Phamaly's Into the Woods

[KathyB]

Phamaly is a theatre company of actors with disabilities--mostly physical (they used to be called the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League until they ditched the acronym a few years ago), but also developmental and mental. They produce around four plays a year and have been doing their summer musical for 29 years. They always do a fantastic job and leave me with a new respect for actors of all abilities, and how anybody can be cast in a part if the audience and director just open their minds a bit.

The Narrator was a deaf actor who used ASL to narrate the show, while an ensemble of young actors interpreted what he was saying for the audience. I wasn't sure how well this feature worked--at times I thought it was brilliant, while at other times I had a hard time following and figuring out who was talking, perhaps because of the sound design, where it was at times difficult to determine who was saying what out of the mikes. The Narrator was very flamboyant in his gestures, which he had to be in order to be noticed, and in order to become so obnoxious that the other characters sacrifice him to the Giant. One thing that did work brilliantly was at the end, with the remaining cast standing in place and signing part of "Children Will Listen" while the entire theatre was silent. 

The production had a very large cast--as mentioned before, there was an ensemble of five actors, and also an actor playing Milky White, the hen, and the harp (who doubled as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White). That was the only doubling of parts, as the Mysterious Man, Wolf, Cinderella's Prince and Narrator were all separate. (Three actors also ran across stage as the Three Little Pigs, which did not work for me, because there really wasn't any point of them being there and they distracted from the Wolf's song.) There were a few times, at the conclusion of each act, when it seemed like all the actors were on stage together, and it was amazing how it was choreographed so that no one ran into each other, as there were a number of wheelchairs, mobility devices, and canes being used, not to mention some cumbersome props, like Milky-White's body.

The woods were represented by open frames with stylized tree branches at top, which worked pretty well as a solution for how to stage the woods in the round. On the whole, this was a wonderful production, if not quite as fantastic as the imaginative version I saw at the Old Globe in 2014. It had the best Granny entrance ever, a kind of a dud Giant death scene (I kind of figured this would be problematic, as the theatre was in the round and there wasn't a really good way to stage it so it could be seen from all angles, so they just showed a huge hand dropping to the floor). Fantastic Baker's Wife and Cinderella (who were two of the three Equity actors in the production). But the best part, as always, was how it opened my eyes to actors of all types. Florinda was actually blind. The Baker's Wife used a wheelchair and Jack a walker, yet they both zipped around stage so that I hardly noticed the devices. Apparently Phamaly had been wanting to do Into the Woods for ten years, and had a problem getting the rights because too many other companies in the area were staging it. I'm glad I had a chance to see what they did with the material.