Talking about Into the Woods
On April 12, one week into rehearsals for Into the Woods, Don Cohen spoke with director Rick Lombardo and several members of the cast, including Leigh Barrett (Baker’s Wife), Nancy E. Carroll (Witch), Evan Harrington (Baker), and Todd Alan Johnson (Wolf, Cinderella’s Prince).
Cohen: You’re one week into three weeks of rehearsal. Do you have a sense of where you want to be at this point?
Lombardo: I don’t tend to think that way very often any more. I know where I want to be at the end, but the longer you do this, the more you trust in the process. It’s not about having to have a run-through at the end of the second week. If you get the right artists in the room, it will unfold at its own pace.
Carroll: At the first rehearsal of Threepenny Opera, with the entire cast assembled, Rick said, “I don’t know what we’re doing.” That was very comforting because you could say, “OK, then we’ll go along for the ride.” At least in the beginning, 90 percent of what we do is wrong, is experimentation. You don’t do a scene and expect it to be that same next time. It’s just, “Well, that was one shot.” We don’t even say, “I’m going to change that.” It’s expected that you adjust.
Johnson: In situations like this, with two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal and a few days of tech, most directors wouldn’t allow a period of exploration. What’s really refreshing is that we’re trusting in the process; we trust that everything is going to land and this is going to be a cohesive whole. If we have trust, we can risk with each other. If you get up on stage and you’re afraid, you don’t get to explore as fully as you could. If you don’t explore, then the audience gets ripped off. I think Rick understands that the audience comes first. So whatever pays off for us during this process is ultimately going to pay off for the audience. That’s the real reward: making something really great happen. Rick will see which direction we’re going and let it wander, then rein it back in. He’s very open to suggestion. It’s pretty rare, in my experience, to find someone at the helm who isn’t trying to do it by themselves and force everyone else to take their line.
Lombardo: It can’t work that way. If a director has a very specific idea of how a particular role needs to be played and tries to cast someone to fulfill that idea, he gets into rehearsal and tries to give them all these notes to make them do it that way. In some instance, when directors get really frustrated, they try to show somebody how to do it in a certain way. The performance is going to be empty, devoid of life. It will have a shape that is maybe what they imagined, but it’s not going to be a living, breathing piece of theater. I feel lucky because I get to go to work every day with really creative people, and I get to pick and choose from the things that they create and say, “Yeah, that’ll work” or “Maybe not that one; let’s try something else.” I think it’s incredibly laborious to try to give somebody a performance and almost always fails. What works is coaching a performance out of somebody—the performance that’s in them.
Cohen: Have some of you done this show before?
Harrington: I have. Eight years ago.
Cohen: Playing the same role?
Harrington: Yes, in college, so it was a lot different. I’m trying to make it as fresh for me and everyone as I can, trying to go with these artists that I’ve come to know.
Cohen: Does playing familiar fairy tale characters affect how you play these roles?
Barrett: You don’t sit down with your child and say, “Let’s read about the Baker and his wife.” I’ve felt that the reason things aren’t working for the Baker and his Wife is that they don’t really fit in this fairy tale world. They are real people, not fairy tale characters.
Johnson: Even though the characters that I’m playing are very overblown, my challenge is to—well, first my challenge is to learn the music—but then my challenge is to find how to create the truth inside these overblown characters.
Cohen: The Wolf is very much an archetypal figure.
Johnson: He is, but it’s so much more interesting when the audience can relate to him. We’ve had the good fortune, with these last three musicals, to have smart material. We’re not working with intrinsically flawed stuff; this is stuff that we can build on. A lot of theatre companies tend to fall back on classics that don’t have a lot of meat or shows that are so flawed it’s very hard to make them right.
Barrett: Or they settle for what’s on the surface.
Johnson: Or you have a creative team that isn’t willing to dive beneath the surface and bring more to it than is on the page because they’re lazy or burned out.
Lombardo: You have to respect Sondheim’s writing. I’m starting to think that 100 years from now we’re going to look back at his creative output and recognize him as the American Shakespeare. I don’t say that lightly. His understanding of the use of language and rhythm to communicate really important ideas in the English language may be second only to Shakespeare.
Cohen: Have you been influenced by earlier productions?
Lombardo: I think the original productions become thought of as seminal and folks try to recreate them. Someone might remember that Joanna Gleason did a moment this way—what was that line reading and how did she get that laugh? I think that always leads to dead productions.
Cohen: Nancy, playing the Witch, do you have to steer between the performance of Bernadette Peters on one hand and the clichéd fairy tale witch on the other?
Carroll: I say that ignorance is bliss. I had never heard the score to Sweeney Todd; I’d never seen a production of it; I didn’t know the music. So I didn’t have to worry about being Angela Lansbury. Same with this. Somebody said, “Have you seen the video?” No, and I don’t want to. It won’t help me. I’m looking at what’s on the page. I’ve been looking for a voice for the witch over the weekend. I watched Alice in Wonderland and 101 Dalmatians. Finally I thought, go to the source, go to a child; they know more about fairy tales than anyone. I have a five-year-old niece, “Bwidget.” I asked her who the scariest witch was. She said, “Sweeping Bwooty.” I watched Sweeping Bwooty and thought, there’s a voice, there’s a pace that I can start to use. I could also sing in that voice.
Lombardo: A lot of people doing Into the Woods start doing the Witch lines like Bernadette. I didn’t know that you’d never seen the show, Nancy, but I knew that was not the way you would approach this role. Even if she had heard Bernadette do it, she wasn’t going to come in and sound the way Bernadette sounded.
Carroll: That is what is expected a lot of times. When you create something new, you open yourself to people saying, “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
Harrington: That happens with this show more than with others. This one and Sweeney, because Bernadette Peters and Angela Lansbury are known for playing these roles.
