Into the Woods

Hello! So recently I went with my brother to a super professional showing of Into the Woods with my brother, and now I wanna talk about the show because it was my first time seeing it. Note that I will be spoiling the entire musical, so if you ever plan on watching this musical from 1987, maybe don't read this post. Or do, I don't really care. Okay so for context, Into the Wood's is my mother's favorite musical. I thought it was just a bunch of fairy tales merged into one, almost like a less comedic Shrek. What I was surprised by when I sat down in the dark theater for awhile, was that this musical was FUNNY. It also had a lot more dark humor than I would expect, and I genuinely loved it. The musical follows the story of a baker and his wife, who can't have a baby, Little Red Riding Hood, who takes some bread from the bakers and heads out to see her sick grandmother, Jack, who can't get his white cow to produce any milk but won't sell her because "He's my only friend, mother!", Cinderella, who wants to go to a royal festival, and the witch-- An ugly old woman who tells the Bakers that she is the reason they can't have kids, she put a spell on their family after the Baker's father stole magic beans from her garden. She tells them that the only way she'll reverse it is if they can find a shoe as pure as gold, some hair as yellow as corn, a cloak as red as blood, and a cow as white as milk. If you know how to read and know a lot of fairy tales, you've probably already put together the clues as to where they'll find these items. So now everyone sets off into the woods (THEY SAID THE THING). Cinderella needs to visit her mother's grave and wish for a dress, Jack needs to sell his cow, Red needs to visit her grandma, and the Bakers, who need to collect some random things to reverse a spell. 

Little Red Riding Hood's story is my absolute favorite, both because it's comedic and because it's incredibly dark and has some parallels to real life. Just like in the typical fairy tale, Red is walking through the woods when she runs into the wolf, who (At least in the version I saw) is dressed very... suggestively. The wolf sings a song suggesting that she goes on a longer path to look at flowers, and Red, objecting at first, eventually agrees and goes down the path. Later, after a comedic segment of The Baker trying and failing to steal her cloak due to being too kind, Red reaches her grandmother's house and sees that the door is open. She goes in and the classic "Oh, Granny, what large ears you have!" segment plays out until she gets eaten. The Baker comes across the scene and stabs the wolf's stomach, allowing Red and her Grandma to crawl out. The Grandma steals the Bakers knife and runs back in to skin the wolf while Red sings a sad song about how she was scared of the wolf but at the same time was excited by him, and went down the wrong path because he made it feel exciting and new. Then once she got eaten she blamed herself for trusting the wolf. She gives her red cloak to the Baker as thanks for saving her life and gets a new cloak made from wolf skin. At the end of the first night, everyone recites a lesson they've learned. Red's is "Kind does not always mean good." Which to me, feels way more important to tell children than "Listen to your parents" or "Don't talk to strangers" because they'll hear those lessons 80 million times anyway.

Cinderella's story is nice, just a little basic. She basically just gets a dress and shoes from her mother's grave by making a wish to the spirit of her mother who lives in a tree or something? Idk I wasn't paying attention at that part. But anyways she goes to the festival and dances with the prince and then runs away after. In this musical though it isn't because she was under a spell and it was wearing off, but because she felt like she wasn't worthy to be with the prince and left before they could get closer. Her whole arc in the first act is mostly running and hiding from the prince, occasionally stopping to chat with the Baker's wife until she finally gives her her golden slipper. (Note, not a glass slipper, gold--Which feels way more fancy to me than glass. Why did Disney think they were doing her a service by replacing the gold slipper with glass??) Anyways Cinderella eventually gets together with the prince yayyy.

Jack's story is probably one of the most important ones to the musical. He sells his cow to the Bakers for a bag of magic beans which grow a beanstalk he climbs up to collect riches. Then he tries to buy back his cow from the bakers but they won't budge. Little Red Riding Hood doubts that he can get actual riches so he goes and steals the golden harp which agitates the giant and prompts Jack to chop down the beanstalk and kill the giant. Then after the Baker's finish their spell he gets his cow back and says, "Now I have two friends! A harp and a cow! :D" 

Rapunzel's story throughout the whole show is capital L lame. I'm sorry if you have any attachment to this character but it's literally just the original story of Rapunzel where she has her prince, her mother (Who is the witch in this story,) finds him out and throws Rapunzel into a desert where she gives birth to twins, her prince gets blinded but finds her again because of her beautiful singing voice and she cries into his eyes which gives him vision again. The only thing Rapunzel in good for in this chapter is giving the Baker's Wife her hair, but even then it's useless because the witch adds randomly "The spell won't work if it's something I've touched." Even in Act Two Rapunzel is useless because her entire character is just screaming and laughing maniacally, having breakdowns because she was raised in an isolated tower, gave birth to many more twins after getting with her prince, and then her prince cheated on her with snow white. Then she dies. I don't know if I missed it or what happened but at some point she just died and the witch was super upset about it. Also, Rapunzel is the Baker's sister. This is mentioned once throughout the show and it serves almost nothing to the plot. The only thing good about Rapunzel is her prince being there to sing Agony with the other prince, because that part was funny. But even then the prince gets zero punishment for his actions in the show and doesn't serve much purpose. 

The Baker's story is pretty good I think. The Baker keeps telling his wife to go home because it's too dangerous in the woods, but honestly she's way more capable than him so I think he should shut up. They get all the things, the only real mishaps they had were losing the cow but then finding it again, and finding out that Rapunzel's hair wouldn't work. However they can somehow just use the hairy part of an ear of corn instead so that's cool. They feed all the ingredients to the cow and Jack milks her, giving the milk to the witch. She drinks it and the spell is broken on the Bakers, plus she is no longer ugly. Okay so maybe I'm just gay or they picked a really good actor for this showing but the witch is SO HOT. Cough anyways, the Baker's whole arc is that in the woods they go from having little trust for each other to trusting each other and wanting to work together more. What a heartwarming tale, I hope it doesn't...

Act 2 erases all their character development. Ok like I said at the beginning, I really loved Into the Woods, I know I'm complaining a lot but the show was really good. HOWEVER, Act 2 made me mad. It felt like a terrible movie sequel that no one asked for. At the end of Act 1, it's a happy ending for everyone. The Bakers saved their marriage and had a baby, Red Riding Hood now has a knife and knows self defense, Jack and his mother are rich, and Cinderella has a prince. Her evil stepsisters are also blind because Cinderella's birds pecked their eyes out, idk if I mentioned that. In Act 2, the giants wife climbs down from another beanstalk that grew at some point and she wants to kill Jack because he murdered her husband and stole all their stuff.(Valid, honestly.) The giant steps on the houses of almost everyone, effectively killing anyone who isn't a main character. Jack's mother dies, Rapunzel dies, the Baker's wife cheats on her husband with Cinderella's prince and then dies, Red Riding Hood's mother and grandma both die, the witch kills herself I think (?), and the princes, despite being awful people, live till the end. The Lady Giant is killed off stage in a very anticlimactic fight, and the whole act is honestly really slow and boring compared to the first one. 

If anyone really loves this musical I hope you aren't offended, a lot of this is just being nitpicky and despite my complaints I would still recommend this musical to anyone reading because it was really funny and interesting. That's all I have to say for now, thanks for reading my super long and unorganized review, let me know if you want more essay-type posts about things I like, I have a lot of thoughts and actually like writing if it's something I'm interested in.