Some Enchanted Evening INTO THE WOODS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine completed their Pulitzer-prizewinning musical Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, they began exploring two new ideas: to create from scratch a classic myth or fairy tale for the stage and to bring together Lucy, Ralph Kramden and other memorable sitcom characters in a single overlapping story for a TV special. Eventually the two plans sort of fused. Instead of the sitcom figures, the authors decided to jumble larkingly together the characters and archetypes popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The strikingly original yet completely accessible result opened on Broadway last week.

Into the Woods is a musical fairy tale in which Jack, of beanstalk fame; Little Red Ridinghood; Cinderella, Rapunzel and their respective princes; Sleeping Beauty; Snow White -- and, of course, a wicked witch and a menacing giant -- are living out their stories in the same forest at the same time, bumping into each other and entangling one another's narratives. As funny as Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, as musical as his A Little Night Music, as morally inflamed as his Sweeney Todd, yet more forgiving and affirmative than anything he has written before, Into the Woods is the best show yet from the most creative mind in the musical theater today. It is also that joyous rarity, a work of sophisticated artistic ambition and deep political purpose that affords nonstop pleasure.

Broadway could not need it more. In recent years the musical, which once planted America's theatrical flag from Rome to Tokyo, has been subjected to a kind of reverse Monroe Doctrine. The Great White Way's four hottest sellers -- Cats, Me and My Girl, Starlight Express and Les Miserables -- come from London (Les Mis originated in Paris). So does Phantom of the Opera, which opens in January but already boasts a $10.5 million advance sale. During the 1980s, dozens of homegrown musicals have come and gone, some losing as much as $7 million.

Into the Woods cannot change the situation by itself or even by example. For one thing, imitation is a less viable route to success in the theater than in prime-time TV. For another, only Sondheim is Sondheim. Says Composer- Lyricist Jerry Herman, author of La Cage aux Folles and Hello, Dolly: "We would all agree that Steve is the genius of the group, the one who keeps on taking the musical theater to new places." What Into the Woods does, gloriously, is make the case for what musicals might be, blending innovation and old-fashioned storytelling into an elixir of delight. It makes audiences think of Freud and Jung, of dark psychological thickets and sudden clearings of enlightenment, even as they roar with laughter. Its basic insight, plainly influenced by the revisionist scholarship of Bruno Bettelheim, is that at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong -- which is to say, almost everything that can -- arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions.

The show's first image is a curtain imprinted with pages from three fables about magical keys to happiness: Cinderella, which in this interpretation concerns the illusory promises of perfect love; Jack and the Beanstalk, in which Sondheim and Lapine see a quest for the fool's gold of material conquest; and an invented tale called The Baker and His Wife, about a couple who long to escape the curse of childlessness inflicted by the "witch next door." Inasmuch as the holy grails that will lift the witch's spell are Jack's beloved white cow, Little Red Ridinghood's crimson cape, Rapunzel's yellow hair and Cinderella's golden slipper, by the end of the first act the fairy-tale figures have bonded into a community and sing and dance about living happily ever after.

But they don't. The widow of a giant slain by Jack shows up to exact revenge and drives everyone back into the woods (mystical and eerie in Tony Straiges' design, spellbound in Richard Nelson's storybook-colored lighting). The threat she poses has been likened by some critics to nuclear war or AIDS; the rampant selfishness that soon erupts in the face of trouble is, the producers admit, meant as a subtle protest against the self-congratulatory individualism of the Reagan era. But with or without allusive implications, the story jolts its passive characters -- and spectators -- into a world where every action has its moral consequences. The royal family proves unheroic and useless in a crisis. Neighborliness among the peasants turns to mistrust in a brilliant song of mutual finger pointing, Your Fault. Several characters die brutally in the grasp of the giantess or at the hands of panicky fellow citizens. Yet what comes out of this chaos is not the jollity of happy endings but a deeper reassurance, born of tolerance and community and shared sacrifice, articulated in the haunting ballad No One Is Alone -- a song as tuneful and touching as Sondheim's Send in the Clowns, but deeper and richer in meaning.

To outward appearances, the surviving characters are alone. Vague, pixilated Jack (Ben Wright) no longer has his nudging mother (Barbara Bryne). Tough and fearless Ridinghood (Danielle Ferland) no longer has either her granny or her sexually seductive wolf (Robert Westenberg, who doubles brilliantly as the prince to Kim Crosby's klutzy, endearingly otherworldly Cinderella). The sweet little baker (Chip Zien) has lost his wife (Joanna Gleason, in the most beguiling performance of a superb cast). Even the witch (Bernadette Peters) has stormed off in rage at the collective dithering. But in the aftermath of havoc, households re-form, and life, better understood now, goes on.

Some audiences may resent the shifts in tone, others may find the authors a bit preachy. Lapine's book, at times self-consciously literary and deconstructionist, does not play fair. He encourages audiences to laugh at violence visited on unpopular characters in the first act, then chides them for doing so during the second. Sondheim refuses to sketch easily likable characters, and his intricate scores and filigree lyrics yield their richest rewards only upon repeated hearings. Although Sondheim is accounted a reviewers' favorite -- a record six of his shows have been named best musical by the New York Drama Critics Circle -- most of his work has opened to skepticism and only gradually won esteem. Something of the same seems to be the initial fate of Into the Woods. Opening night notices ranged literally from "great" to "awful," although a $2.3 million advance sale cushioned the more nettlesome views. Most musicals take on easy targets like the Nazis (Cabaret) or slavery (Big River) or avoid a moral dimension altogether. Into the Woods aspires to nothing less than explaining the nature of growing up and taking responsibility. If its execution is in small ways imperfect, its vision is as big as the giantess's 40-league boots.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York