[title]
★★★★★
The Bridge Theatre has an incredibly consistent track record with musicals. Admittedly that’s because it’s only previously staged one musical. But it was a really good one, the visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls that wrapped up a two-year-run in January.
And great news: rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods makes it two for two.
After the slightly stodgy tribute revue Old Friends and the weird semi-finished ‘final musical’ Here We Are, this is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. And the main thing worth saying about 1986’s Into the Woods is that it’s the work of a genius at the peak of his powers: a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn.
While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book and lyrics are by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion). He naturally does a tremendous job – his lyrics are sometimes hilariously bathetic, sometimes formally audacious, sometimes devastatingly poignant, often all three in a single song. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the forest itself.
So that’s a big gush about, but the fact is Into the Woods is a sublime but fiddly musical with a lot of moving parts. You need to get it right, and Fein smashes it, largely thanks to exceptional casting. There is a nominal main plot, which centres on the misadventures of the Baker and the Baker’s Wife (Jamie Parker and Katie Brayben, given the show’s most down to earth, human performances). But it’s an ensemble show that requires at least a dozen great singing character actors. Rsing stars Chumnisa Dornford-May and Bella Brown are rightly represented and do fine work as a slightly loopy Cinderella and an ethereal, damaged Rapunzel. Gracie McGonigal is absolutely wonderful as a gung-ho, psychotic girl guide of a Red Riding Hood. Oliver Savile is a hoot as the smarmy, childlike Prince (‘I was raised to be charming, not sincere’). And Kate Fleetwood walks off with woman of the match – she’s an actor who eats up villain roles for breakfast, but she brings complexity, heart and a comic range equal to her vocal one to the role of the scheming but complicated Witch.
The cast is key, but the whole thing looks astonishing: Tom Scutt’s set transitions between a sort of huge table the whole ensemble moves around and through, and the astonishingly lush, vivid woods themselves. Initially hidden behind a bland screen, they’re a liminal, transgressive space, glistening, eerie and primal. The costumes (also by Scutt) are similarly ravishing: initially dun, dusty hues, they give way to ever more extravagant finery as the show wears on (shout out to the Prince’s little codpiece). Actors who aren’t speaking often freeze in place rather than leave the stage: it often has the look of some lush Breugel painting. There are some subtle but effective projections of falling leaves and flitting birds from video designer Roland Horvath, contributing to the sense the woods are alive and breathing. And for what it’s worth, the puppet cow (Milky White) is very cute, especially when it comes back as a yellow-eyed zombie.
It’s just great, really, a sublime production of a sublime musical with a sublime cast. Fein doesn‘t try to reinvent the wheel, so much as he acknowledges the importance of the wheel’s function and then goes ahead and makes the best looking, best crafted wheel you’ve ever seen. Pure magic.
Bridge Theatre, until Apr 18 2026. Buy tickets here.
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