into the woods critique essay

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Into the Woods (Play): Summary & Critique

The core idea of the play is its idea of bringing various fairy tale characters together. It is a mark of the fertile imagination of writer Stephen Sondheim that classic fairy heroes such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel etc, are brought under one grand narrative. While retaining their original features that these characters are renowned for, the author places their personality in new contexts. These contexts are of two forms – the first is that pertaining to plot and the second is in interaction with other (equally famous) characters. The acting ensemble is led by the brilliant El Beh donning the role of the Baker’s Wife. This essay will foray into how El Beh plays a central role and holds the various sub-narratives together. Further, the dynamics and various facets of her acting are analyzed in relation to that of her co-actors.

The pivot around which Beh’s character revolves is the impending dream of having a baby. While one might call it an objective, it is not portrayed in conflicted terms. Beh takes us through the journey of realization that she had experienced. While everyone else around her are longing after dreams unfulfilled, the Baker’s Wife has the audacity to show deep contentment with her past and present. She feels an immense sense of fulfillment with her domestic life and the small joys that it contains. It is in this context that the idea of having a baby strikes her. It is a simple and natural desire for a maiden, but it is contrasted with the goals of other characters in the play. Beh’s role is the most challenging of all. Yet, she succeeds in conveying the moral complexities of her character in a clear and uncluttered way.

The socio-economic status of the Baker’s wife is decidedly modest. This is visible in the choice of costume she wears and the absence of jewelry in her person. Her contemporary, urban accent is another indicator of her status. But her wealth is no measure of her pride and dignity. She carries herself in a respectable fashion. This is most evident in her inner thoughts, depicted in the play as song-monologues. A notable such number is ‘Moments in the Woods’ sung by her. There is richness in the subtext of the song, for beneath the façade of a regular melancholic utterance, the song carries philosophical insights. Beh’s rich tonal quality carries the song to all corners of the auditorium. Not only is her pitch perfect for the theatre, but also consistent with the role she is playing. In contrast, some of the other actors adopt a presentation style that harks back to classic theatre. 

When we compare El Beh’s acting with the rest of the cast, the difference in quality is easy to see. Keith Pinto as the Baker plays his role competently and complements his wife’s acting. While Beh’s performance has attracted much attention, Pinto too manages to bring an understated perfection to his role. After all, it is he who evokes all the difficult moral dilemmas within the plot. Monique Hafen, who plays Cinderella, utilizes her natural good looks and vocal prowess to good effect. That is not to say that she is not equally good in playing the fool in certain parts of the play.  Other memorable characters in the play are that of the Witch and the Mysterious Man, played by Safiya Fredericks and Louis Parnell respectively. These two enliven the narrative, along with the trio of wolves. The acting skills of most actors are tested during the song sequences. But of them all, it is El Beh whose performance nears perfection. 

The rich inter-textual dialogue, song and music help showcase El Beh’s all-round skill and focus. But unfortunately, she and her colleages are let down by stage dimensions. The somewhat congested space of the stage undermine her expression at places. This is particularly true in scenes involving numerous actors, where the stage appears particularly cramped. It also has the drawback of inhibiting choreography. Actors, including El Beh, appear conscious of limitations in space and in turn do not fully and freely express the emotion demanded by the moment. 

In terms of criticism, one could say El Beh overdoes her choreographic parts, for it tended to take audience attention away from the lyrics. This is most evident during the rendering of It Takes Two by the Baker and his wife, where the audio-visual spectacle dilutes the gravity of the situation – undermining the feeling of newfound intimacy between the couple. Similarly, the nostalgia invoked by songs such as No One Is Alone and Children Will Listen also tend to undermine the exigencies of the plot. While El Beh’s brilliant individual performance carries the play, loose co-ordination between her and her co-actors is a letdown. When not speaking or singing, they seem to switch off mentally even when standing next to the action.

To sum up the acting appraisal, El Beh is the best performer among the ensemble. The rest of the crew is of good quality, though not of the same pedigree as Beh. 

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Why “Into the Woods” Matters

By Michael Schulman

For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population—musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber—has experienced a punishing range of emotions about the new movie “Into the Woods,” based on the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical of the same name. The emotions include anxiety, rage, anticipation, possessiveness, nostalgia, suspicion, denial, and dread. More than once, I’ve heard the show’s own lyrics used to explain how “Into the Woods” devotees feel about the adaptation. “Excited and scared,” as Little Red Riding Hood has it.

As a member of this small but fervent demographic, I’d like to explain why we’ve been so tense. Part of it is that “Into the Woods” is easy to get wrong. The musical weaves together fairy-tale figures like Cinderella, Jack (of the beanstalk), Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Rapunzel and the witch, and more than one handsome prince. Two new characters, a baker and his wife who’ve been cursed with barrenness, help to tie everything together. By the end of Act I, everyone’s wishes have come true: Cinderella gets her prince, Jack gets the giant’s harp, the baker and his wife get a child, and so on. In Act II, it all falls to pieces. A second giant goes on a killing spree. The princes cheat. The couple resorts to blaming and bickering. The characters question their original wishes and what they stole and whom they sold out to fulfill them. Nobody quite lives happily ever after.

In other words, it’s the antidote to Disney. So how could Disney possibly adapt the show without betraying its dark spirit? That was the question lingering over the buildup to the movie, stoked by dribs and drabs of paranoia-inducing detail. In a Talk of the Town piece by Larissa MacFarquhar in June, Sondheim himself seemed to confirm purists’ worst fears, telling a group of drama teachers that Disney had in fact bowdlerized some plot elements: “You will find in the movie that Rapunzel does not get killed, and the prince does not sleep with the baker’s wife.” (Only one of those things turned out to be true.) Disney’s tagline seemed unnervingly apt: “Be careful what you wish for.”

