By Gregory Kable,
dramaturg, Into the Woods
If Sondheim had a partial debt to Hammerstein, he was also
consciously challenging himself to emulate the triumphant construction of a
Hollywood favorite, The Wizard of Oz,
a work whose score he lauded as inextricable from its action. Lapine would
bring an equal enthusiasm as well as a sympathy for the writings of
psychologist Carl Jung, whose ideas Lapine initially investigated in his
acclaimed play Twelve Dreams. If such
firm foundations afforded the collaborators a promise of navigating the hazards
of musical fantasy, they gained further confidence in the tradition itself,
which is defined by its state of constant reinvention. From the initial core stories
gathered by Charles Perrault in the 17th century, to the 18th
century publication of forty volumes of French fairy tales, the 19th
century collections of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, on
through the imaginative literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Lewis Carroll, and James
M. Barrie, down to our present age of Walt Disney, Jean Cocteau, Angela Carter and
J.K. Rowling, the polyphonic nature of the genre warmly welcomes all comers. |
| The Red Riding Hood/Wolf illustration. By Gustave Dore;1883. |
The project emerged, too, in another period of social
transition, which always inspires a hunger for myth; stories which explore and
explain the reasons we all must enter the thickets of the self--daring the dark
path, doing battle with ogres and witches, erecting or being locked within
lonely towers, seeking dragons and true love’s tokens, watching desire pass into
dread and fear into bliss--encountering the magic of absolute freedom and learning
the virtues of healthy restraint. These patterns shaping Sondheim and Lapine’s process
were also reemerging in public consciousness throughout the musical’s
development. Bruno Bettelheim1976 study The
Uses of Enchantment popularized both psychoanalytic perspectives on fairy
tales and wider respect for the genre as a significant form of children’s
literature. From a complementary vantage point, public television’s
high-profile series of interviews between journalist Bill Moyers and Jungian
mythologist Joseph Campbell, entitled The
Power of Myth, were expansive discussions on the place of religion and myth
in contemporary culture and respectfully included fairy tales among their
subjects. These dominant interpretive schools, a reading of fairy tales as personifications
of psychological forces or as timeless archetypes from the collective unconscious,
with competing perspectives on their meaning rooted in the individual or the
group, both find their way into Sondheim and Lapine.
To be continued Friday...
To be continued Friday...
Come see Into the Woods and A Midsummer Night's Dream at PlayMakers November 1 - December 7. For tickets, call 919.962.PLAY (7529) or visit our website.
