And of course I’m walking up with a baby and she goes “Ohhh!” and-forgetting that she had -and my daughter was like “Ahhh!” because this witch was glad to see her. My daughter was about a year old, and I needed to run down to the wardrobe department during a matinee, and Bernadette was sitting in the stairway waiting to go on. I remember Bernadette really wanted this kind of lump on her chin, and so, she was wonderful about really inventing the Witch. And, of course, you always have the situation in the theatre that it has to be adhered at least once a day and sometimes twice a day, and you’re gonna do it eight times a week, so, how much can their skin really take? How do you go about capturing the right look, but making sure audiences can see and hear the actor? AHW: It was a matter of casting their faces and then working with prosthetic designers and figuring out how much we could really put on. This was also an era when these kinds of prosthetics were really being introduced and used for the first time. We really went through a lot of versions of what that should be, and what really worked from stage during the preview time. And he had all the physical attributes of a male. And so we wanted to have a very sexual nature to the Wolf, and so he has a prosthetic chest-we actually cast the chest of a body builder, I think. That’s a really good reflection of what we’re talking about with these fairy tales when we tell our children, they’re used to explore all sorts of other things in our lives, right? All sorts of other aspects of how we choose, how we make decisions. But it’s got a darker side, too, this child and what’s happening. AHW: Steve and James both felt that there needed to be a sexual nature-I mean, it’s in “Hello, Little Girl.” It’s in the song, right? My favorite singing of that song ever was listening to Steve in his library singing it at his piano, you know, just the nature of the enticement of that song is so wonderful and fun. I understand that it took several versions to get the look right. Your concept for the Wolf, which married the physical attributes of man and beast, was dripping with sexuality-right down to being anatomically correct. We spent a lot of time with the Rackham versions, which are those are beautiful illustrations, then looking at some more contemporary ones and then starting to think about the characters all together from that. Then, we spent a lot of time looking at illustrations through time of all of these various fairy tales. There’s a lot more anxiety-ridden, anxious things that I think we’ve kind of cleansed the palette of those fairy tales with, through time. Cinderella, if you go back and read some of the original versions, she ends up underneath a table being kicked by everybody at the table. I mean, we’ve kind of made them easier for our children. When you go back and look at a lot of those original fairy tales, they’re pretty terrifying. We went back and looked at a lot of the initial versions of the fairy tales to begin with. What sources did you turn to when you began conceiving what these classic characters would look like? Ann Hould-Ward: Lapine was so interested in really going back to the original fairy tales, and he was very interested in what the psychology was: the echoing of contemporary psychology (when we did it in the late 80s), and the psychology that people didn’t even know when they’re telling their children the fairy tales in the 1700s. visited Hould-Ward as she opened up her “show bible” for Into the Woods to exclusively share never-before-seen sketches, photos and inspirations that are now a part of Broadway history. Hould-Ward earned her second Tony nomination for her work on the production when Into the Woods arrived on Broadway the following year. This year marks 30 years since Into the Woods premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, CA. While these fairy tale characters navigated unfamiliar emotional territory, they were instantly recognizable to audiences thanks to the detailed costume designs of Ann Hould-Ward, who collaborated with Lapine and Sondheim just a few years prior when she translated the pointillistic art of George Seurat into wearable fashion for Sunday in the Park With George. In the mid 1980’s Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine set out to write Into the Woods, a “quest” musical that would intertwine the characters and narratives of classic fairy tales with a contemporary underpinning.īy excavating the often overlooked darker aspects and implications (the ones you don’t see in the Disney versions), Sondheim and Lapine reintroduced audiences to the bedtime stories they heard as children-only this time Cinderella, Little Red and the charming Prince were tangled in confusion, conflict, sexual tension and ethical dilemmas.
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