More than plot, what’s tricky about “Into the Woods” is tone. Lapine’s book tacks between farce and tragedy, winking at the absurdities of the original tales (How the heck does Little Red Riding Hood climb out of the wolf’s belly intact?) and then guiding their characters through calamity and heartache. Sondheim’s score is a puzzle-master’s trove of overlapping motifs, internal rhymes, wordplay (“We’ve no time to sit and dither / while her withers wither with her”), and psychological nuance. Few musical-theatre soliloquies are as elegant as “On the Steps of the Palace,” Cinderella’s deconstruction of the moment she decides to leave behind the shoe:

You think, what do you want? You think, make a decision. Why not stay and be caught? You think, well, it’s a thought, What would be his response? But then what if he knew Who you were when you know That you’re not what he thinks That he wants?

And then what if you are?

When the musical opened on Broadway, in 1987, parents would occasionally yank their young children out of the theatre in shock during the second act, thinking, They killed Rapunzel? I was too young to go (though, to my mother’s credit, she brought me to see Sondheim’s “Passion” a few years later), but fortunately Lapine’s note-perfect production was preserved by “American Playhouse.” The moment I first saw Bernadette Peters singing “Last Midnight” on PBS, circa fifth grade, was a formative one. It wasn’t just that she looked like a fabulous goth diva or her peculiar, warbly way of delivering punch lines. It was Sondheim’s articulation of the witch’s alienation and moral skepticism that was so riveting. Also, her hair.

I certainly didn’t comprehend all the musical’s resonances, among them the communal solidarity during the AIDS crisis, which at the time was stomping around the theatre world like an angry giant. (Sondheim has downplayed the AIDS connection, but it’s unavoidable.) Still, the show was a psychological bait and switch, a gateway to adolescence and its complicated truths. Act I had magic beans. Act II had disillusionment, responsibility, and loss. You got from one to the other through the woods, as good a metaphor as any for the big brutal world. Even the shifts in tone were a lesson: amid despair, a dry one-liner (“I was raised to be charming, not sincere”); after an act of courage, ethical revisionism. What I learned from “Into the Woods,” most of all, was ambivalence. It’s in every song, undermining prepackaged morals. (“Isn’t it nice to know a lot?” Little Red sings to herself. “And a little bit not.”) No one in musical theatre does ambivalence like Sondheim, and usually no one tells you what it is until after you’ve experienced it. Cinderella’s hemming and hawing on the palace steps is worlds away from “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” from Disney’s cartoon version. What if your heart doesn’t have a goddam clue?

It’s appropriate, then, that ambivalence is the overriding feeling I’ve had about the movie, even after seeing a screening a few weeks ago. Rob Marshall’s version, I’m happy to report, is faithful enough to please most diehards, without sacrificing the concrete magic that movies can offer. For the most part, the plot changes seem wise. (Come on, guys, relax about the Mysterious Man.) Meryl Streep is excellent; duh. It’s wordier and weirder than other movie musicals, as it should be. If anything, it was jarring to see the show's ambiguities translated so literally to a big holiday film, where they don’t seem to belong—or maybe I was just seeing the musical's flaws for the first time. Is the second-act massacre really deserved? I kept wondering, as I watched, how this could possibly be marketed to children, but then I reminded myself that I was ten when I saw “Into the Woods” on PBS. So now I’m worried less about the movie than about how the rest of the world will receive it—the selfishness of aficionados, who want their special thing all to themselves. Someday, the generation that learned about moral relativism from “Wicked” will feel the same way. I’ll tell them something that I learned from the witch: sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched.

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Into the Woods review – Terry Gilliam’s rollicking take on Sondheim’s ‘fairytale collision’

Theatre Royal Bath The ex-Python’s production is visually enticing, playful and dreamlike but doesn’t quite reach the mournful depths of parental anxiety that run through the story

W hat makes this Stephen Sondheim musical of colliding fairytales so irresistible is its doubleness: playful, quirky and fun, it is also a profound exploration of parental anxiety and loss. First we laugh at its wisecracks and wit, then we feel for its lost folkloric icons.

Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman’s atmospheric production does not quite manage to pull us into the musical’s mournful depths but it entertains enough and excels in its aesthetics of dark, dreamlike otherworldliness as Cinderella (Audrey Brisson), Red Ridinghood (Lauren Conroy), Jack of the Beanstalk (Barney Wilkinson), Rapunzel (Maria Conneely) and of course the Baker (Rhashan Stone) and his wife (Alex Young) career and rollick in the thick of the woods.

There are plenty of visual delights with fluttering puppetry (by Billie Achilleos) and gorgeous masks, along with Jon Bausor’s set design whose flat woodland resembles illustrations from the pages of a children’s story book. Human figures appear with animal heads and there is a beautiful, speaking flower pot representing Cinderella’s dead mother, both of which look like imagery from a Paula Rego painting. Mark Henderson’s lighting is fabulous too, along with creepy shadow play, as the story reaches beyond the “happy ever afters” and into marital unrest, terror and loss.

This is not a cleverly radical or overhauled production in the manner of Marianne Elliott’s gender-reversed Company , but it has been changed by degrees – trimmed in parts (though it still feels long) and given a gothic Grimms’ tales makeover. The narrator is not the suited accountant-type figure from the original, magnificent, 1987 Broadway production , but a cross between Nosferatu and a Dickensian incarnation of death in a top hat.

