SRO TAKES INTO THE WOODS INTO THE AUDIENCE

This January, SRO Productions will return after many years to a musical that many consider one of the best in history, putting an all-new immersive spin on Into the Woods as it comes to Johnson City’s Goodwill Theatre Schorr Family Firehouse Stage.

Into the Woods premiered in San Diego in 1986 before coming to Broadway for a 765-performance run in 1987, and it is considered one of the greatest achievements of Stephen Sondheim, the thoughtfully humorous composer and lyricist who is responsible for Sweeney Todd, Assassins, and Sunday in the Park with George, to name but a few of his works. With book written by James Lapine, Into the Woods has been extensively recognized and revived, receiving Tony Awards for Best Score and Best Book, a 2002 Tony Award for Best Revival, and a 2011 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival for its London West End production. In 2014, a Disney film adaptation was released to great commercial success, featuring an all-star cast including Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp.

The musical was inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s popular 1976 nonfiction book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which applied Freudian psychoanalysis to well-known folk stories. Accordingly, Into the Woods is a mélange of many well-known and loved Charles Perrault and Brothers Grimm fairy tales, wrapped in a framing story about a childless baker and his wife, told from a critically analytical viewpoint.

SRO’s production is music- and stage- directed by the company’s own local musical theater master, Scott Fisher. The company’s last production of the show was the first with which Fisher was involved, around 1989. And as he recalls, “We haven’t really done it since then. We did it shortly after its Broadway run, and it was really successful. People didn’t think at that time that a community theater could pull off a show like that. But we’ve never revisited it in all those years. And it was always one of my favorite shows. So I had this idea that I wanted to eventually do Into the Woods and stage it a little differently - sort of along the lines of the way we staged Les Miz.”

Fisher is referring to his own 2013 production of Les Miserables at the Firehouse Stage, which generated unprecedented audiences and interest for the company, and which restaged the piece completely in the round, an innovation that was widely applauded. Fisher says this style of his is influenced by that of the recent-years Broadway success Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, but applied to celebrated musicals from earlier years. As he describes it, “We’re trying to do it more environmentally. So instead of on a proscenium, we are really immersing the audience into the show. The performers will have stages around the audience and there will be a couple of small stages in the midst of the audience, and there will be walkways through. The audience sat at tables when we did Les Miz, instead of just in seats. The action happened on all sides of them - up close and personal.”

According to Fisher, the nature of Into the Woods makes it especially suited to this kind of treatment, with its bosky setting and the tone that occasions. “It seemed like a logical sort of way to reimagine Into the Woods, because they travel,” he tells Carousel. “It’s kind of a dark show about journeys. So it will give us a chance to move the characters to different locations in the space as they travel through the woods.”

(Megan Germond, Kaylea Lockwood, Maureen Dancesia, and Eric Bill in rehearsal)

He continues: “I think Into the Woods fits this concept even better for this immersive feel. The idea of sitting in the woods and these little vignettes that can take place in all different locations in the woods. I just feel like it’s a really good marriage of a staging idea with the content of the show. On a proscenium stage it feels like the characters are coming into the same location over and over again. Unless you’re able to switch up the set - which takes a lot of effort to do […] in between each scene. Whereas, with this, you can just move the actors to a different location and you get the feeling that they have progressed - or are going in circles. There are just different ways you can play with the staging that way.”

Fisher explains that while SRO’s Les Miserables was a noted success, there was a desire not to jump immediately into trying to duplicate the style of production. “We have always wanted to revisit that sort of staging,” he says, “but we wanted to show that we have more ideas in our bag of tricks than that. So since then, we explored doing a show in the round, Once on this Island. Which has since been revived on Broadway, and they actually did it in the round! So we wanted to wait a little bit in between Les Miz and this. And we learned some things from Les Miz too, like about stage placement. There were a few blind spots that we hadn’t considered because we had a lot of overflow seating, and so we’re taking those things into consideration.”

For the twenty roles available, SRO had over eighty auditioners, providing a wide range of talents to choose from as well as an indication that excitement in the community over the immersive Into the Woods is at a high level. The cast chosen includes Mickey Woyshner - a veteran of Les Miserables and many other SRO shows - as Rapunzel’s Prince. Maureen Dancesia will be playing Cinderella, and Dominique Lazaros - a veteran of SRO’s Annie and Sweet Charity - makes a return after several years to play the Witch. Local radio personality Bill Snyder plays the Mysterious Man, the Narrator is played by Shan Towns, and the baker and his wife by Eric Bill and Megan Germond. Other featured performers include Laura Liburdi, Connor Kabat, Shirley Goodman, Anna Simek, Annie Graham, Kaylea Lockwood, Jeff Tagliaferro, Jenny Gac, Andrew Simek, Wendy Germond, Vito Longo, Adriana Cabot, Janey Moody, and Alex Mendoza.

Performances will be at the Schorr Family Firehouse Stage at 33 Willow Street in Johnson City January 19-21 and 26-28. Friday and Saturday shows are at 7:30pm, and Sunday shows are at 2pm. Tickets can be bought at goodwilltheatre.net or by calling (607) 772-2404; $22 general audience, $22 for seniors and students.