Indy Theatre Habit

Last year, when I interviewed local costume designer Stephen Hollenbeck for a “Conversation With” post, he mentioned a musical called “Into the Woods.” I had never heard of that show before, but what Stephen (and later, others) said about it intrigued me because it seemed to be about the many layers of meaning that are embedded in folk and fairy tales, and about what happens after “and they lived happily ever after.”  As an oral tradition storyteller myself, these two topics have fascinated me for decades.

So…I am very glad that I got to see Butler Lyric Theatre’s production, directed by D. Scott Robinson*, in the Broad Ripple High School auditorium last Thursday night.

It was an odd yet ultimately exhilarating experience.  The first act was just “meh” but the second act was “wow!”   I think that my mixed experience of the show may have been due to a number of factors related to both this production and the show itself.

“Into the Woods” – the piece itself

The show itself, whose music and lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim with book by James Lapine, is now on my “See Any Chance I Get” list.  It is the first show on my list.  Before this, my list included only certain playwrights.

The structure of this show is as fascinating to me as, well, as folk tales.

In the first act, we are dropped into several folk tales that we probably at least sort of recognize, even if the only version we have ever experienced is Disney’s.  However, these presentations are (to my relief) not based on Disney’s bowlderizations. 

For example, when Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters are being mean to her, she gets some solace by consulting the spirit of her mother, who is now held in a tree.  Later, when the Prince comes calling to ask the ladies of the house to try on the slipper that he is certain fits his anonymous beloved, the Stepmother encourages her daughters to cut off parts of their feet in order to make the slipper “fit.”  Cinderella has to empty their blood from the slipper before she can try it on her own foot.

The stories are connected to each other by being in The Woods.  Little Red Riding Hood visits the Baker and his Wife to get goodies to take to her ailing Grandmother.  The Baker and his Wife are cursed with childlessness because he stole some rampion for her from a neighbor’s garden.  The enraged neighbor (a Witch) says that she will remove the curse if the Baker can get the four items that she needs in order to become young and beautiful again and win back the girl, Rapunzel, that she had had trapped in her tower.  One of the items is a white cow.  A kind-hearted but dim-witted boy named Jack happens to be on his way through the woods to market to sell his white cow.  And so on.

The first act has to accomplish three things.  It has to a) remind us of these traditional stories, b) make us see that not only are the themes of these stories timeless, the stories themselves are always going on all over in the timelessness of The Woods, and c) make us gradually realize that these supposedly self-contained stories are all actually connected.  This is a lot to accomplish, but each one of these stories is packed with psychological meat just waiting to be unpacked and chewed on.  I think the opportunity is also there for the audience to come away with a deep, satisfying connection to the individual, traditional stories, if the performers have done enough work with them during the rehearsal process, perhaps with an oral tradition storyteller.

In other words, there is a danger, I think, for people to see the first act as merely a long set-up for the second act, but it is not.  The first act ends with “and they lived happily ever after.”  There is a reason that most folk tales end this way: it triggers people to feel satisfied, at least for the moment.

At this point in the show, then, the audience members look at their programs and think, “Wait a minute.  This is only intermission.  But I feel complete.  Wasn’t everything wrapped up in the first act?  What else could possibly happen?”

The comfort of the first act allows for a healthy curiosity going into the second act.

In the second act, people continue to make mistakes, fall in love, go on quests, fail and succeed and so on, but it is automatically more interesting – more thrilling, more anxiety-producing, more exciting, more enjoyable – because the characters are now more experienced, more self-aware and more compassionate.  They may still go ahead and kill the giant that threatens their well-being, but they do so with more acknowledgment that she is a living creature, too, with feelings of her own and people who love her and stand by her just as they have.

The second act is also inherently more interesting because we no longer imagine that we know all there is to know about the stories.  We no longer have any idea about how the stories are going to proceed, much less how they are going to end. 

Also the songs are better in the second act.

