Into the Woods…

and out of the woods and home before dark!

For a celebration of our 5th anniversary(btw, Happy Anniversary to us on December 30th!) we got tickets to a local civic theatre that was performing “Into the Woods”.  We knew about it because our good friend Laurel Armstrong was cast in the part of Cinderella (as seen in the cast list on the right).

It’s not a super well known play (Broadway Musical, actually) but I grew up watching it since my mom had a VHS tape of the actual broadway performance.  A recap of the overall story is that it has a bunch of fairy tales (Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and the writer’s own tale of a Baker and his wife) together in one kingdom.  The first act is about their “wishes” and leads up to each fairy tales’ “Happily Ever After”. (Cinderella marrying her prince, Jack being rich, etc.)  The second act is what happens AFTER “Happily Ever After”.  Overall the story has some good morals.  The songs can be difficult to follow as they are written to be very quick (Apparently this is a trademark of Sondheim), but are extremely humorous.

Overall, the performance was excellent.  It lived up to every expectation I could have.  There were definitely differences from what I expected, but not bad differences.  After all, each director needs to be able to do their own thing with a play.  They don’t have to do it EXACTLY like Broadway (and probably shouldn’t, anyway). 

Here are some great lines in the play:

Prince Charming to Cinderella: “I was raised to be charming, not sincere”

Little Red Riding Hood: “Nice is different than Good”

The Witch: “ You're so nice. You're not good; you're not bad; you're just nice. I'm not good. I'm not nice. I'm just right. I'm the witch; you're the world!”

As we didn’t have anyone to take a picture of Stephen and I together, I’ll settle for these of us apart.