The important point to be made about the Stratford Festival's production of Into the Woods is that it is an impressively smooth and assured piece of musical theatre.
At its best, it constitutes a genuine imaginative triumph and a testament to the creative vision of director Peter Hinton and designer Dany Lyne. In fact, it might even succeed in temporarily cooling the hostility of those of us who have decidedly mixed feelings about the true value of Stephen Sondheim's contribution to American musical theatre.
Into The Woods offers Sondheim's personal spin on the fairy tale, and being a Sondheim show, this means that somwhere along the way his music and lyrics must attack the myth of the traditional fairy-tale ending with its promise that the characters will live happily ever after.
So at the rousing conclusion to Act I, we have Little Red Riding Hood rescued from the wolf, Rapunzel freed from imprisonment in the tower, Cinderella wed to her Prince, and Jack triumphant over the giant. But following intermission, Sondheim and book writer James Lapine put an icicle through the show's heart.
This means the death of characters we have rather come to like, as well as acts of sexual betrayal, jealousy, greed and hypocrisy. Given Sondheim's jaundiced view of personal relationships, it isn't surprising, for example, that Cinderella's and Rapunzel's princes should each develop a roving eye.
Furthermore, the slain giant's widow is on the rampage. In briefe: Neat storybook resolutions don't happen in real life. And the sinister woods represent the tough challenges and choices everyone must face.
Often in performance, Act II comes across as slack and repetitive. Not so with the production at the Avon Theatre. As the characters cope with their guilt, fear and despair, we have a sense of real stakes at play - and for this we must thank the conviction the actors bring to their parts. Witness, for example, the scene in which the two wayward princes (Laird Mackintosh and Thom Allison, both excellent) sing anxiously but mendaciously about the "agony" of love. Or that remarkable ensemble song, Your Fault, in which everybody keeps trying to shift the blame.
Sondheim is a brilliant lyricist but an indifferent composer, so a performer faces the challenge of celebrating the words while giving the music the support it so badly needs. At the preview performance attended by this reviewer, there were problems with the important opening exposition, times when the intricate patter became smudged and inaudible. But elsewhere there was a bouquet of stunning vocal work, ably supported by the orchestra under musical directory Berthold Carriere.
What sets the plot in motion is the plight of The Baker and his wife. They are barren, thanks to the curse laid on them by the witch, who now offers to lift it if they venture into the woods and secure the items she needs to regain her former beauty - a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold. And that brings other characters into play - Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Jack and Rapunzel.
Bruce Dow is a poignantly funny Baker and Mary Ellen Mahoney a knockout as his wife. Susan Gilmour again shows why she is one of the finest dramatic singers in Canadian musical theatre, Jennifer Waiser is a perky and engaging Red Riding Hood. Dayna Tekatch is a resilient Cinderella and Amy Walsh a convincingly troubled Rapunzel. Kyle Blair's Jack is the most amiable of knuckleheads and Allison a hairily convincing wolf.
The evening is full of bold, unsettling strokes: The giant's wife, for example, is represented by a huge and ominous shadow and by the amplified voice of Martha Henry growling in the guttural cadences of the demonic interloper in The Exorcist.
The woods themselves seem hallucinatory, with a style whispering of Lawren Harris and Maurice Sendak. The costumes show an occasional affection for kink: Cinderella's wicked stepmother and stepsisters look like a brothel madam and her whores; Peter Donaldon's superbly unflappable narrator is a thing of shreds and patches; Gilmour's witch emerges first in an outfit made of vegetables, but later assumes the image of a Nazi stormtrooper. Hinton adores the material's sardonic subtext, so even a truly spectacular imaginative flight like the sight of a 20-foot high Rapunzel towering above the stage proves both dazzling and dislocating. This is a dream show with a nightmarish undercurrent.