Once More Into the Woods

On the ground floor of his plush, five-story Turtle Bay townhouse, next door to one owned by Katharine Hepburn, Stephen Sondheim relaxes on his couch, with a drink, in his slippers. He is talking at the moment about “uplift songs,” a subcategory of show tune for which he is not best known.

His innately mixed feelings on the subject of stirring, pulse-pounding anthems in the vein of “Climb Every Mountain” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” are clear in the way the phrase “uplift songs” slips out of the side of his mouth, quickly. Like an olive pit.

Sondheim has written a few uplift songs in his day, depending on the needs of the show (“Being Alive” from “Company”) and the mood of its characters (“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow,” ironically deployed in “Follies”). Such deceptively optimistic tunes coming from the famously mordant composer and lyricist, however, tend not to sound like Jerry “Hello, Dolly!” Herman’s uplift. Or anybody else’s.

With Sondheim, who has spent fruitful decade after decade giving melody and voice to the contradiction, complexity and yearning in his subjects, reassurance usually carries a reminder that things can change in a world with, as one Sondheim lyric has it, so little to be sure of.

One of Sondheim’s few true Broadway popular successes, the multifarious fairy-tale saga “Into the Woods,” has become one of the last quarter-century’s more visible and widely produced musicals. A Broadway-bound revival opens today at the Ahmanson Theatre.

In April, Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center launches a “Sondheim Celebration” composed of major revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Sweeney Todd,” “A Little Night Music,” “Company,” “Passion” and “Sunday in the Park With George.” Continuing through the summer, it also includes a Japanese-language production of “Pacific Overtures” and a one-act children’s version of “Into the Woods.”

It’s enough to make anyone feel appreciated. Seventy-one next month, Sondheim can look back at a lifetime of musicals that, in most cases, in one way or another, mattered like no one else’s.

Yet for any front-rank artist, it’s the next project that nags and cajoles. And for months now, Sondheim hasn’t been able to get to second base on the long, long awaited project, originally called “Wise Guys.”

Until Feb. 1, the new show, lately retitled “Gold!” but due for one more title change, found Sondheim and librettist John Weidman (“Pacific Overtures” and “Assassins,” as well as the non-Sondheim “Contact”) in a heated legal dispute with Hollywood and Broadway producer Scott Rudin over who holds the commercial rights to the property.

Now that the matter is resolved, the world is likely to get its first new Sondheim musical since “Passion” in 1994. “Gold!” also marks a reunion of Sondheim and director Harold Prince: They last collaborated on “Merrily We Roll Along” 20 years ago. “Gold!” is about the once-notorious Mizner Brothers--one an architect, the other a con man--whose pursuit of the American Dream, Sondheim says, represents a chance to “do a romp through history.”

But for now, the focus is on “Into the Woods,” written by Sondheim and librettist-director James Lapine in the mid-’80s, when the Reagan revolution was in full force.

The show features various Grimm brothers transplants--Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the giant--occupying the same once-upon-a-time landscape. To these, Lapine adds a baker and his wife longing for a child, plagued by the witch next door. This enchantress, played in the revival by Vanessa Williams, has put a curse on the baker’s house. She promises to lift it only if four things come her way: a cow as white as milk; a cape as red as blood; hair as yellow as corn; and a slipper as pure as gold.

How these items are found, whose fates they affect and what deceptions are practiced by whom leads “Into the Woods” to a happy ending. For Act 1, that is. In Act 2, the widow of a slain giant (the one relating to Jack and the beanstalk) seeks revenge. Wishes granted begin to curdle.

The second act, Sondheim says, “deals with the consequences of the first. It’s about transgression, about people who in their own little selfish ways cause a holocaust.”

And then comes the show’s most comforting song, “No One Is Alone.” Too simple, some say--comforting in a facile way. Yet the song, free of bombast, an uplifter with integrity, regularly reduces audiences to tears. When the Broadway-bound revival of “Into the Woods,” now in previews at the Ahmanson, opens at the Broadhurst Theatre in Manhattan on April 29, it’s a good bet that New York City theatergoers--in varying states of post-Sept. 11 anxiety--will react more strongly than ever to Sondheim’s lyrics:

Sometimes people leave you

Halfway through the wood.

Do not let it grieve you.

No one leaves for good.

You are not alone.

No one is alone.

Reviving and revising “Into the Woods,” meantime, wasn’t Sondheim’s idea. “It was James’,” Sondheim says of Lapine, Sondheim’s collaborator on “Sunday in the Park With George” (about pointillist painter Georges Seurat) and “Passion” (inspired by the film “Passion d’Amore”) as well as “Into the Woods.”

