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      in Music

      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Some Enchanted Evening

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      Sara Bareilles and Neil Patrick Harris lead a starry Encores! revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour musical.For nearly three decades, the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has upheld a specific mission — excavating the hidden gems of American musical theater, burnishing them to a fully orchestrated shine. Which makes the fractured fairy tales of “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour 1986 musical, a peculiar choice. (Let’s just say that when Rob Marshall has directed a star-crammed film version of a show within the last decade, it is no longer a hidden gem.)But that mission has expanded, unearthing something as glorious as Lear deBessonet’s revival. Her “Into the Woods” runs through May 15; only a few tickets remain. So if you know a spell to charm the secondary market, cast it now.The show, as ever, collides characters drawn from a half-dozen tales in the European folk tradition — Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, a prince or two. At its whirling center are a humble baker (Neil Patrick Harris, with down-to-the-millisecond comic timing) and his wife (the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and recent Broadway baby Sara Bareilles, no slouch). Desperate for a child, they heed the witch next door (Heather Headley, a diva in a frowzy wig and claws) and head into the forest — here, a bare stage ornamented with the set designer David Rockwell’s elegant birch trunks. Within three nights they must obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.This color-blocked quest overlaps with those of Little Red (Julia Lester, pert and twinkling), waylaid by a seductive wolf (Gavin Creel, sleazy and flawless), and the moony Jack (Cole Thompson, sweet and dreamy), forced by his mother (the comic genius Ann Harada) to sell the cow that he loves too much. Separated in the woods, the baker and his wife have other encounters. The baker meets a mysterious man (the downtown stalwart David Patrick Kelly, who doubles as the narrator). His wife befriends Cinderella (Denée Benton, luminous, with a crystalline soprano), on the run from a pursuing prince (Creel again).From left, Gavin Creel, David Turner, Ann Harada, Bareilles and Harris in Lear deBessonet’s revival of the Sondheim-Lapine musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen tales have circulated since the premodern era, it’s no spoiler to say that they all end happily. Cinderella gets her prince. Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel, mellow in an underwritten role) gets hers (Jason Forbach, in for Jordan Donica). Little Red and her grandmother (Annie Golden) are released from the wolf’s stomach. Jack, now rich, reunites with his cow (expertly puppeteered by Kennedy Kanagawa). But that only brings us to intermission. And unease already glimmers, firefly-like, among the trees.In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the baker’s wife interrogates the ethics of ambition. Characters weigh personal desire against the needs of the greater community. And as in Sondheim shows like “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” they wrestle with the question of whether getting what you want is actually good for you. What if you get what you wish and you still want more? What if the wish come true isn’t really worth what it cost you?The second act darkens and destabilizes these tales. It’s a truism that a happy ending depends on stopping a story at just the right moment. “Into the Woods” insists on continuing straight past happily ever after, exploring the repercussions of those Act I choices and offering new and somewhat more abstract conflicts. The priority shifts from the individual to the collective as characters band together to save the kingdom and themselves. That should feel at least as propulsive as gathering potion ingredients. Instead it feels theoretical, a filigreed representation of the classic trolley problem. Should the characters deliberately sacrifice one person — Jack — or do nothing and allow many others to die?This more philosophical turn has bothered many critics. If I’m honest, it bothers me. But I can still remember myself 30 years ago, wearing out the VHS tape of the original Broadway version, which PBS aired as part of its “American Playhouse” series. The conflicts didn’t feel abstract to me then. Keying into the emotional force underlying them — the wanting, the regret — I understood the musical’s questions of right and wrong, and the very murky moral territory in between, the way children do: intuitively and very personally.From left, Heather Headley, Julia Lester, Cole Thompson, Denée Benton and Harris in the show’s second act, which darkens and destabilizes the fairy tales.