A witch promises to make a childless baker and his wife parents if they collect the ingredients for a spell: a white cow, a red hood, long golden hair and a golden slipper.

Into the Woods
BRIDGE THEATRE, LONDON

In economically stressful times, a Christmassy show or pantomime risks being too short to shore up a theatre’s fortunes for the year ahead. So the dream is a piece that suits the season but could draw audiences far beyond.

The Bridge – the nine-year-old Thameside theatre run by former National Theatre boss Sir Nicholas Hytner – has found a perfect solution. It’s reviving Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 fairytale mash-up musical Into the Woods.

Anyone who got a trip or tickets for Christmas was lucky, but you still have until 30 May to experience a production with levels of revelation and enjoyment that should not be a surprise, given that director Jordan Fein’s recent restagings of Oklahoma and Fiddler on the Roof stacked up cash and prizes. Having radically reanimated those 1940s and 1960s musicals, Fein now does the same for this Eighties Tony award-winner.

What American musical theatre calls the “book” – narrative and dialogue – is often overlooked by reviewers, but Sondheim said that no musical can be better than its book and Into the Woods has one of the greatest. Lapine’s introduction to theatre was playing the title human in a school production of Jack and the Beanstalk and that seems to have sown the beans of an interest in classic children’s stories that matches in its own way the scholarly insight that writers such as Jack Zipes and Marina Warner have brought to the deep meaning of fairytales.

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