True to the librettist’s lot in life and in show biz, Lapine’s isn’t the name most closely associated with “Into the Woods.” Sondheim’s name is, because Sondheim is Sondheim is Sondheim. He is the American musical theater’s greatest living composer-lyricist, not to mention Broadway’s most venerated songwriter.

The revival promises a new look, fancy new special effects and a more physically sprightly staging than the 1987 original. (The choreographer is John Carrafa, hot off “Urinetown.”) The song “Our Little World,” sung by the witch and Rapunzel in the show’s London incarnation, has been interpolated. So have smaller bits--there’s a second wolf, for example, and a brief appearance by the Three Little Pigs. Sondheim is tweaking a lyric or two in “The Last Midnight,” and Lapine is trying out a new line or two for, among others, the narrator, here played by John McMartin, an alum of the original Broadway production of “Follies.”

For this collision of fairy tales, Sondheim says he wanted a sound owing equal parts to Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat” and to Carl Stalling, the man behind the ditties skipping through so many Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoons.

“I wanted it jaunty and recognizable and rhythmically jolly,” Sondheim says. “And square, in a way. Square always implies dull, but I think of square in the sense of traditional. Traditional, but with some spice and spikiness in the harmonies.”

Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, echoing Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tart, stringy “Fairy Tale” as well as larger-scale influences, have been retained here, with a few changes, under the eye of musical director Paul Gemignani. En route to Broadway the first time, “Into the Woods” tried out 15 years ago at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, now known as the Globe Theatres. Sondheim’s memory of the tryout?

“I remember Kay McLelland [one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters] falling into the trap door on stage, and Chuck Wagner [a prince] grabbing her just in time. Very scary. And I remember writing ‘No One Is Alone’ out there and playing it for everybody for the first time.” The song, he once said, sticks with people for elemental reasons: “It’s the simplest tune in terms of the fewest number of notes. And it’s sung three times.”

The title, he believes, has made the song a thing misunderstood. It’s not simply a we’ll-be-fine number, he says, it’s a reminder that everyone’s actions affect someone else.

Lapine acknowledges that many people’s initial response to an “Into the Woods” revival was that it might be too soon. Gordon Davidson, whose Center Theatre Group is assisting Dodger Theatricals in getting the show up and running again, says with a chuckle that “when the question was first raised about doing it, I thought: Didn’t we just see this?” The original Broadway tour played the Ahmanson in 1989. “But James had terrific new ideas for it.”

Gemignani says that “what this show will say and mean to people in New York after going through Sept. 11 ... well, let’s just say it’s perfect timing, in a way.”

Not too much of that talk for Sondheim. “For me it’s exactly the same show, before 9/11 or after. It’s about people who do things that lead to unfortunate consequences, and they don’t think. It’s about selfish acts, and they’re perennial.

“If the show has any new resonance now, it’s because people are interpreting it that way.”

On Sept. 11, Sondheim was about to leave his Connecticut house for New York City “for ‘Assassins’ auditions, of all ironic things,” he says. (A planned revival of “Assassins,” the Sondheim-John Weidman musical about people who succeeded or failed in killing various U.S. presidents, has been postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks.)

“Then a neighbor called and said to turn on the TV.” Sondheim pauses, briefly, at the memory. “Yep. Yep. Yep yep yep yep.” The memory isn’t pleasant.

Lately, he says, in the months following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, New York has “calmed down. But, you know, it’ll be scary on some level for a long time. Why wouldn’t it be? Something else is bound to happen.... New York’s both vulnerable and a showcase, if anybody wants to make a point.”

Truly, we are in excellent times for the justifiably paranoid. It’s enough to make anyone think, as Sondheim does, that “there are always those moments when you think, oh, God, what am I writing for?”

“But then,” he says, “you live your life.” As the song in “Sunday in the Park With George” says: Move on.

It’s tough to move on, of course, when faced with an $8-million lawsuit.

Sondheim had been pondering a musical about the Mizner brothers for decades. Addison Mizner made his name as an architect whose Florida buildings helped define that state’s sunbaked image during the ‘20s land boom. Wilson Mizner was a scoundrel, a prospector, boxing promoter, and eventually a screenwriter and playwright. Taken together, the Miz- ners serve as complementary self-made American swells. They were the spirit of vaudevillian energy, at once lowdown and high-hat.

Sondheim and Weidman began work on the show formerly known as “Wise Guys” in the early 1990s. Plans for a premiere at the Kennedy Center were postponed more than once.

