INTO THE WOODS

[DiveMilw]

Wow, and if Woods were to persist into the spring AND Merrily were to arrange a speedy transfer uptown from NYTW, there could potentially even be three Sondheims on B'way at once, which I'm pretty sure would be a first.

Ooo!  That would be very exciting and warrant a trip to NYC.  

[scenicdesign71]

The 2022 B'way cast recording has arrived on Amazon, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, etc.

[scenicdesign71]

There's now an Into The Woods poster on the Metro North train platform literally a hundred feet from our shop at work (and visible from our loading door).  It might have gone up anytime within the past week — I've been on location all day every day since last Wednesday, so I just saw the poster upon finally returning to the studio this morning.

Unfortunately, at the top of the poster it says "FINAL EXTENSION through January 8 only".  So I guess we won't be getting that Sondheim trifecta on B'way this spring.

[scenicdesign71]

Signature's new revival may not be perfect (according to Peter Marks, linked below), but I'm intrigued by Lee Savage's design concept, blurring the psychic geography of "into the woods/out of the woods" in the unit set of an overgrown cottage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/11/18/into-the-woods-sondheim-signature/

Plenty of ITWs have played with juxtapositions of inside and outside, culture and nature, architecture and wilderness -- sometimes framing the evening within a domestic interior (often a nursery or children's playroom) that opens up, breaks apart, reveals or is taken over by forest at various points in the story.

What interests me about this one is that it seems to place the entire narrative in an (I'm guessing, from the photos, fairly static) environment where such juxtapositions have already advanced to a point of signal ambiguity; where those binaries have long since proven unstable, been thoroughly scrambled, and aren't likely to be reestablished as tidily distinct categories anytime in the foreseeable future.

[Leighton]

Oh I love that set!

[scenicdesign71]

...I'm intrigued by Lee Savage's design concept [for Signature's revival], blurring the psychic geography of blah blah blah

Oh I love that set!

Here's another:  Into The Woods at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora, IL.

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I've been looking at production shots on FB, posted by the lighting designer Jose Santiago, and admiring how the designers have merged scenery and projections into a unified vision of wild Pre-Raphaelite lushness.  Judging by Mr. Santiago's photos, the finished production does full justice to set designer Jeffrey Kmiec's rendering (above).

The challenge here, which they seem to have met impressively, is in seamlessly blending projected backgrounds with dimensional scenery for an illusion of deep, dense forest that goes on forever (that density actually reminds me a bit of Tony Straiges's initial concept sketch for the B'way original); and I can imagine the Giant, and her destruction of the woods in Act 2, being fiercely plausible as cinema-style projections (by Paul Deziel) seen through the couple-dozen "real" foreground trees and towers that Mr. Santiago has lit so beautifully.

As ITWs go, this one appears to be more eye-candy than high-concept, but it's wonderfully effective on those terms, and as a feat of collaboration it looks to have been very successful indeed.