At Writers Theatre, Gary Griffin stages a rich and rewarding revival of the popular fairy-tale mash-up.
In Look, I Made a Hat, the second volume of his lyrics and musings about his work, Stephen Sondheim notes the unlikely genesis for Into the Woods: he and book writer James Lapine had concocted an idea for a TV special mashing up characters from similar comedies (Ralph and Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners, Archie and Edith Bunker from All in the Family) with characters from various cop and medical dramas, using a car accident as the narrative pretext for bringing them all together. When that project (perhaps unsurprisingly) fell apart, they decided to apply the concept of colliding worlds to stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, specifically Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood (here called "Little Red") with the English folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk tossed into the mix.…
At Writers Theatre, Gary Griffin stages a rich and rewarding revival of the popular fairy-tale mash-up.
In Look, I Made a Hat, the second volume of his lyrics and musings about his work, Stephen Sondheim notes the unlikely genesis for Into the Woods: he and book writer James Lapine had concocted an idea for a TV special mashing up characters from similar comedies (Ralph and Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners, Archie and Edith Bunker from All in the Family) with characters from various cop and medical dramas, using a car accident as the narrative pretext for bringing them all together. When that project (perhaps unsurprisingly) fell apart, they decided to apply the concept of colliding worlds to stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, specifically Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood (here called "Little Red") with the English folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk tossed into the mix.…