Where Sondheim’s narrator usually draws together the intersecting stories, the framing device here is a girl playing with her doll’s house, the latter becoming a miniature setting for the story – as if the action in her little house has come to life after bedtime. It is a Nutcracker kind of twist that is cute but twee.

Some of the characterisation steers close to pantomime, especially in Cinderella’s stepmother and sisters, but the central fairytale figures are played relatively straight. This realism should render them more human and affecting, but they feel slightly featureless and generic instead, while the humorous lines in James Lapine’s book and Sondheim’s sparkling lyrics feels oddly dampened.

The most characterful presence is, in fact, that of Jack’s beloved cow, Milky White – a truly loveable creature played by Faith Prendergast and resembling a giant liquorice allsort with long eyelashes.

The singing is strong throughout and the best of the comic songs come with the prince’s two numbers about the pain of love: Agony (sung by Nathaneal Campbell and Henry Jenkinson) while the Witch’s Lament, by Nicola Hughes, has melancholy power. The second, darker half, is stalked, literally, by a grim reaper and there is a sharp rendition of Your Fault, as it begins to convey the Freudian tragedy of over-protective mothers and absent fathers. Nothing quite develops its emotional power as much as it might but it stays elegant from beginning to end.

Plays until 10 September

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Film Review: ‘Into the Woods’

Wolves howl, giants roar and a cast of fairy-tale all-stars seek enlightenment in this solid, satisfying film version of Stephen Sondheim's beloved Broadway musical.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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“Be careful what you wish for” warn the ads for “Into the Woods” — an apt summary of the movie’s theme, and also the mindset of many a Stephen Sondheim fan ever since it was announced that the composer’s popular 1987 Broadway musical was being turned into a film. But such fears are swiftly allayed by director Rob Marshall , who, um, marshals Sondheim’s cavalcade of fairy-tale all-stars on to the screen in a faithful, never particularly inspired, but supremely respectable version — one that outclasses Marshall’s prior “Chicago” and “Nine,” to say nothing of this season’s two-ton musical monstrosity, “Annie.” Strong reviews and family appeal should earn Disney much more than a bunch of magic beans at the holiday box office, with a long shelf life to follow.

It certainly took Hollywood long enough  to see the forest for the trees where “Into the Woods” was concerned. A film version was first bandied about in the mid-’90s at Sony (with Goldie Hawn, Cher and Steve Martin among the potential cast), then put into development deep-freeze for the next two decades. During that time, “Woods” was revived twice on the New York stage (including director Timothy Sheader’s brilliant open-air production in Central Park in 2012) and could be felt as an influence on the “Shrek” movies and (especially) Disney’s “Enchanted.” But the announcement that Disney was finally making “Woods” still brought with it no shortage of anxieties (some fueled by a misquoted Sondheim interview): namely, that the Mouse House would sand down the less family-friendly elements of the show, including its lascivious pederast wolf, an episode of marital infidelity, and a second-act body count to rival Sondheim’s own “Sweeney Todd.”

For all those reasons and more, the chief virtue of this “Into the Woods” is a feeling of relief. Marshall hasn’t made one of the great movie musicals here, but he hasn’t bungled it, either — far from it. Aficionados who know the show by heart will fully recognize what they see here (and actually be able to see it, after the frantic, seizure-inducing editing of “Chicago” and “Nine”), while new audiences will more than get the gist, a touch condensed and Disneyfied perhaps, but to little overall detriment. If so much as one tween viewer adds Sondheim to his or her iPod playlist alongside the likes of “Let it Go,” all will have been worthwhile.

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Taking greater inspiration from “The Uses of Enchantment” author Bruno Bettelheim than from Uncle Walt, Sondheim and book writer James Lapine (who also earns a screenplay credit here) pluck a dozen or so characters from the iconic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, add in a few of their own invention, and set them on a tragicomic collision course in which “happily ever after” comes with a litany of fine-print conditions.

The lineup includes a humble baker (the very appealing James Corden ) and his wife ( Emily Blunt ), whose bake shop is frequented by a bratty, shoplifting Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), and who live next door to a haggard old witch ( Meryl Streep ) with many axes to grind. Long ago, the witch abducted the baker’s infant sister, Rapunzel (MacKenzie Mauzy), and cursed the baker himself with sterile genes —  punishment for the sins of his estranged father (who stole magic beans from the witch’s garden, once upon a time). But the curse can be reversed, the witch announces, provided the baker and his wife procure the necessary ingredients in the span of 72 hours: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold.

It is that quest which leads the childless couple into said woods, and into contact with all manner of fellow travelers running to or away from something: the farm boy Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), reluctantly off to market to sell his beloved but milk-dry cow; Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), giving chase to a confounded Prince Charming (Chris Pine); and Little Red herself, weighing mother’s advice about strangers against the dandyish charms of a certain Mr. Wolf (a lip-smacking Johnny Depp , in slanted fedora and a kind of hirsute smoking jacket). For Sondheim and Lapine, these woods are as much a psychological space as a physical one — an existential crucible where innocence is lost, wisdom gained and the difficulty felt of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, be they golden or giant-sized. Freed from the literal belly of the beast, Red Riding Hood sings that her lupine adventure made her feel scared, yes, but also excited, before concluding, “Isn’t it nice to know a lot?/And a little bit not.” Meanwhile, after her own illicit wooded liaison, the baker’s wife wonders, “Is it always ‘or?’/Is it never ‘and?’” — one of those deceptively simple Sondheim lyrics that feels like a definitive expression of life’s unending compromise.

