Performance: Into the Woods

Sky City Theatre

Review: Susan Budd


With Raymond Hawthorne's magnificent production of Into The Woods, Auckland Theatre Company ends the year to thunderous applause.

It is theatre at its best: magical, enthralling, lusciously costumed, beautifully set and superbly performed to sublime music. It makes you laugh and it makes you cry.

Stephen Sondheim is inarguably the master of musical theatre. His lyrics are witty and profound, his music subtle, complex and divinely melodic.

When blended with James Lapine's treatment of Grimm's fairytales as a metaphor for the joys and pains of life itself, the result is unparalleled entertainment, satisfying and immensely enjoyable. The characters of fairytales pursue their dreams to make their wishes come true, but the consequences are unforeseen and uncomfortable. What happens in the happy ever after?

The mythic figures are brought to idiosyncratic life. Roz Worthington's Cinderella is no pathetic waif wilting over the ashes but a glamorous teenager, a little ditzy but not about to fall for a good-looking guy just because he is a prince.

Her growth to pragmatic but compassionate maturity is beautifully charted.

As her prince, "raised to be charming, not sincere," Shane Cortese has charm in spades, undercut by total selfishness and the inability to desist from the pursuit of unattainable princesses.

Ross Girven and Delia Hannah, as the baker and his wife, portray delightfully the couple who set the plot into motion with their search for the ingredients for the spell that will lift the witch's curse of sterility.

They best embody the tragedy of wish fulfilment and the pathos of acceptance.

Simon Roborgh's Jack is splendidly comic and Claire Dougan gives his cow bovine sweetness. Sophia Hawthorne is a feisty Little Red Riding Hood and Jennifer Ward-Lealand comes into her own as the witch when she finds youth and beauty but loses the powers of darkness.

George Henare as the objective outsider, the narrator and mysterious man, holds the disparate elements together with quiet authority, bringing a chill along the spine with those magical words "Once Upon a Time ... "

Vicky Haughton's choreography sends the cast of 18 swirling in constant, graceful motion among the strangely organic Art Nouveau structures that in John Parker's set represent trees, evocatively lit by Vera Thomas.

Elizabeth Whiting's 18th-century costumes are gorgeous and the nine-piece band play superbly under Matthew Brown's direction.