Tracy Katz Paladini and
Daniel Frank Kelley

Into the Woods
APR 27 – MAY 15 , 2005

Hollywood reporter
Hollywood, California

THEATRE REVIEW
Into the Woods
By Ed Kaufman
Hollywood Reporter

Bottom line: A blend of witty and wise, this is wonderful, thoughtful entertainment.

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities (first performed on Broadway in 1987 and winner of the 1988 New York Drama Critic's Circle Award and Drama Desk Award), is satiric, insightful, opulent -- and terrific.

All takes place in the woods, an enchanted sort of place where the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of Beanstalk fame) and his mother, the Baker and his wife and a mysterious witch are all retold.

As imagined by Sondheim and James Lapine, the woods are a metaphor for the dark place of our unconscious -- a symbol of that passageway that leads us from the safety of our parents’ home into the world at large. It’s also the place -- at least in the Sondheim/Lapine retelling -- where we’re made to consider in the second act what happens after "happily ever after."

Act 1 starts with the entire ensemble singing "I Wish." And from this moment on, it's a matter of fulfilling each of their wishes -- no matter what sins they commit in attaining same. Act 2 is an examination of the consequences of events in Act 1. Ultimately, Into the Woods questions the notion of "happily ever after" and its existence even in their fairy-tale world.

Credit Glenn Casale for the thoughtful, astute and talented direction and choreography; Thomas G. Marquez for the lush costumes, Pamela Gray for the lighting and John Feinstein for the sound. Steven Smiths conducts the orchestra of 15.

And the large and talented cast is outstanding and certainly up to the sophisticated and tricky challenges of Sondheim's music and lyrics, including Ira Denmark and Mary Gordon Murray as the anxious, childless Baker and his wife; Kim Huber as the lamentable Cinderella; Tracy Katz Paladini as the tough-as-nails Little Red Riding Hood; Yvette Cason as the transformed Witch; Robert J. Townsend and Gordon Goodman as the two vain and vapid princes; Carol Swarbrick as Cinderella's grasping and grabby stepmother; Melissa Hoff as the innocent Rapunzel; Julia Burrows and Weslie Thomas are giddy and selfish as Florinda and Lucinda, Cinderella's two stepsisters; Daniel Frank Kelley as simpleton Jack and Brooks Almy as Jack's overbearing mother; Cynthia Ferrer as Cinderella's deceased mother (as well as the lady Giant); Jack Messenger as Cinderella's ineffectual father; Jack Harding as the uptight Steward and Kevin Cooney as the Narrator who manages in Act 2 to become entangled into the onstage action.

Into the Woods is a lyrical, compelling fairy tale for all ages. And of course it is first-rate Sondheim.