Class 12: Is This the End?

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12. Is This the End? The syllabus announces this class as "The Witch in the Woods." We are still looking at the same show: Into the Woods (1987), the second collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. But it occurs to me that the new title is more appropriate to a musical that serves up the traditional happy ending as the finale to Act One, and then devotes Act Two to question what, if anything, the concept of "happy ending" can possibly mean.

No Sondheim musical takes moral issues lightly, but this one is exceptional in that its source material—various Grimm fairy tales—is not normally a place where you would look for moral subtlety. Sondheim and Lapine set themselves two huge challenges. (1) Can they link the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Baker's Wife, and Rapunzel together without tying the plot into knots? And (2) In the second act especially, can they balance internal factors deriving from a character's personality with external ones such as the rampage of a vengeful Giantess? I'll leave it to you to judge how well they succeeded. rb.

The script, videos, and images will be posted immediately after class.

Handout Class Script

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Q AND A

Is cynicism a defining quality of Sondheim's work?
I very much appreciated this comment because it made an opposing pole to the first remark about the positive lessons to be taken from Into the Woods. The first was the answer I hoped the class might elicit, so I agreed with it; the cynicism comment seemed left-field, subversive, cynical in itself, so I covered my surprise in a joke. But it got me thinking, and clearly it got the rest of the class thinking too. The resultant discussion as the best I have ever experienced in an Osher class—thank you All!

What do others have to say about this?
So I came home and Googled "Sondheim, cynicism." There were a lot of hits; you can look for yourselves. The one I liked best was Sondheim's Cynicism by Peter Tonguette in FIRST THINGS. It was written, I think, before Into the Woods opened, though there is a mention of it at the end. A much more recent article, almost equally good, is Stephen Holden's Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life by Stephen Holden in the NEW YORK TIMES in 2010. The most thorough examination of Sondheim's work in this vein, though also pre-Woods. is David van Leer's 1987 essay Putting it Together originally for RARITAN, but it is 15 pages long.

What about other shows?
One day I'll try to work out these thoughts more fully; they have been with me for a long time, and I'm not sure I have the words yet to properly express them. But one thing that has always made me leery of the Broadway musical in general is its writers' reluctance to express emotion in an open and sincere way. It is much safer to be clever or cynical about it, more urban, more New York. Sondheim himself tackled it in one of his earlier shows, Company, managing to examine the syndrome without totally falling into it himself. Hence, I think, the number of Broadway shows that take theater itself—intrinsically an artificial medium—as their setting. But I come from opera, which thrives on the display emotion; indeed, composers like Puccini are equally subject to the accusation of wearing their hearts on their sleeves so obviously that they don't always seem genuine either. That's as much as I want to say right now, but I'd welcome any thoughts. Roger.

VIDEO LINKS

Several people have posted the PBS film of the original stage production that we watched. The links below are to the complete production, followed by the places where we started each section in class. There is also a posting of the Disney movie, but I suspect it may soon be removed. rb.

INTO THE WOODS
	Original production on PBS	Complete — Act I opening — "It takes two" — Act I ending — Act II opening — Act II ending
	Disney film, 2014	Complete


IMAGES
The thumbnails below cover the very few slides shown in class. Click the thumbnail to see a larger image. Click on the right or left of the larger picture to go forward or back, or outside it to close.