Into the Woods

From ChatGPT

"Into the Woods" is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. The show combines elements of several fairy tales, including "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and "Jack and the Beanstalk," and explores what happens after "happily ever after." The musical premiered on Broadway in 1987 and starred Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason. The show features a number of memorable songs, including "No One Is Alone," "Children Will Listen," and "Agony." "Into the Woods" is widely regarded as one of the great works of American musical theater and has been praised for its innovative structure, complex characters, and rich exploration of themes like family, morality, and the consequences of our actions. The show was a critical and commercial success and won a number of Tony Awards, including Best Score and Best Book. In addition to its success on Broadway, "Into the Woods" has also been adapted into a successful film and has been produced in theaters around the world. Its memorable songs and powerful storytelling continue to captivate audiences today and have helped to secure its place as a classic of the genre.}

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Authors

Original Authors

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Book
...
Music and Lyrics

Later Contributors

There are no known writers who contributed to revisions, etc. following the original production.
Genre: Musical Play

Score

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

Cut prior to opening

Added to London production

Listed as a musical number in some productions

Listed as a separate number in some productions and on some recordings

Studio Cast Recordings

No studio cast recordings listed.

Demos & Pre-Production Recordings

  • No demo recordings listed yet.

From ChatGPT

"Into the Woods" is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. The show combines elements of several fairy tales, including "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and "Jack and the Beanstalk," and explores what happens after "happily ever after." The musical premiered on Broadway in 1987 and starred Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason. The show features a number of memorable songs, including "No One Is Alone," "Children Will Listen," and "Agony." "Into the Woods" is widely regarded as one of the great works of American musical theater and has been praised for its innovative structure, complex characters, and rich exploration of themes like family, morality, and the consequences of our actions. The show was a critical and commercial success and won a number of Tony Awards, including Best Score and Best Book. In addition to its success on Broadway, "Into the Woods" has also been adapted into a successful film and has been produced in theaters around the world. Its memorable songs and powerful storytelling continue to captivate audiences today and have helped to secure its place as a classic of the genre.}

More

Authors

Original Authors

...
Book
...
Music and Lyrics

Later Contributors

There are no known writers who contributed to revisions, etc. following the original production.
Genre: Musical Play

Source

No source listed.

Synopsis

In Into the Woods, a witch's curse condemns the Baker and his Wife to a life without children. They embark on a quest to find the four items required to break the spell: the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold. Will they succeed? And what happens after 'happily ever after?'

Trivia & History

A misconception about Into the Woods is that the authors were inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's book The Uses of Enchantment. It's worth looking into the sources of this misconception and what Sondheim and Lapine have said about whether Bettelheim's book influenced the creation of the show.

Some Sources of This Misconception

Before Into the Woods started previews on Broadway, there was an article on it in the Sunday New York Times that included this passage:

"As he worked on fleshing out the individual characters, Mr. Lapine not only drew on his own knowledge of Freud and Jung (one of his early plays, 'Twelve Dreams,' explored, among other things, the split between the two schools of analytic theory), he also read studies by such authors as the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, the Jungian theorist Marie-Louise von Franz and folklorists Iona and Peter Opie."

Frank Rich's review of the original Broadway production also mentioned Bettelheim:

"One needn't necessarily have read Bruno Bettelheim's classic Freudian analysis to realize that, in remaking Grimm stories, Mr. Sondheim's lyrics and Mr. Lapine's book tap into the psychological mother lode from which so much of life and literature spring."

When the commercial video of the original Broadway production was first broadcast on PBS, there was a segment in which Sondheim and Lapine were interviewed by Edwin Newman. Lapine himself mentioned Bettelheim in this interview.

"One of the reasons I liked writing it was because as I read the fairy tales as an adult, I could see how you could take the opposite point of view, you could read Bettelheim and find out the great message that they have but you could also read 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and look at Jack as something of a thief, and Cinderella as an imposter."

Betteleheim was also mentioned in passing in Stephen Banfield's article in the souvenir program for the original London production. In Craig Zadan's Sondheim &. Co., we find this: "Lapine consulted a psychologist and read studies like Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment."

Lapine's Negative View of Bettelheim

In a 1988 issue of the Performing Arts Journal, however, Lapine said something that suggested he took a negative view of Bettelheim's book:

"The Narrator is what the fairy tale is about. I tried telling the stories without a narrator and it just doesn't work. . . . Ultimately, we defined our narrator as a kind of intellectual, a Bettelheim figure; I wanted to get rid of Bettelheim!"

Statements From Sondheim in 1994 and 2006

Sondheim addressed the Bettelheim assumption in 1994, when he was interviewed by James Lipton for the TV series Inside the Actors Studio. Lipton brought up Bettelheim.

Lipton: There seems to be a philosophical war in that musical between the theories of Bruno Bettelheim and Jung.

Sondheim: It’s interesting you say that. Everybody assumes we were influenced by Bruno Bettelheim. But if there’s any outside influence, it’s Jung. James is interested in Jung. Twelve Dreams is based on a case Jung wrote about. In fact, we spoke to a Jungian analyst about fairy tales.

On page 2 of a 2006 interview with Edward Seckerson, we find this from Sondheim:
 
"[W]e took a Jungian approach. You know, this whole thing about how we based it on Bruno Bettelheim is nonsense — it’s nothing to do with Bettelheim. In fact, I don’t know if James read the book. I didn’t."
 
Look, I Made a Hat
 
Sondheim addressed the Bettelheim assumption again in Look, I Made a Hat. On page 58, he wrote:
 
"And, ah, the woods. The all-purpose symbol of the unconscious, the womb, the past, the dark place where we face our trials and emerge wiser or destroyed, a major theme in Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which is the book everyone assumes we used as a source, simply because it's the only book on the subject known to a wide public. But Bettelheim's insistent point was that childen would find fairy tales useful in part because the young protagonists' tribulations always resulted in triumph, the happily ever after. What interested James was the little dishonesties that enabled the characters to reach their happy endings. . . . James was also skeptical about the possibility of 'happily ever after' in real life and wary of the danger that fairy tales give children false expectations. As his play Twelve Dreams has demonstrated, he was drawn not to Bettelheim's Freudian approach but to Carl Jung's theory that fairy tales are an indication of the collective unconscious, something with which Bettelheim would be unlikely to agree. James and I talked about the fairy tales with a Jungian psychiatrist and discovered that with the exception of 'Jack and the Beanstalk,' which apparently is native only to the British Isles, the tales we were dealing with exist in virtually every culture in the world."

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