Douglas Messerli | In and Out: Some Comments on Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods / 2025

 

in and out: some comments on sondheim and lapine’s into the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

In 2014 I saw both a stage production and the film version of Into the Woods, strangely for someone so in love with theater musicals and particularly Sondheim works as I am, long after the original Broadway production of 1988. I felt that I had been sleeping through the late 1980s when I finally saw my first production of the work on the stage of the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts based on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production of the musical masterpiece in 2014. The film flashed through my head soon after, and I fell in love. It wasn’t until 2025 that I actually got a glimpse through the 1991 PBS production of the same work of the original, which I now believe to be far superior to the two later visits I made to that Sondheim delight.

    After seeing the movie version, I did not even imagine including this work in my Queer Cinema volumes. Although I knew that some critics saw the original in 1988 as a metaphorical statement about AIDS, the woods representing the dangerous sexual world where people entered and often died, none of that had been apparent in the 2014 film nor apparently in the Wallis Center stage version.

     It wasn’t until viewing the PBS television production of 1991 that I realized that the true center of the film was the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, where a sexually confused gay boy had quite literally taken a voyage up a large erect anatomy that had suddenly sprouted in his own back yard to discover a world of giants. It is his act that brought the wrath of the giant’s wife upon the society, destroying so many of the character’s lives. And Jack, even at the end, still seeks women out as mothers instead of lovers. In Sondheim and Lapine’s work, Jack remains a permanent gay adolescent as if he were locked to some sort of Freudian notion of what homosexuality is all about.

    Yet he has also helped all the other locked-in-and-up characters the freedom to explore the world outside of their narrow folklore positions. Even the Princes discover that loving beautiful women is not always truly fulfilling and seek out one another’s company to vent their frustrations and, frankly, display their beautiful anatomies. Cinderella abandons her magical world of the castle, Rapunzel becomes frustrated for being locked away in a tower by her corrective witchy mother, and the Baker’s wife discovers, for the very first time perhaps, that she is attractive even to the most handsome of men. The poor Baker loses everything but discovers a world of new friends. And Little Red Riding Hood finally grows up to see how her innocence has nearly destroyed her life.

      I think even the Brothers Grimm might be amused to see where Lapine and Sondheim have taken their characters. These tales, as the writer and composer make clear are, after all, figures who children attend to, wonder about, attempting to unwind and reweave their actions. Folklore and the accompanying myths are those that help to make us imagine who we will grow up to be. Jack and his giants, Cinderella and her grand ball, Rapunzel and her hair, the Baker and his Wife’s much longed-for baby are what we all were as children, imagining the world which we were about to enter. Are we pretty enough? Willing to explore worlds we never imagined existing? Do we want the ordinary joys of a family life? Children do listen, and wonder, and imagine.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).