We also realize in the second act that there is really no such thing as “the end.”  The giant that had threatened everyone may now be dead, but what’s going to happen to her corpse?  Is everyone going to get sick from the diseases the flies bring?  Did the giant have children that are now going to come down from the sky seeking revenge?  And even if the giant issue gets resolved, what will happen next to Cinderella and the Baker and all the rest of the characters?   Will they go even deeper into The Woods immediately or will some of them stay put for a while?  Either way, what is the point of each of their lives? 

The second act ends, not with “And they lived happily ever after” but with an admonition to be careful what you wish for and yet also a hopeful “I wish…” 

I think I love this show so much because it is so much like life.

The Butler Lyric Theatre’s Production

While I was waiting for the show to begin last Thursday night, I wrote a few tweets via my iPhone for @IndyTheatre on Twitter.  In one of them, I wondered about the partnership between Butler Lyric Theatre and Broad Ripple High School.  AroundIndy.com’s manager, Bob Burchfield, sent me a link to an article on his website that discussed it.  (Thanks, Bob!)  Unfortunately, I think that link has since expired.  This one also gives info about the partnership.

Then came the show itself.  The first act was, as I mentioned earlier, just okay.  I jotted notes in my notebook because that’s what I do, but at intermission I thought, “I am having a pretty good time, and I will stay for the second act, but I do not feel an urge to write about any of this.  Thank goodness I did not get in on a media pass.”

However, the second act knocked me over.  I felt much more engaged.  I wept during several of the songs.  I did not stand to applaud at the end, but I did applaud vigorously and with a big, satisfied smile on my face.

Beyond the structure of the show itself, here are three possible reasons for why my experiences of the two acts were so different:

1)   School Production

In the first act, maybe I was still recalibrating to the fact that this is a school production. 

A school production is usually different from a professional production or even a community theatre production NOT because the performers are not talented – in this case they certainly were! – but because they are all pretty much the same age – in this case, in their late teens or early 20s – but the characters they play are supposed to be from several different generations.  Whenever anyone referred to The Mysterious Old Man in this show, for example, I was jarred out of the story because although the actor was wearing a grey wig, he was obviously not old. 

Granted, folk tale characters are supposed to have a certain timeless, ageless quality, but still.

(And I don’t mean to be picking on the actor who played The Mysterious Man.  Nobody who was supposed to be someone older actually came across as older.)

I don’t know enough about acting or directing to know if it is even possible for people in their late teens or early 20s to convincingly portray characters that are supposed to be not just in their 40s or 80s but also “older and wiser” or “older and more scarred.”  I don’t mean to be age-ist.  I doubt whether I would buy people in their 80s portraying 20-year-olds, either.  Maybe I would, given the right circumstances, I don’t know.  I do know that in most school productions that I’ve seen, it doesn’t happen.  You know going in that it is probably not going to happen, so you recalibrate your expectations and enjoy the show anyway.  I don’t mention any of this as a criticism or complaint, just as an observation.

Anyway, maybe the time the second act started, I had recalibrated my expectations.

2)   The Set’s Opening Night Jitters

But also, maybe it was the set.

The set for this production was very cool but it seemed to have a mind of its own, even though it was designed by Broad Ripple High School stage manager Troy Trinkle, lit by technical director Cathy Sipe, stage managed for the Lyric Theatre by Megan Fletcher, and constructed by the Broad Ripple High School Technical Theatre Department, with Charla Booth on the light board and several Broad Ripple High School students serving as deck hands, spotlight operators, and assistant lighting and sound engineers.

The set evoked the shadowy, layered feeling of The Woods in a very stylized way.  It included one huge piece that at first glance appeared simple but which was actually quite intricate and clever.  The base of it, I think, was a group of tall staircases on wheels, or maybe a combination of staircases and other scaffolding on wheels.  The decorated parts could be pulled apart and put back together again in a multitude of ways.

As I say, it was very cool, but during the first act, I could almost hear the set calling out, “We are in the land of folk tales where objects have voices, too.  I have a voice, too!  And what I’m telling you is that I am the real diva here!  Pay attention to me!  Pay attention to me…”

That show-offy set caught at actors’ costumes, snagging the actors in place when they were trying to run away.  It squeezed them and tripped them as they tried to climb up and over and down its narrow paths.  It tickled the backs of their necks with microphones hanging from its ceiling.