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow I understand them differently: as conjectures and hypotheticals. But that doesn’t make them any less urgent. The last two years, maybe the last six years, maybe more, have emphasized the stark divisions in American life, isolating us in our individual experiences of suffering and perceived injustice. But these same years have offered galvanizing examples of mutual care and aid, a mode echoed in the ballad “No One Is Alone,” which argues for support and understanding despite differences.If I were a betting woman, I would hazard that’s the aspect of “Into the Woods” that appealed to deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores! and an artist with a long history of community engagement and activism. Unlike the other Encores! shows of the season — “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” both of which received contested updates — “Into the Woods” arrives largely unchanged. And no longueur or flubbed cue breaks the spell of her compassionate, witty production. She has cast wonderful comedians, many of whom are also wonderful singers, and has encouraged them to deliver rich and very human performances, accented by Lorin Lattaro’s friendly, organic choreography and Rob Berman’s splendid music direction.The show ends with a musical combo punch — “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen” — an absolute T.K.O. to anyone who argues that Sondheim’s pleasures are intellectual alone. (It’s a deeper cut, but the preceding song, “No More,” an existential body blow, prepares the way, too.) For “Children Will Listen,” led by Headley, with superb, sinuous phrasing, deBessonet suddenly swells the cast with 70 or so supernumeraries, children and seniors singing along.The night I saw it, not all of that singing was precisely on key, and the child nearest me overacted wretchedly. But I found myself crying without really knowing why. For the child I was, I suppose. And the child I am. And the mother now, also. I listened. I am still listening. You should, too.Into the WoodsThrough May 15 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Comedy Undercut ‘The Life.’ Billy Porter Looks for Its Humanity.

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      The actor is directing an Encores! revival of the 1997 musical, updating it to confront hard truths about racism, poverty and carceral injustice.When “The Life” opened on Broadway in 1997, the sex trade in Times Square that it depicts was no longer a prominent feature of the area. Like an increasingly polished Midtown Manhattan, the musical, about the women and men who once made it a prostitution capital, was sufficiently family-friendly for my parents to take me to see it, at the age of 15, as my first Broadway show.We came to New York to see “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s portrait of la vie bohème, which had opened the previous year. After reading newspaper listings, my father chose “The Life” as another show for us to catch while in town. And despite its ostensibly R-rated subject matter (which we assume he somehow overlooked), it was perhaps no more adult in theme than “Rent.” Set circa 1980, “The Life” is also about lovers and strivers doing their best to survive a harsh and unforgiving city.But the Broadway production of “The Life” shared more DNA with droll Gotham fables like “Guys and Dolls” and “Sweet Charity,” another musical about dreams of escaping the sex trade composed, some 30 years earlier, by Cy Coleman, whose score for “The Life” is filled with magnetic melodies and brassy hooks. A hybrid comedy-drama, “The Life” was jazzy and jaunty, with a touch of vaudeville and the blues.Porter with Ledisi, the soul and jazz singer who is taking on the role played by Lillias White in the original 1997 production.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWith lyrics by Ira Gasman, and a book by Coleman, Gasman and David Newman, “The Life” imagined the sex workers who populated Times Square as showbiz types with verve and moxie. (Vincent Canby’s critic’s essay in The New York Times praised the production’s “go-for-broke pizazz.”) Propelled by electric performances, “The Life” was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won two, for best featured actor in a musical (Chuck Cooper) and for best featured actress in a musical (Lillias White, whose volcanic rendition of “The Oldest Profession” was the first time I’d witnessed a show-stopping ovation).Though my life could not have been further from “The Life,” there was a restlessness and defiance to the characters that I recognized in my own, as the gay son of immigrants growing up in a mostly white Michigan suburb. Listening to the cast recording, I channeled my angst and alienation into songs like “My Body” and “Why Don’t They Leave Us Alone,” anthems of autonomy and self-determination.Lillias White received a Tony Award for her portrayal of a sex worker in the Broadway production of “The Life.”Associated PressAnd while I could easily relate to yearning for love and escape, “The Life” was not the lesson in hard truths — about racism, poverty and carceral injustice — that it might have been. Though the musical ended in tragedy, comedy kept the so-called hookers and pimps, and their dire straits, at a wry remove. The characters seemed designed for the purposes of entertainment, not to inspire understanding of their interiority and circumstances.“The comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice,” said Billy Porter, who has reconceived a new production of “The Life” for New York City Center’s Encores! series. The show, which begins performances on Wednesday, will be his Encores! directorial debut.The ensemble members Tanairi Vazquez and Jeff Gorti during a recent rehearsal.