Marshall, who’s never seemed to know quite what to do with a movie camera and an editing machine, is helped considerably here by the fact that “Woods” (unlike his previous musical films) has no major dances to flash-cut into incoherence. And where both “Chicago” and “Nine” labored to present their musical numbers as fantasy sequences, lest multiplex-goers be alarmed by the sight of actors suddenly bursting into song, “Woods” harbors no such concerns, embracing its theatricality down to the smallest details of costume and set design. (“The trees are just wood,” Sondheim’s characters sing, but the ones in Marshall’s film, care of production designer Dennis Gassner, look closer to fiberglass.) We’re a long — and probably wise — way here from the bigger-budget version of the film originally proposed, complete with elaborate creature effects from the Jim Henson workshop. The movie doesn’t need the extra razzle-dazzle because the real magic is there in Sondheim’s music, which Marshall allows to come through mostly unimpeded (save for a few deleted reprises) in Jonathan Tunick’s marvelous original orchestrations, conducted by longtime Sondheim collaborator Paul Gemignani.

Both men also worked on Tim Burton’s 2007 film version of “Sweeney Todd” (starring Depp as the eponymous demon barber), a stylistically bolder and more accomplished film than “Into the Woods.” If comparisons must be made, however, then “Woods” is the better sung of the two, by a generally superb cast who catch the tricky tonal shifts from cheeky satire to pathos and back again. Decked out with a long gray mane and a face of Grand Canyon crags, Streep brings a most amusing petulance to the witch (whom Bernadette Peters played as more of a cloying Jewish mother in the original Broadway production). Pine makes for a hilariously preening, clueless Prince, as does Billy Magnussen as his equally charming and insincere princely brother (who longs for fair Rapunzel). Their witty duet, “Agony,” performed in the midst of a babbling brook, is one of the film’s most dynamic numbers. But as onstage, the richest part here is that of the baker’s wife, a loyal helpmeet who can’t help but wonder if she’s cut out for grander things, and who pays dearly for that curiosity. And Blunt (once again under Streep’s thumb, as in “The Devil Wears Prada”) has just the right nurturing yet wistful air to make the character heartbreaking in spite of (or rather, because of) her all-too-human flaws.

For the screen, Lapine has somewhat condensed the show’s second half, diluting the sense that the characters, having achieved their ostensible goals by intermission, still long for something more. Mostly, though, the second-act doozies are still here: the deaths, the betrayals and the buck-passing standoff with a very angry female giant (Frances de la Tour). All of that should send wise children and their parents out into the night mulling the complex nature of love and loss, taking responsibility for one’s own actions, and the things both good and ill we pass on from one generation to the next. “Anything can happen in the woods,” goes one Sondheim lyric, and the same might be said of Hollywood musicals. Sometimes, by happy luck, they manage to get one right.

Reviewed at DGA Theater, New York, Nov. 28, 2014. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 124 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Lucamar/Marc Platt production. Produced by John DeLuca, Rob Marshall, Marc Platt, Callum McDougall. Co-producers, Angus More Gordon, Michael Zimmer.
• Crew: Directed by Rob Marshall. Screenplay, James Lapine, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim, Lapine. Camera (color, Arri Alexa HD, Fotokem prints), Dion Beebe; editor, Wyatt Smith; music and lyrics, Sondheim; orchestrations, Jonathan Tunick; score adaptation, David Krane; music producer, Mike Higham; music supervisors, Paul Gemignani, Mike Higham; musical staging, John DeLuca, Rob Marshall; production designer, Dennis Gassner; supervising art director, Chris Lowe; art directors, Andrew Bennett, Ben Collins, Mary Mackenzie; set decorator, Anna Pinnock; costume designer, Colleen Atwood; make-up and hair designer, Peter Swords King; sound (Dolby Digital), John Casali; supervising sound editors, Renee Tondelli, Blake Leyh; re-recording mixers, Mike Prestwood Smith, Michael Keller; visual effects supervisor, Matt Johnson; visual effects producer, Kenrick Wallace; visual effects, MPC, Atomic Arts, Digital Dimension, Soho VFX; special effects supervisor, Stefano Pepin; stunt coordinator, Mark Mottram; assistant director, Ben Howarth; second unit directors, John DeLuca, Thomas Napper; second unit camera, Alan Stewart; casting, Francine Maisler.
• With: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Huttlestone, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Christine Baranski, Tammy Blanchard, Lucy Punch, Tracey Ullman, Lilla Crawford, Meryl Streep, Simon Ruddell Beale, Joanna Riding, Johnny Depp, Billy Magnussen, Mackenzie Mauzy, Annette Crosbie, Chris Pine, Richard Glover, Frances de la Tour.

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Like a parched soul left adrift on a desert isle where all Broadway show tunes have been banished, I now realize how thirsty I have been for movie musical refreshment. “Les Miserables” feels as if it came out ages ago and, as much as I wore out my Four Seasons “Gold Vault of Hits” LP in my youth, this Sherry bay-ay-bee could not abide by Clint Eastwood ’s underwhelming “ Jersey Boys .”

As for  the now-playing update of “Annie,” well, let’s just say there is always tomorrow for “Tomorrow.”

But then like a siren’s song caressing my needy eardrums, I heard  the opening notes of the “Act One Prologue” of  ”Into the Woods” with its hypnotic staccato-like lyrics and the insistent refrain of “I wish… I wish… I wish.” And, suddenly, my very being felt quenched just by being in the misty midst of this much-delayed cinematic rendering of one of Stephen Sondheim ’s most popular shows.