Lombardo: I think it was because these shows were broadcast. They weren’t just seen by “X” number of people in the theater.
Barrett: Curse you, PBS!
Johnson: The directors of a lot of these other productions either aren’t smart enough or they don’t understand, so they lean on those productions. They think, “This is so complex, I’m not going to try to figure out how it works. I’m going to look at the videotape and do that.”
Lombardo: When I was a young director, my first exposure to musicals was working on new musicals, either as an assistant or as a director. So my experience with musical theater wasn’t ever in recreating a production; it was being in the room with the creator and seeing how people put musicals together. When you have that experience, you realize that the script is merely an artifact, the end result of a process of trial and error where some bad decisions and some good decisions were made. Plays often are not changed very much in rehearsal; I’ve never worked on a new musical that wasn’t vastly overhauled—for good or for bad. Working on Broadway as an assistant, I saw musicals get ruined. I remember how wonderful one particular show was at the final run-through in the rehearsal hall. Four months later, after a long-delayed preview process, it was horrible. Almost every decision made in the commercial theater to improve the show made it worse. So I open the script and say, “OK, this is a new piece. This is the first day of rehearsal. How do you make this work? And what parts of it should go because they don’t work?”
Cohen: I’ve seen shows ruined because of anxiety about keeping audience entertained every second.
Johnson: They’re also afraid of offending someone. They call it “expanding the appeal,” which basically means watering it down to the point where it wouldn’t offend the most sensitive soul.
Carroll: Rick knows his audience. They like being challenged; they like seeing things in a new light and a new way.
Johnson: I think every audience craves that.
Lombardo: I think a really good example of this problem is Ragtime, which we’re producing and which I’m directing next season. It’s a show that became over-bloated in an attempt to take what is a very dark, edgy, challenging narrative and give it a lot of production numbers and lightness and bounce so that it felt like this big Broadway spectacular.
Johnson: Rick likes dark.
Lombardo: The more I look at it, the more I know I want to find a way to pull the focus back down into the story of the characters. I’m going to see if some of what I perceive as excess grafted on can be teased away from it and maybe get to a more solid core. I don’t think one does that to Into the Woods because it is distilled down to the core. The unique challenge to the director of Into the Woods is that the first act and the second act seem so different in tone and feel. If you don’t find a way to plant the seeds of Act Two in Act One and find moments in Act Two that relate back to Act One, you run the risk of making the audience feel that they’re watching two entirely different shows. This is a problem present in both of the Sondheim-Lapine shows. Sunday is the same way.
Harrington: That was one of the things that people didn’t like about it. People wanted to walk out; they thought Sunday in the Park should be done after the first act. People said that about Into the Woods. In fact, children’s versions are only the first act.
Cohen: To me, some of the warmth and humanity of the fairy tale world does seep into the second act. The whole show is warmer than some of Sondheim.
Carroll: I think this is his most heart-felt show
Barrett: And most hopeful.
Carroll: Of all of his shows, this one reinforces these core values of family and community. How do you make family? How do you make community?
Barrett: I felt those themes of family and community in Sweeney Todd.
Carroll: The family that eats together stays together.
Cohen: Is doing Sondheim’s music especially challenging?
Carroll: I think Into the Woods is harder than Sweeney Todd.
Barrett: I echo that. It is the hardest one I’ve worked on.
Johnson: There is no ensemble in Into the Woods. Everyone is a very specific character with their own stories. You have numbers where everybody echoes what has been going on with them personally. The way it’s put together is ingenious, but it’s hard.
Barrett: We all have our little moments, but your moment comes out of somebody else’s. All the finales are interwoven with other people. Even if my story doesn’t have anything to do with Little Red’s story, we’re going to meet up at some point and my musical part has to something to do with what she’s just done. We’re all individuals, but we find out in the end that we are all connected in some way and dependent on each other.
Harrington: By the end of the first midnight sequence, everyone is toppling over each other. It creates that mood of tension and then breaks off into Jack’s number. It’s like organized chaos.
Lombardo: I think Sondheim, better than anyone else in the music theater, finds a way to make the notes, the chords, the rhythms, and the words a perfect expression of thought and feeling. They communicate an inner reality. You don’t feel, here’s the scene and here’s the song.
Harrington: All of his characters have individual, specific feelings, regardless of their voice types. You don’t get the big 11 o’clock number.
Lombardo: The songs sound the way the characters think.
Johnson: The emotion of the scene is supported wholly by what’s happening with the music.
Lombardo: The interesting irony of Sondheim’s career is that he’s tried to write these shows in the commercial arena, with lots of glorious failures—glorious shows that were commercial failures. Later in his career he started creating some shows in the not-for-profit arena, out of Playwrights Horizons. It was hard enough in the sixties, seventies, and eighties for this type of show to find its way to Broadway and find an audience on Broadway. Look at what Broadway has become now—all these jukebox musicals. There’s the new Elvis one now.
Harrington: But there’s always some gem: the Avenue Qs that shock you and give you faith there are things that are still going to be creative, and Spelling Bee is supposed to be hysterical. Actually that’s another James Lapine show. A lot of Sondheim’s work is commercially a failure, but people who are involved in theater probably know more Sondheim lyrics and shows than anything else.
Lombardo: His music spans contemporary serious music and musical theater. He’s got one foot in each camp. One camp doesn’t sell; one camp does. His stories and his themes are on both sides of the fence too. It’s Grimms’ fairy tales or it’s the demon barber of Fleet Street, which was a penny dreadful. His whole career has been about having one foot in popular art and one foot in serious art and trying to find if there’s a way to bring those together.