With 19 major musicals and hundreds of songs, it’s nearly impossible to narrow down his impressive repertoire into a brief list, but we’ve made our best effort below, along with videos of our favorite renditions.
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Just don’t expect your kids to be singing Sondheim the way they do the score from “Frozen.Sondheim racked up seven Tony awards over his career, plus an honorary Tony celebrating his lifetime achievements in 2008.
“Into the Woods’’ thankfully retains most of its wit and bite, and showcases two of the year’s very best female performances, from Streep and Blunt. Other changes include dropping the narrator, missing cameos by some other fairy tale characters, a different fate for Rapunzel - and making Depp’s Wolf seem like much less of a pedophile than onstage. The large, uniformly excellent cast also includes Tracey Ullman as Jack’s Mother Christine Baranski as Cinderella’s Stepmother, with Lucy Punch and Tammy Blanchard as her dimwitted, prince-coveting daughters Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s Prince and Frances de la Tour as a lady giant who wreaks havoc in the woods after her husband has a fatal encounter with Jack and his beanstalk.Īs in the 1987 Broadway original, “Into the Woods’’ pokes fun at the conventions of fairy tales and, indeed, the very notion of happily ever after in a story line heavily influenced by Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment’’ - which on the screen also manages to serve as something of a post-9/11 commentary. Anna Kendrick joins a pantheon of stars in “Into the Woods.” Peter Mountain/Disney This sends the Baker and his wife into the woods, where they split up and individually encounter Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), fleeing her vain prince (Chris Pine) with one gold slipper - and Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), trying to elude the briefly seen Wolf (Johnny Depp).Īlso, there is the none-too-bright young Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), who unwisely trades the family cow, Milky White, for magic beans and, locked in a doorless tower in the woods, the golden-haired Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy), whom the Baker doesn’t realize is his sister, abducted as a child by the Witch and raised as her daughter. But the Witch is willing to reverse this, if, in three days’ time, the couple returns with four items: a cow white as milk, hair as yellow as corn, a cape as red as blood and a slipper pure as gold. They learn they’ve been cursed with childlessness by their neighbor the Witch (Meryl Streep) because she caught the Baker’s father stealing magic beans years earlier. Most of the characters put a twist on the Brothers Grimm, but the couple at the center are creations of Sondheim and Lapine’s - the Baker (James Corden, upcoming host of CBS’s “Late Late Show’’) and the Baker’s Wife (a sublime Emily Blunt). Emily Blunt puts in one of the year’s best performances as the wife to James Corden’s Baker.
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Choreography isn’t an issue with this “Into the Woods,’’ and he is working with a vocally gifted cast capable of doing full justice to Sondheim’s intricate music and lyrics. Without giving too much away, it’s only fair to warn parents of young children that a beloved character still doesn’t survive, though her emotionally devastating demise does take place off-screen.Īdults will appreciate the best musical to come out of Hollywood so far this century - better, by far, than Marshall’s awkwardly staged “Chicago,’’ which somehow won the Best Picture Oscar for 2002.īack then, Marshall resorted to massive editing to camouflage most of his stars’ limited skills in singing and dancing. Its hard edges slightly sanded by the screenwriter and Sondheim’s original collaborator, James Lapine, Rob Marshall’s beautiful film is still nowhere near as family-friendly as the PG rating, the Mouse House imprimatur and the Christmas Day release might suggest. Stephen Sondheim’s stage classic “Into the Woods,’’ a dark and subversive musical take on fairy tales, not only survives but triumphs in the composer’s most unlikely collaboration with Disney.
Rated PG (peril, off-screen deaths, sexual innuendo).
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