Disney is behind  the film adaptation of this melody-laden fracturing of fairy-tale myths, which onstage could be quite grim indeed as it upends the traditional notion that “once upon a time” always leads to “happily ever after.” There has been much speculation about the second half and whether certain key adult-oriented elements that might not conform to a PG rating would make the cut.

Rabid Sondheim-ites might quibble over how  the violence has been softened or kept off-screen, and despair that the ending isn’t quite as bleak. But this is definitely no Mickey Mouse affair. The casting feels mostly flawless (nicely modulating the potential comic-diva overload of having both Christine Baranski and Tracey Ullman , whose part is actually more serious, in the same film). The singing is often splendid. The bits of humor are deftly handled. The pace is relatively swift. And it never feels like a static rendition of a theatrical event dumbed down for a younger demographic.

And, most importantly,  the themes concerning the unrealistic fantasies and desires that parents instill in their children that often result in unwanted consequences comes through loud and clear, thanks to James Lapine ’s adapted screenplay that’s based on his own stage version.

This effort might not get director Rob Marshall entirely off  the hook for his botched “ Nine ” in 2009 and it is nowhere near as star-packed, sophisticated and sexy as his 2002 feature debut “ Chicago .” But he does a good job of keeping the essential integrity of the piece intact. Plus, for those of us who are never happier than when there are a lot of people singing at one time, “Into the Woods” regularly manages to be quite enchanting in its disenchantment about what life offers–or doesn’t.

The clever plot with its interwoven fables is propelled by the Baker and his wife (a well-matched  James Corden and Emily Blunt ), whose attempts to have a baby have sadly failed. Into their shop whirls the Witch ( Meryl Streep , clearly enjoying herself even more than when she jumped on that bed in “Mamma Mia!”), who explains how she cursed the couple in retaliation for a wrong done to her by the Baker’s father. She adds that they can undo their bad luck by collecting four objects in three days: “The cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold."

The cow comes courtesy of Jack of beanstalk fame, gamely portrayed by Daniel Huttlestone , the very same lad who was street urchin Gavroche in the big-screen “Les Mis.” The cape refers to the apparel donned by Little Red Riding Hood, amusingly embodied by Broadway vet Lilla Campbell with plenty of brink-of-puberty brattiness. The hair, as you might guess, is provided by a tower-dwelling Rapunzel ( MacKenzie Mauzy , somewhat of a weak link in this lineup), who was raised by the Witch as her own daughter. And, naturally, the shoe comes courtesy of Cinderella, done to a pitch-perfect hilt by Anna Kendrick , who is turning  into  quite the movie-musical mascot.

All their paths eventually lead, as  the title says, into the woods. It’s a scary place where many of the characters lose their bearings, both morally, ethically and otherwise, and danger regularly lurks—most notably in the form of Johnny Depp as the Wolf. He hungrily exhibits lupine lustiness towards Red Riding Hood, well-fed herself after conning the Baker out of more than a few sweet samples. The actor’s most effective assets are his lascivious vocals, Dali-esque whiskers and snazzy zoot suit with tantalizing faux gray-blue fur as designed by the great Colleen Atwood .

But  his appearance is brief and actually quite non-disruptive as far as zany Depp-ian interludes go. It’s a rare role where he serves the work rather than the other way around.

Eventually, everyone’s wish comes true in one form or another. Then, in  the final act, everything falls apart, a matter aggravated by the tree-menacing intrusion of an angry she-giant (an awkwardly done visual effect with a human actress) who seeks revenge after Jack causes her equally large husband to meet his demise. Death, infidelity, disillusionment and finger-pointing eventually result in a communal healing process that certainly will ring true to audiences who are regularly exposed to such real-life aftermaths in the wake of tragic disasters both natural and man-made these days.  

But “ Into the Woods” wants to entertain as much as it wants to enlighten, thank goodness, and two standouts among the actors do more than their share to make sure that the first goal is certainly met. Of course, Le Streep leaves practically everyone else in the dust and by design. Much like the Wicked Witch of the West (with a sprinkling of Glinda on the side), this is one ugly crone who knows how to make an entrance and an exit as if she were an unwelcome weather event.

Oscar’s favorite actress breathes emotional fire  into two of the show’s best songs, the maternal lament “Stay With Me” and the tour-de force “Last  Midnight ,” during which she haughtily proclaims, “I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right. I'm the witch. You're the world.” The mighty Meryl also works her magic with the dialogue, giddily exclaiming “Oh my God” at one point as if she was a text-happy teenybopper.

More surprising are  the essential contributions of Chris Pine , whose preening, poising and pompadoured prince initially struggles to sweep Kendrick’s Cinderella off her slipper-shod feet. His experience as that self-adoring intergalactic womanizer Capt. Kirk in the current “ Star Trek ” franchise more than serves him well. “Agony,” the duet he shares with Rapunzel’s prince ( Billy Magnussen ) as they compare their female troubles, is the one number during the film that draws actual applause—usually a rare event in movie theaters and one that I experienced as well at my packed screening.

If nothing else, “ Into the Woods” will provide edifying sustenance for holiday crowds desperate to find a fitting movie to share with their family after the gift-opening and feasting is over. Plus, it will act as a harmonic palate cleanser for all those stale Christmas carols that have been playing since Halloween. 

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

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Into the Woods (2014)

Rated PG for thematic elements, fantasy action and peril, and some suggestive material

125 minutes

Anna Kendrick as Cinderella

James Corden as The Baker

Chris Pine as Cinderella's Prince

Johnny Depp as The Wolf

Emily Blunt as The Baker's Wife

Meryl Streep as The Witch

Lucy Punch as Lucinda

Christine Baranski as Cinderella's Stepmother

Tracey Ullman as Jack's Mother

Simon Russell Beale as The Baker's Father

• Rob Marshall
• James Lapine

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Must watch videos, into the woods movie – a dad’s critical review.