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLike most writers working on Broadway at the time, the creators of “The Life” were white men; their story didn’t ask audiences to consider why its mostly Black characters, many of whom are women, were trapped to begin with — only that they wanted out. With his revision, Porter, 52, said he intended to make “The Life” a darker and more clear-eyed drama, humanizing its characters and foregrounding their social disadvantages.Porter, who last year concluded his run as Pray Tell on the FX series “Pose,” played a principal role in early developmental workshops of “The Life” but was not ultimately cast when the show moved to Broadway. He says he believes in the purity of its creators’ intentions. “They wanted to be allies, and they were,” he told me during a lunch break at a recent rehearsal. “The music is extraordinary, that’s why we’re doing it at all.” Still, he noted that this story was problematic in the absence of more context.In reimagining the show, Porter said the humor would come from the characters’ often painful truths. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEncores! first approached Porter about directing “The Life” in early 2020; inequalities exposed by the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have only fueled the urgency behind his vision for the show. “We have to make sure everybody understands that there are systems of oppression and erasure and caste in place, where if you’re born in a system, you stay in that system,” he said. “We can’t unsee it anymore.”The plot remains largely intact, but characters stuck in “The Life” are presented in more fleshed-out detail — not only with back stories and more vivid inner lives, but with fates beyond the action onstage. Much of this information comes from the narrator, Jojo, originally played by the white actor Sam Harris. In Porter’s iteration, the role has been expanded and will be played by Destan Owens, who is Black. “I wanted the narration to be told through our eyes and our voice,” Porter said.Reflecting on the summer of 1980, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, Jojo tells the audience, “We were all like crabs in a barrel,” scratching and clawing to get out. (Jojo made it to Los Angeles, he says, where he now runs his own P.R. firm.)Porter’s revision has the support of Cy Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere’s Fleetwood (Ken Robinson), a Vietnam veteran succumbing to the city’s crack epidemic, and his lover Queen (Alexandra Grey), who learns that her cash from turning tricks has not been going to their escape fund. There’s Memphis (Antwayn Hopper), the fly, ruthless kingpin who drives a wedge between them for his own gain. And there’s the worn out and weary Sonja (Ledisi, in the role originated by White), whose character has been deepened from soulful comic relief into a tragic harbinger of what’s to come.Where the original subtly hinted that Sonja is suffering from H.I.V., the first cases of which were diagnosed around the time “The Life” is set, Porter foregrounds her declining health, adding a scene in which the women receive supportive services at a community clinic. That’s where Queen, who is transgender in Porter’s revision, also receives hormone treatments. To Porter, these aspects of the characters’ lives come with the clarity of hindsight.The music of “The Life” also aims to be more reflective of post-disco New York, in new orchestrations and arrangements by James Sampliner. While honoring Coleman’s original melodies, Sampliner said the revival’s sound, which he called “down and funky,” would be far from the original’s big-band jazz, citing sonic influences like Earth, Wind & Fire, the O’Jays, Chaka Khan and Isaac Hayes. “It’s just got stank all over it,” he said.“It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said of the production. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Encores! series, which began its first season under new leadership last month with “The Tap Dance Kid,” has long welcomed substantial revisions to its short-running revivals of American musicals (as the book is often the problem with those rarely seen). But preserving original orchestrations and arrangements has also been part of its mission, so “The Life” represents an artistic departure.It is also the first of what the artistic director, Lear DeBessonet, and the producing creative director, Clint Ramos, call an auteur slot, giving artists like Porter the encouragement to reimagine works from their personal perspective. Porter’s revision has the support of Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content.Will “The Life” still have laughs? “It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said, adding that he considers himself a hopeful entertainer. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.” The humor won’t be put on to make anyone feel more comfortable, he added. Rather, it will come from the often painful truths of the situation (like Sonja asking for a doctor’s note to show her pimp).The grit and perseverance that women like Sonja and Queen taught me at a young age remains as well — lessons perhaps rendered more poignant by a fuller picture of the odds stacked against them. And “The Life” may also speak with hard-fought wisdom for troubled times, to a city emerging from another difficult chapter.“We choose hope, not because things are joyful or hopeful,” Porter said. “But in order to live.” More