Into the Woods

Into the Woods had a sold-out run in May 2022 as part of the Encores! 2022 season, and now the musical transfers to the St. James Theatre on Broadway for eight weeks. Into the Woods tickets will be available on New York Theatre Guide soon.

Into the Woods is a musical about fairytales — but this show tells them differently than you might remember them. Into the Woods draws on versions of fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers, whose stories often have dark themes and endings. The central story is a totally original one, though, of a baker and his wife trying to conceive. They've been having trouble for a long time, and they soon discover that because the baker's father angered a witch years ago, she put a curse on his family to make them barren.

The witch tells the couple that she'll reverse the curse if they bring her four enchanted items: a red cape, a gold slipper, yellow hair, and a white cow. So they venture into the woods near their house to get these items and cross paths with classic fairytale characters like Cinderella and her prince, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Rapunzel, and Jack (of the beanstalk), who are all trying to fulfill wishes and wants of their own. But nothing is as it seems in the wood, and the path to happy ever after isn't always a clear one.

Into the Woods features a book by James Lapine and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and it's one of the composer's most well-known musicals. The premiere of Into the Woods on Broadway was in 1987, two years after Lapine and Sondheim's previous collaboration, Sunday in the Park with George, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and got nominated for Best Musical. Into the Woods had plenty of success of its own, winning three Tonys of its own including Best Book and Best Score. The show also further cemented the star status of Bernadette Peters (as the Witch) and propelled Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason (as the Baker and the Baker's Wife) to Broadway fame; Gleason won the production's third Tony.

The last Into the Woods revival took place in 2002, and now 20 years later, Into the Woods returns. The current revival joins another Sondheim revival on Broadway: Company, which was nominated for nine 2022 Tony Awards and features a female Bobbie (Katrina Lenk) in place of the originally male lead, Bobby. Sondheim's Assassins was also revived off Broadway shortly beforehand, in winter 2021, just before Sondheim's death in November 2021.

Tickets to Into the Woods in New York will be available soon.