Character Analysis: Into The Woods

“How crisis can be instructive”: Into the Woods as Allegory
Into the Woods was Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s second venture into the world
of musical theatre as a collaborative pair. The musical, which opened on Broadway at the Martin
Beck Theatre in November of 1987, concerns itself with a variety of characters and plot
structures from Brothers Grimm fairy tales, all of which revolve around and are tied into a story
Sondheim and Lapine concocted themselves – a baker and his wife wish for a child, but a curse
is placed upon them inhibiting their fertility, requiring them to venture into the woods to find a
list of items which will allow the curse to be reversed. Into the Woods ran for 765 performances
and is easily Sondheim’s most performed

work, as its focus on universally recognizable fairy tale
characters in a unique and enthralling musical form caters to a wide array of audiences and can
be understood by audiences of all ages.
However, what differentiates Into the Woods from the strict black-and-white moral
lessons which accompany fairy tales and are preached to children in their earliest years are the
themes in the piece which allow all of the fairy tales to be seamlessly tied together, the most
prominent being the theme of mass consequence for individual action, regardless of triviality,
and community responsibility accompanying those actions. In an excerpt from Sondheim & Co.
by Craig Zadan, Sondheim explores what Into the Woods is about at the very core of the piece:
“…the story becomes one of how the characters have to band together and make amends
for what they did. Eventually, the show is about community responsibility … you just
can’t go and chop down trees and tease princes and pretend that beans are worth more
than they are. Everybody has to pay for that” (Zadan 338).
While the first act of Into the Woods is relatively light-hearted, with the characters finding a false
sense of comfort and resolution at its close, a beanstalk begins its growth toward the sky,
indicating that bad things are to come. As such, the second act of Into the Woods is much darker
– a small sin, buying a poor boy’s cow with magic beans to reverse the curse of infertility, ends
up resulting in the deaths of several of the musical’s main characters as well as destruction of the
kingdom they all live in. Major themes in the second act of Into the Woods are disillusionment,
and eventually, loss.
By 1987, the year that Into the Woods opened on Broadway, the AIDS epidemic, which
began around 1981, had already killed almost 48,000 people, 18,000 of whom lived in the New
York City area (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). The New York theatre community
was at the heart of the devastation – hundreds upon hundreds of theatre artists were killed, and
other artists (as well as their artistic endeavors) were suffering as a result. As such, many have
interpreted (and continually interpret) Into the Woods as an allegory for the AIDS crisis in New
York – a closer look at Sondheim and Lapine’s material gives way to several lyrical indications
of the suggested allegory, and also reveals an intrinsic connection to the emotional devastation
faced during the AIDS crisis inherent in the themes and symbols of the musical.

The threat for the characters of Into the Woods begins when the beanstalks grow – Jack
climbs up the first beanstalk, and playing a child’s game, he steals a golden harp from a giant.
Seeking the thief, the giant climbs down the beanstalk, but on his way down, Jack chops the
beanstalk at its base and the giant falls to his death. The dead giant’s wife comes down the
second beanstalk, which was unintentionally planted when Cinderella threw the magic bean that
the Baker’s Wife tried to offer her in exchange for her slipper, and characters begin dying
rapidly, regardless of their involvement with or understanding of the situation that occurred with
the giantess and her husband. Though resting intrinsically in fairy tale, the sheer terror that the
characters are facing in the second act as the giantess kills massive numbers of people is

tangible
in the musical’s book and lyrics, and it is this raw emotional devastation shared by a community
that seemingly connects the piece to the wreckage that the AIDS crisis bestowed upon New York
City in the 1980s. AIDS is represented in Into the Woods by the Giant, which crushes the lives of
theoretically blameless people, and in turn, causes a community to band together in suffering,
unclear of what is to come and further, how to reshape their lives following crisis and loss.
Late in the second act, the Baker sings a song called “No More,” and it is performed in
reflection of the death of his wife as the spirit of his father convinces him to face his new
responsibility, which is thematically similar to the ways in which the gay community had to learn
to face the responsibility they now all shared in keeping one another safe from a disease which
no one understood. Lyrically, the entire song shares connections to the AIDS crisis, but the last
lines in particular resonate deeply: “How do you ignore / all the witches / all the curses / all the
wolves, all the lies / the false hopes, the goodbyes / the reverses / all the wondering what even
worse is / still in store? / all the children… / all the giants” (Sondheim 100). Sondheim, as a gay
man living and working in New York City, was inevitably part of the panic felt by the
community – the CDC predicted that the epidemic could only get worse, that it would kill
hundreds of thousands people on top of the 48,000 people it had already killed. A heart-breaking
line that the Witch utters late in act II is a sentence which was on the lips of every theatre artist in
New York City in 1987: “Wake up. People are dying all around us” (Sondheim).
But despite this allegorical connection to the AIDS crisis, which has been debated and
discussed at length in the theatre community since the show opened in 1987, Sondheim has
stated respectfully that him and Lapine had “never intended to be that specific” (Weinraub),
which raises an interesting question regarding the collective audience experience of Into the
Woods as it is related to Sondheim and Lapine’s creative process. It can be plainly stated that a
majority of audience members attending Into the Woods in 1987 were affected in some way by
the AIDS crisis; thus, when presented with theatre dealing so heavily with loss, devastation, and
confusion, it is inevitable that the audience found a sense of belonging to the material, an
emotional connection which defied the fairy tale genre and became more about the significant
reflection of reality in theatrical narrative.
Even if Sondheim did not intentionally write a musical about the AIDS epidemic, the
themes and symbols of the material certainly resonate with members of a community which has
experienced senseless loss, and with that, a chosen family which gathers in grief to process the
loss. When Into the Woods was revived in 2002 at the Broadhurst Theatre, it was just one short
year following the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City, which was another crisis
that brought the entire city together in solidarity against what the terror stood for and what it did
to their community. Vanessa Williams, who played the Witch in this revival, reflected very
publicly at the time about the startling way that the audience wept throughout the end of the
second act, a catharsis necessary for a crowd of people all reflecting on the terrorist attacks and
seeking comfort in art. In a time of crisis and grief, the New York City audiences were cradled
by the sentiment that “sometimes people leave you / halfway through the wood” (Sondheim
101), and further, that “no one is alone” (Sondheim 101), especially in times of epidemic, crisis,
or terrorism, situations that require a chosen family and communal solidarity in order to properly
sort through the aftermath, the shell-shock, which inevitably follows such events.
Though Sondheim is infamous for defying the “write what you know” rule, Into the
Woods seems to exist on another plane for him – he wrote material which has timelessly
comforted communities in crisis, and he wrote it during a time when his community was going
through the unimaginable.

It can be argued that the very nature of the material, fairy tales
carrying strict moral guidelines, resonates in all ages and eras because of the ways in which they
are passed down from parents to children. However, the themes upheld throughout the second act
of Into the Woods are Sondheim and Lapine’s, and those are the themes which resonate
profoundly and carry the heaviest impact. The thematic narrative of Into the Woods is applicable
beyond the confines of any given production, and when Cinderella reassures Little Red in her
darkest hour that “no one is alone,” it is not merely one fictional character singing to the next –
Sondheim and Lapine are behind that lyric, offering the sentiment behind the language they’ve
used to give voice to their characters to their audience. Even further, they are offering the
wisdom that every individual in every community needs to reflect on, question, bargain for,
accept the consequences of, and persevere through the deadliest epidemics, the largest crises, and
the deepest personal turmoil one can experience in the wake of it

all.