The show that refuses to play nice
There's a moment near the end of Act One in "Into the Woods" where everything you thought you knew about fairy tales collapses. The baker's wife is gone. The giant is real. Cinderella's prince is a cheat. And Sondheim, grinning somewhere behind the curtain, has tricked you into caring deeply about characters you only half-remembered from bedtime stories.
That trick is why the Yale Dramat's fall 2024 mainstage production matters — not just as theatre, but as proof that some works get sharper with age. Strom Auditorium turns 25 this year, and honestly, programming "Into the Woods" for the anniversary feels like the only correct choice.
What Sondheim actually did
People throw around words like "genius" with Sondheim so casually that the word's lost its teeth. But sit with the score of "Into the Woods" for a while and you start to understand. He didn't write songs about fairy tales. He wrote about the wreckage that comes after you get what you wanted.
"Children Will Listen" isn't a lullaby. It's a warning.
The Bowdoin Orient called the show an interrogation of fairy tales, and that's fair. But I'd go further — it's an interrogation of the audience. You walked in expecting "happily ever after." Sondheim wants to know why you still believe in that, and what you're willing to sacrifice when you find out it doesn't exist.
The giants we don't talk about
Coggin Heeringa wrote something that stuck with me: the giants in this show aren't just the literal one stomping through the kingdom. They're the ones we carry around every day. The parent who left. The career that didn't pan out. The relationship where you gave everything and got crumbs back.
That's what makes community and university productions of this show so compelling. These aren't seasoned Broadway actors performing from a safe emotional distance. These are 20-year-olds who just finished a brutal midterm week, standing on stage, singing about loss with the kind of rawness that only comes from still being in the middle of figuring life out.
Theatre Harrisburg's recent run proved this too. When you strip away the expectation of perfection and let real vulnerability take the stage, "Into the Woods" becomes something else entirely. Not a spectacle. A conversation.
25 years of Strom, and what theatre gives us
A quarter century of performances in one building. That's hundreds of shows, thousands of actors, probably millions of nervous opening-night butterflies fluttering in stomachs backstage. Strom Auditorium has seen Shakespeare and Sondheim and everything between.
What keeps people coming back isn't the sets or the lighting rigs. It's the weird, electric thing that happens when a room full of strangers collectively holds their breath because someone on stage just said something true.
"Into the Woods" does that better than almost anything in the musical theatre canon. Not because it's clever — though it is — but because it refuses to let you leave the theatre feeling comfortable. You wanted a fairy tale. You got a mirror.
Go see it this weekend. Bring someone you've been meaning to have a real conversation with.
