Into the Woods

(seen 19 January 2015)

The Disney film of Stephen Sondheim's musical 'Into the Woods' stars Meryl Streep, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Johnny Depp and many others. It simplifies the plot of the original play (fewer characters and fewer deaths) but remains true to the spirit of retelling some well known tales from the Brothers Grimm - 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Jack and the Beanstalk', 'Cinderella' and 'Rapunzel' - intertwining them into a meditation on growing up, facing responsibility and attempting to make moral choices in a complicated world.

The intricacies of the plot are well managed, not least because of the simplifications in this adaptation. The jarring effect of bringing folk-tale narrative into conflict with complex ethical issues and quite recognisable (if dramatically exaggerated) problems in family dynamics is handled with a mixture of wit and poignancy that often turns on a simple chordal progression in the music from cheerfulness to wistfulness and regret. There are delightful set pieces - a wonderful contest in emotional agony between two ridiculously handsome princely brothers (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen); a fantastically over the top witch from Meryl Streep - and some very astute observations on what 'happily ever after' might really be like. Binding it all together are the common-sense humanity of the Baker (James Corden), who only loses his moral certainty in absolute extremity, but is otherwise the everyman who sees things through, and (for the most part) the loyalty and perseverance of  his wife (Emily Blunt).

The darkness of the original is mitigated by a shortening of the play's second act, which perhaps leaves the losses to the surviving characters a little unbalanced, but there is certainly no overall Disneyfied white-washing of  good cheer and superficial optimism. In this, it is a rather unusual choice for the Disney studio; but the production values do the piece proud. The village is suitably quaint, the palace is more primitive than the fairy-tale flummery of Disneyland or Disney World, and the woods are decidedly dangerous. Some of the original cruelties of  the Grimms' tales are not glossed over here, in particular the physical violence in Cinderella.

The song lyrics sparkle with clever rhymes and sound patterns, though they are occasionally (as so often with Sondheim) a bit too clever for their own good - riffs on the significance of 'or' and 'and', for example, are a bit too glib. They are delivered in great style by all the cast, not least the youngest - Daniel Huttlestone as Jack and Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood.