosing which numbers to perform, and which to skip, and how they are delivered, and all of the choices that the director and the performers make.

You can make a theme about a belief in happy endings being naive, but you could also focus on no one being alone or on the influence adults have on children. Those are just the first three that come to mind. Some of those shows would be more fun to watch, and some less. Maybe you just put your favorite songs in, and it's a mess but it's a well-sung mess. I'm sure that happens sometimes.

Anyway, I found that interesting, and a testament to the power of theater.

For the movie itself, I liked the stage version I saw better; it was more robust. I did like James Corden and I thought Meryl Streep was great. Some of that was her performance, but also they had a lot of fun with her entrances and exits, which were well-executed.

I thought I was nostalgic for a time when Johnny Depp could play something other than weird caricatures, but now I'm wondering if that was a false memory all along.

I did feel like it was a bit of a cheat to lose the "Agony" reprise, because not having the both princes be equally sorry schmucks takes away some of the play's bite, but that made Rapunzel's storyline really sweet, and let Billy Magnussen be heroic, so I'm going to take it.

I'm not sure it was valuable to raise the ethics of killing the second giant and then just morph into "No One Is Alone". It doesn't really answer the question, and you could get to the song by other means. But, hypothetically speaking, that type of decision making might be exactly the sort of thing that could have viewers leaving the theater wondering what the point was.