I just took my family to see the most philosophically pernicious Disney movie of all time:  Into the Woods . As the story warns you: “Careful the tale you tell…Children will listen.” Read on to find out why…

My almost-11-years-old twin daughters Mary Claire and Rose were dying to see Disney’s  Into the Woods.  In case you don’t have twin daughters keeping you in the know,  Into the Woods is a mashup fairytale of Jack in the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel.

What was Great about Into the Woods

The film was beautiful with an all-star cast: Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, and Tracey Ullman. It’s a film adaptation of the 1987 Broadway musical “Into the Woods.” I ain’t gonna lie. When Chris Pine did his musical number on the waterfall, I was laughing and loving it. It reminded me of something from my favorite musical: Pirates of Penzance. 

I was so into the film that at one point I even thought to myself, “This is great. I should buy stock in Disney. This is so well done!” The music was fun and fantastic. The story moved quickly and held my attention. I wasn’t getting up to go the bathroom.

From a story-telling point of view, the musical weaves together various classic fairytales into one giant meta-narrative so that each character was interconnected. And at last, all the happier ever after’s happened. The Prince married Cinderella. Little Red Riding Hood lived. The baker’s wife had a baby. The witch was appeased. Rapunzel got her man, too. Jack kleptoed the giant’s gold and chopped the beanstalk to kill him.

But then the pernicious twist…

What was Wrong about Into the Woods

For 60 years Disney has made beautiful “happily ever after” cartoons. I don’t know if it’s feminism or just Western jadedness, but “happily ever after” is just soooo not cool anymore. Moreover, it’s now fashionable to reveal the prince as evil and the princess as romantically frozen or emotionally tangled. There can be no love at first sight. Oh, and if there is, it will be crushed. The wounded girl will go on to become a maleficent  benevolent heroine.

I get it. Happy endings can be more like the aftermath of Helm’s Deep. Life is messy. Not everything is “A Dream is a Wish that Your Heart Makes.”

So  Into the Woods  creatively deconstructs the “happily” narrative of each story. At one point Cinderella’s prince-husband (?) begins to seduce the baker’s wife who just had a baby. One of my daughters leans over and says, “Daddy, what is happening?” I lean in and say, “The Prince is trying to commit adultery with her.” Yikes. This was not the delicately whispered conversation that I had hoped to have during a holiday trek to the the cinema. All I can say, “It’s a good thing we’ve gone over the 10 Commandments as a family.” I have explained the elusive “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as “When you try to marry someone who is not your husband/wife.” Now we have a kids movie to help us understand it more deeply. Thanks Disney!

Into the Woods as a Secular Sermonizing

So, yeah, there was the awkward Baker’s wife and Prince kiss scene and then the wife’s perplexity over it. But that’s not really what made me dislike the film.

I’m a philosopher. I’m a prof. That’s my trade. So it was the not-so-subtle sermon at the end of the film that got my goat.

There is a final scene in which all the characters play the blame game. They each take turn blaming the others for the unhappy ending in which they find themselves. The witch finally reveals that finding blame is unhelpful. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody screwed up. Everybody is to blame. So just move on with your life. Pick up the pieces and try to make something of it.

Into the Woods as Philosophical Nominalism

Ultimately, Into the Woods is  an apologetic for the philosophical school of nominalism – an error going back before the days of Socrates and Plato. Nominalism holds that there is not real essence or form out there in the world. There is no real substance or nature out there. Instead, we humans create and apply the names ( nomina in Latin, hence nominalism) to things and actions out there.

With nominalism, there is ultimately no meaning. There is no purpose. There is only the meaning and purpose that we create in our own hearts. There is no such thing as natural law. We can decide what we want things to be. If we want to change the  nomen or definition of “marriage” than we can do so. If we want to change the  nomen or definition of good and evil, we can do that, too.

Here’s the final (nominalist) sermon from Into the Woods.  I wanted to cover the ears of my dear children when I heard these words sung to a beautiful melody:

“Wrong things, right things … Who can say what’s true? … Do things, fight things … You decide, but … You are not alone … Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good.”

This is the final answer to the pain of the characters. “You decide what’s good.” But that’s the problem. All the bad guys are already playing that game. They have decided what is “right for me” and they are hurting you.

Out of the Woods: Let’s Turn from Nominalism Back to Realism

The opposite of nominalism is realism. Realism holds that there are absolute, non-changing forms, substances, and ideas in the universe. There are natural, pre-established laws that are real and not man-made . Humans don’t get make up their own definitions. There is no “You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good.” Instead, human persons must discover the true definitions within the fabric of a real world. We don’t create meaning and purpose. We discover what was already real before we showed up.

If you’ve jumped ahead of me and have concluded that Nominalism leads to secularism and atheism and that Realism leads to religion and theism, you are very intelligent. You can see past the meta-narrative of  Into the Woods.

So let’s get “out of the woods.” The nominalist worldview of the woods that proclaims, “You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good,” is ultimately bleak. It leaves you with the feeling that I had walking out of that movie theatre with my kids.

[reminder]Have you seen the film yet? What were your thoughts?[/reminder]

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Theatre Critique on the Play “Into the Woods”

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“Into the woods” is a play written by James Lapine, which uses the music and lyrics by Stephen Sondeheim. The current critique refers to the play “Into the Woods”, staged in 2013 by Larry Cure and Sharon Miller, with all the parts being performed by students. In general, the performance has its strengths and weaknesses, and presents a clear main idea “be careful with what you wish.”

