“Sometimes People Leave You Halfway Through The Wood” - A Review of the 'Into The Woods' 2022 Cast Recording
By Alex Kulak
Alex Kulak is a playwright, composer, and screenwriter currently based in Chicago. @AlexKulak2
How do you mourn somebody you’ve never really met?
In Into The Woods, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s revisionist fairy tale masterpiece, the Baker’s son will one day have to answer that question. He is left half an orphan by the conclusion, his mother killed by a giant and buried in it’s footprint, with a neurotic and insecure father left as his only blood relative. Being an infant, it’s unlikely he’ll retain any memories of the Baker’s Wife, relying only on the stories and memories of others who knew her.
It’s a predicament many of us in the musical theatre community are all too familiar with. Next month marks a year since the passing of Sondheim, and while many continue to mourn his passing every day, we do so with the caveat that almost none of us ever actually met this musical theatre juggernaut. We watched the interviews, or read Finishing The Hat and Look, I Made A Hat, or maybe even were one of the lucky few to participate in a little bit of snail mail correspondence. But the relationship between nearly all of us and Sondheim was only parasocial.
All of this emotional baggage didn’t really come into play until the end of the experience of listening to the cast recording for the latest Broadway revival of the show. Specifically, it’s the ghost of the Baker’s Wife singing a reprise of “No One Is Alone” to the Baker:
“Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Do not let it grieve you
No one leaves for good.”
It was during this stanza when I started crying. The weight of this album had finally revealed itself.
This is not only a fantastic, definitive recording of one of Sondheim’s finest works. It is also the first recording he didn’t get to hear.
Although we had the gender-bent production of Company last year (Sondheim saw a preview, but didn’t live to the opening), the relationship a composer has to a cast recording is a very different animal. Sondheim was very involved with every preservation of his music, coaching and offering advice to actors during the recording process. The stage production might be headed by the director and producer, but in the recording studio, Sondheim was king. What happens when the king is no longer with us?
Like the Baker’s Son, the performers were left in a scary world without the most important of guiding voices. And they did what the Baker’s Son will likely one day do. They will listen to other trusted voices, they will rely on the advice that was offered during the departed’s life, and they will go forward trusting that their own sense of intuition won’t let them down.
In the case of this new cast recording, that new independence paid off in spades.
I know that calling this album definitive will be deemed as sacrilege by many musical theatre lovers, with the legacy of the original cast recording looming over it, but this version is set apart by the fidelity of the recording and the completeness of the artists’ original vision.
Between this new production and the upcoming Josh Groban-led revival of Sweeney Todd, I’m so thankful that producers are finally appreciating the importance of Jonathan Tunick’s full orchestrations to Sondheim’s scores. While I’ll always defend certain reinterpretations of Sondheim’s shows (don’t fight me on the John Doyle productions of Sweeney and Company), it’s an undeniable fact that no orchestrator understood Sondheim’s compositions better than Tunick. The fifteen-piece orchestra, conducted by Rob Berman, is lush, moving, and incredibly complementary to the singers’ voices.
Speaking of, there is not a weak performer in this ensemble. Sara Bareilles continues to wow us all with her seemingly endless talents. Being a songwriter herself, she plays the Baker’s Wife with a respect for the text I’ve never seen before in a Sondheim interpreter. She recognizes and showcases the value of every word she sings, making every line purposeful. Brian d’Arcy James plays her Baker, and his big-as-all-outdoors voice is a perfect pairing with hers on “It Takes Two”.
Patina Miller’s Witch may not have the camp that Bernadette Peters originated the character with, but she more than makes up for it with a profound wisdom and gravitas. She is the character that saw the events of the show coming more than any other character, and Miller plays her with the weight and the regret of a character that knows how the show will end, but wishes more than anything that it will be different.
Phillipa Soo’s Cinderella has one of the hardest jobs in the piece. Sondheim once said that patter songs are infinitely harder to write for female voices than for male voices, as the male tessitura is far closer to a speaking timbre. “On The Steps Of The Palace” is a deceptively difficult song to sing, and Soo knocks it out of the park, nailing the technical feat of the patter while infusing it with incredible storytelling.
Newcomers Julia Lester and Cole Thompson also do more than prove themselves as Red Riding Hood and Jack, respectively. Red Riding Hood is simultaneously hilariously immature and wise beyond her years, and Cole Thompson’s interpretation of “Giants In The Sky” contains all the wonder and awe that those four words entail.
At the same time, I was listening to the recording, and a friend of mine was as well. This friend had recently lost two women he was close to, and was feeling everything I was with an even greater sense of sadness and loss. It was that moment when I realized that Sondheim had given us a gift even greater than Into The Woods. He had given us a language to process our grief with. Through his lyrics, his music, and his understanding of the human condition, he teaches all of us that even after loss, no matter how great, “No One Is Alone”.