But the actors must have been doing some communicating of their own – either whispering things like “Sweet Set, I do see you!  I love you!  I need you!” or hissing things like “Set, bro, calm the f*ck down!  We’re all in this together!” or a combination of both – because by the second act, the set had settled down and become part of the team.  Still fabulous, but much easier to live with.

By the way, the costumes, which were designed and constructed by Karen Witting, must have been given a lot of praise and attention before the show started, because they behaved themselves and were calmly gorgeous the whole time.

3)   Voice Majors

But the main reason the second act was so different from the first act in Butler Lyric Theatre’s production on Thursday night might have been something to do with the director’s Facebook status that afternoon.  It came up in my feed as “Scott Robinson is reminding everyone to bring their pickles.” 

I think they were magic pickles and everyone ate them back stage during intermission.

At some point during the first act, it struck me that what I was really watching was a showcase for voice majors, not a presentation of a story.  Mind you, it was a pleasure to hear all of the beautiful, and beautifully trained, voices, but it wasn’t particularly engaging, if that makes sense.  People had memorized where they were supposed to stand and they had perfectly learned their songs and lines and how they were supposed to deliver them, but it didn’t seem as if they had dug into any of the emotional content very deeply or, paradoxically, let go enough to give the characters room to be themselves.  I wondered if the performers had ever read the original pithy stories from which their characters had been taken.  And, with a few exceptions, they didn’t seem to be fully present and they didn’t seem to be interacting with each other.

In the second act, however, it was as if they had eaten their magic pickles, and forgotten they were voice majors.  They had even forgotten they were on a stage.  They now inhabited their iconic characters and had joined each other in their shared story. 

The contrast was as great as that.  Magic happened in the second act. 

Songs and Orchestra

If I had been judging this show for the Encore Association of community theatres, I would have nominated every single song and every single singer in the second act for the “Best Musical Number” award.  I’ll just mention two in particular:

I had set my notebook on the floor during intermission, but I compulsively picked it back up to note the satisfying complexity in Katy Merriman’s rendition of a song sung by the Baker’s Wife called “Moments in The Woods.”  She has just had an unexpected fling with Cinderella’s Prince (Jon Tigert) and is trying to sort out her feelings.

Later, Cinderella (Rachel Anderson), Little Red Riding Hood (Jordan McKee), the Baker (Ben Wright), and Jack (Kevin Masterson) sing a reassuring yet haunting wake-up call entitled “No One Is Alone.”

The orchestra, nestled in the pit in front of the stage, sounded great the whole time.  David Rugger conducted with firm precision.  I don’t really know anything about conducting, but I say “firm precision” because I happened to be sitting right behind him as he faced the orchestra.  I could see the way he lifted his baton arm ahead of time to alert a musician that something tricky was coming up, and then brought it down with exactly the amount of vigor that he wanted from the sound, at exactly the right moment.  I am not describing it very well, but I think that if I had been one of the musicians in his orchestra, I would have appreciated the clarity of his conducting.

All of the sixteen(?) orchestra members sounded good, as I say, but I especially appreciated the work of the percussionist, Zane Merritt.  I loved that “Into the Woods” uses a lot of live percussion – rather than recorded sounds – to embellish the storytelling.

Box Office

Unfortunately, this show only ran for one weekend, so it is too late for you to go see it yourself.  My program says that the Butler Lyric Theatre’s next production will be Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” on April 16-18, location to be announced.

*Update 11/20/09 – My first draft of this review ran 20 pages which was, even for me, much too long, so I cut quite a bit.  I cut a sentence that said that I also wanted to see this show because I had loved Scott Robinson’s direction of “Honk” and “Grey Gardens” for the Buck Creek Players.  I have decided to put that sentence back, here at the end.  I couldn’t write about “Grey Gardens” when I saw it because I was judging it for the Encore Association of community theatres, but it impressed the heck out of me.  There.  I said it.

‘See you in The Woods and in the theatres!

Hope Baugh – www.IndyTheatreHabit.com