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Maybe it’s these troubled times we’re living in, but my immediate thought upon watching this transferring revival of Sondheim’s classic Brothers Grimm pastiche ‘Into the Woods’ from US company Fiasco Theater was: well this is a fine Marxist critique of the selfishness of late capitalist society.
Certainly it’s a world away from the glossy 2014 Hollywood film, or the fancy costumes and sets that usually accompany productions of ‘Into the Woods’. Here that’s stripped away: all the better for us to see its biting undertones.
Cleansed of fairy dust, it’s essentially about the self-defeating power of human rapacity. Clad mostly in brown and white, the cast of Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld’s discretely Brechtian production – who double as the musicians – look like a rabble, a mob, or a tide of humanity, albeit a friendly, all-American one. The baker and his wife fuck over pretty much every other character in the interest of lifting a curse preventing them from having a child; the two princes indulge their whims, outrageously; the giant and his wife are robbed and slaughtered because the Jack and co believe they have the right to rob and slaughter them. In the first half they all sort of get away with it; in the second their actions rebound on them cataclysmically.
If that sounds bleak: well no, it’s utterly charming, partly because of the wordy humour of the score, partly because of the thoroughly loveable way Fiasco go about their task. If you’re not won over when cast member Jessie Austrian prefaces the show by explaining that she is pregnant but it’s important to bear in mind that the character she’ll be playing (the baker’s wife) isn’t then you’re probably at least mildly evil. If your heart isn’t subsequently melted by Andy Grotelueschen’s deadpan take on Jack’s cow Milk White, you should probably be locked away for the good of humanity.
It’s not feel-bad, then. But certainly the cast’s good nature does little to mask Sondheim’s weary sigh at humanity’s inability to come together for the common good in the face of the temptations of the material world. It’s perhaps a bit on-the-nose to say, but its final vision of a decimated mob having to clear up the appalling mess that they needlessly created feels somewhat apt in the ongoing farce of Brexit Britain.