In 1999, producer Rudin financed an off-Broadway workshop staging of “Wise Guys”--with Nathan Lane and Victor Garber in the title roles, and directed by Sam Mendes.

Mendes was Mr. Hot, straight off his film directorial debut, “American Beauty.” But everyone wanted a different show, and no one was very happy with the results.

“It came out sentimental, and that’s not what we meant,” Sondheim explains. “We meant it to be fast, funny and a kind of tumble through America. And it turned out to be a sort of psychodrama about two boys and their mother, and that wasn’t at all what we wanted.” Recent rewrites, Sondheim says, have downplayed the mother figure and added a major female role. In all, Sondheim estimates that only one-third of the score heard in the 1999 workshop will remain.

This week, Sondheim, Weidman and director Prince will hold a reading of the work in progress in New York. After that, the creative team may well commit to a full production at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for either the 2002-03 season or the one after that.

“Hal and Steve both want to feel the script’s in good shape before they commit to a production,” says Goodman executive director Roche Schulfer.

Late last year, when the Goodman announced the show, producer Rudin threatened legal action. In December, Sondheim and Weidman sued Rudin for $10 million and sought an injunction that would allow them to proceed with the production in Chicago.

Rudin then filed an $8-million countersuit for breach of contract and fraud. On Feb. 1, the sides came to an out-of-court settlement. Rudin may make some money on an eventual Broadway production, but for now, he’s out of the picture. And since Prince came on board as director, Sondheim says, the rewrites have been encouraging.

“Hal is galvanizing,” he says. “To sit in a room with him and talk about what you’ve written, or to play him stuff, just makes you want to go home to the yellow pad. His energy and enthusiasm and understanding is nonpareil. John and I are having a great time. Doing ‘Pacific Overtures’ with him [a quarter-century ago] was one of the best experiences I ever had. I won’t say it’s unalloyed joy--that’s hyperbolic--but it’s pretty close.”

It’s a peculiar head trip for an artist: The show has been rolling around in Sondheim’s brain for decades, yet it’ll be awhile before anyone will ever get a look at a full staging. Meantime, the 15-year-old “Into the Woods” keeps going and going, and now it’s going back to a New York City very different from the one greeting it in 1987.

Lapine says that “Into the Woods” has “always been a challenging show tonally, in that we’re trying to have fun in the first act without it becoming so silly billy that it makes the events of the second act unearned. That’s tricky.”

For the end of this new “Into the Woods,” Lapine has long envisioned “a sort of cluttered stage with everybody cleaning it up. I don’t want to completely give away the moment. But right after Sept. 11, I did think, ‘Yikes, is this too much? Too obvious?’ For now, anyway, we’re sticking with it.”

The changes, says Vanessa Williams, “make you feel like you’re working on an original show, even though this all started back in the ‘80s.” In the days before the first preview, Williams is ready and eager to take on the show’s technical challenges. “Forget about the music,” she says, laughing. “I need to make sure my levitation device, my hydraulic foot lift [for scaling Rapunzel’s tower], doesn’t kill me. And they’re still tweaking the transformation scene, when I float up and spin around.”

In the pre-technical-rehearsal days just weeks ago in New York, the cast performed a bare-bones run-through that left the invited audience in tears. “When you can make people cry like that,” she says, “that’s a testament to the strength of the material. The show will always hold up, no matter what time we’re living in.”

Last week, Sondheim flew out for previews. “It’s really one of the most beautiful shows I’ve seen in my life,” he said of scenic designer Douglas W. Schmidt’s work. “It’s really lush and wonderful looking. And I don’t think anyone will argue that.”

Back in December, Sondheim sussed out the reasons for this musical’s ongoing popularity. “The shows of mine most produced on the college, stock and amateur circuits are those with plots, and lots of good parts, like ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’ and this one ... they’re just fun to perform.”

It’s funny, Lapine says, relating a sorry-grateful moment involving the man who wrote a song called “Sorry-Grateful.” “I was just going through a little family drama with my daughter over the holidays, and then I went into the rehearsal room one day, and suddenly I realized Steve’s lyric hit me in a whole new way: ‘Children may not obey, but children will listen.’

“I thought, well, you know ... that’s a good piece of advice.”

“Into the Woods,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Opens today, 4 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Additional performances: Feb. 17 and 24 and March 3, 7:30 p.m.; March 7, 14 and 21, 2 p.m. Ends March 24. $25-$70. (213) 628-2772 or www.TaperAhmanson.com.

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Michael Phillips, former theater critic of the Los Angeles Times, is theater critic of the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.