In the first act, some characters fall out of the play because of lack of acting skills, but the director’s choices are quite strong. In the second act, acting improves; however, the director’s decisions there become predictable and monotonous. However, as far as the main task of modern theatre is to make viewers ask themselves a question, the Cure and Miller’s performance can be called a successful one. As a matter of fact, the strong points of the play include its cheerful mood, good directors’ findings and excellent acting of the main characters. However, there are still things to be improved.

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To begin with, setting plays secondary role in the performance, which is the right thing, because setting is more important for symbolic theatre. As the genre of the performance is a fairy musical, symbolism appears to be a secondary concept, while the primary ones include acting, vocal and plastic skills of the actors, as well as the composition of the play as a whole on the stage.

The first act is set in three houses. There are no houses on the stage, but the walls make viewers understand that the characters begin their journeys from their homes. All of them communicate in the closed spaces with their families or themselves, expressing their wishes. It is obvious that they are set in different places, because they are not integral and exist on different levels of the play. Once the walls disappear, all the characters find themselves in the wood. The space expands, lights become dimmer and some trees in the depth of the stage are enough to model the wood. The further development of the action demands only some hints to change the settings. These are different parts of scene – right and left wings, downstage and upstage; illusion of movement from one part of the wood to another is created when some characters disappear in the right side scene, and the others appear from the left one. To show the palace, the only thing used is the throne, to show Jack’s yard – only a cow. In fact, all the settings were expressed through the characters that refer to them.

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Speaking about the feelings  experienced by the fairy characters, all of them express human wishes to deal with poverty, have a child, find love or be younger. One of the most realistic is the Baker’s family. The Baker’s wife is a kind of a modern self-content woman, who experiences extreme situations and behaves as a courageous and determined person on the way to her aim. Her desire to have a child rises from the real maternity instinct, which bares all her noble virtues. However, she subsides to temptation with the prince in the end of the play and is punished for that by the wood. She dies, because she commits an unconscious betrayal not only against her husband, but against her wish and aim in life. She lets prince Charming seduce her and she kisses him, while her task was to find Jack. This human weakness kills her character, as it is incompatible with her previous behavior.

The third thing to discuss is the director’s choices, such as casting and the context. Although the casting is suitable for the play, there is a disjuncture between some actors who play sincerely and close to professional level, such as those whose characters were Baker and his wife, and those whose aim is more to provide entertainment than work on the role and composition, like both princes and Red Hood. Other actors performed a good quality of acting, they were sincere, but often they failed in diction or plastic movement on the stage. In all the scenes with the Witch or Cinderella’s sisters, it is difficult to understand their speech. Some choices are contradictory with the play, such as the illogical combination of naturalistic scene with the wolf and Red Hood with her Granny, where they come out of Wolf, or the scene where Baker feeds the cow with all the items. At the same time, the cow, as well as setting and other supporting cast, tends to be conventional rather than naturalistic. All these choices do not seem appropriate to the flow of the play where only a few conventional trees stand for the wood. These scenes should have been staged based on dancing or other, more theatre-like decisions.

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Despite some inconsistent details, the performance succeeded in reaching the idea of the play. As the material is a fairy tale, there is a vivid morality, mentioned in the paragraph about Baker’s wife. In fact, different moral issues and didactic aims of each tale are present in the performance. They teach not to talk to strangers, as in the scene with Red Hood, believe in the power of truth and kindness, but not the power of money, as it happened in the tale about Jack, and to be honest and not to envy, as in the Cinderella’s story. These moral conclusions of each tale are subordinate to the main idea, which teaches the viewers to be careful with their wishes, and especially with the ways of succeeding in those wishes coming true, because their consequences may affect life in unexpected ways. The final song reveals this idea in the end, although it was hinted throughout the performance.

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Movie Review: Into the Woods (1991)

• D.M. Behrendt
• Movie Reviews
• One response
• --> December 10, 2014

These are the first words of Into the Woods , Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s timeless 1987 musical production, and the last. Dangerous, familiar words that, in the real world, can strain our relationships with our dreams, our loved ones, and ourselves, and set us up for situations in which we can never truly feel satisfied. Each of the main characters of Into the Woods is based on a classic fairy tale character (or concept, in the case of The Narrator/Mysterious Man, originated here by Tom Aldredge) and employs a different twisted method of justifying the actions they undertake in order to achieve their personal goals.

A childless Baker (Chip Zien) who, along with his wife (Joanna Gleason) is following the instructions of a hilarious and cantankerous Witch (Bernadette Peters) to lift a curse and conceive a child, believes that “things are only what you need them for; all that matters is who needs them more.” His wife herself subscribes to a Machiavellian morality (which provides us with one of the play’s most enjoyable puns), thinking that everyone lies to everyone else, and all that really matters is the relative size of our deceptions. The Baker and the Baker’s Wife have no problem taking what they need (i.e., per the Witch’s instructions, a cow as white as milk, which belongs to Jack, a cape as red as blood, which belongs to Little Red Riding Hood, hair as yellow as corn, from Rapunzel, and a slipper as pure as gold, which is Cinderella’s) from those to whom those coveted things actually belong.

Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland) also takes from others, eating all of the treats she is supposed to bring to her Granny (Merle Louise, who also voices the Giantess and portrays Cinderella’s Mother) in the woods before being eaten herself by another taker, the Wolf (Robert Westenberg, who also plays Cinderella’s Prince). Cinderella (Kim Crosby), aside from her crippling self-consciousness, appears as one of the most morally balanced characters at the beginning of the play, though the most honest would have to be the Witch and The Narrator/Mysterious Man; in essence puppeteers who pop in to help or hurt the other characters as they please, but harbor no illusions of moral high ground. In complete contrast to these self-aware characters stands Cinderella’s Prince and Rapunzel’s Prince (Chuck Wagner), who relish their agony and compete against each other to determine who has suffered more on their quests for dramatic, life-changing love.

Perhaps the best and most enduring aspect of Into the Woods overall is the end of its first act. At this time, all of the characters have achieved exactly what they set out to at the beginning of the play. The Bakers have a child, Cinderella has escaped her father’s terrible house, the Witch is beautiful again, Little Red Riding Hood has defeated the Wolf, Jack and his mother are no longer completely impoverished. However, as anyone who has ever desired anything should know, this is still not enough, and the second act opens with the same exact cast of characters espousing a whole new set of desires, which end notably less well for each of them the second time around.

With the Disney adaptation of this play set to hit theaters on Christmas Day, it is definitely worth watching this original version, but not paying extra for the Blu-ray. It certainly does not contribute much in the way of clarity; faces and other details are frequently just as obscured as if you were in the audience in a fairly poor seat, and just as frequently so zoomed in that the overall effect of the stage is at best diluted and at worst lost. This is an understandable problem that tends to arise when viewing any filmed stage production; one always wishes they had been behind the camera at the time of the taping and able to control when and how the shots zoomed in and panned across the stage. For this play in particular, the biggest problems are in the first scenes of each act, where all the main characters inhabit their own scenes on the stage, all in a row, but the camera zooms in on each so tightly that it takes a moment to even realize they are all there at once, let alone discern their specific orientation.

These shots also take away from the effect of the conveyor belt on the stage that is best utilized during the scene where Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf meet for the first time, and during a few moments featuring Jack’s (Ben Wright) cow, Milky White. Not only does the camera zoom in on their part of the stage, ignoring the rest, but its operator also chose to focus on these characters from the waist up, completely overlooking this unique technical detail. Zooming in this way is also extremely detrimental to the concept of perspective in scenes featuring the Giantess.

All in all a play about the nature of desire and our inherent inability to feel satisfaction (there will always be another wish, and, in its own sick way, even agony can be pleasurable), Into the Woods is clever, funny, moving, self-reflective, and timeless, all things that any broadway play should be. My fingers crossed for the film adaptation, because, as we’ve learned with many televised musicals, they do not always work out so well, but I wish . . .

Tagged: fairy tale , novel adaptation , play , witch

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'Movie Review: Into the Woods (1991)' has 1 comment

December 22, 2014 @ 9:21 pm Shala

I wasn’t even aware that this was a broadway play before it was a movie; thank you for bringing this to my attention.

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Stage: 'Into the Woods,' From Sondheim

By Frank Rich

• Nov. 6, 1987

WHEN Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood and their fairy-tale friends venture into the woods in the new Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, you can be sure that they won't miss the subconscious forest for the picturesque trees. The characters of ''Into the Woods'' may be figures from children's literature, but their journey is the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.

Like the middle-aged showbiz cynics who return to their haunted youths in ''Follies'' and ''Merrily We Roll Along,'' or the contemporary descendant who revisits Georges Seurat's hallowed park in ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' or the lovers who court in a nocturnal Scandinavian birch forest in ''A Little Night Music,'' Cinderella and company travel into a dark, enchanted wilderness to discover who they are and how they might grow up and overcome the eternal, terrifying plight of being alone. To hear ''No One Is Alone,'' the cathartic and beautiful final song of ''Into the Woods,'' is to be overwhelmed once more by the continuity of one of the American theater's most extraordinary songwriting careers. The lyric's terrifying opening admonition - ''Mother cannot guide you'' - sends one reeling back three decades to the volcanic finale of ''Gypsy,'' in which the mother played by Ethel Merman at last cast her children into the woods of adulthood with the angry outburst, ''Mama's got to let go!''

The material of ''Into the Woods'' is potent stuff - as old as time, or at least as old as fairy tales. One needn't necessarily have read Bruno Bettelheim's classic Freudian analysis to realize that, in remaking Grimm stories, Mr. Sondheim's lyrics and Mr. Lapine's book tap into the psychological mother lode from which so much of life and literature spring. What is harder to explain is why the show at the Martin Beck, though touching both of its authors' past themes at their primal source, is less harrowing than, say, ''Sweeney Todd,'' which incorporated its own Sondheim variations on ''Rapunzel'' and ''Hansel and Gretel,'' and less moving than ''Sunday in the Park,'' which made related points about children and art and gnarled family trees through similarly Pirandellian means.

To understand how much ''Into the Woods'' disappoints, one must first appreciate its considerable ambitions and pleasures. The authors have not just tried to match the Grimms but to top them. In Mr. Lapine's book for Act I, Cinderella (Kim Crosby), Little Red Ridinghood (Danielle Ferland) and the giant-killing Jack (Ben Wright) join two newly invented characters reminiscent of ''Sunday in the Park,'' a childless baker (Chip Zien) and his wife (Joanna Gleason), in an intricate tripartite plot also yanking together one witch (Bernadette Peters), one wolf (Robert Westenberg), two princes (Mr. Westenberg and Chuck Wagner) and countless parents and stepparents. Although the principal characters, true to their Grimm prototypes, gain new wisdom in the woods, their pre-intermission happy endings hardly deliver the promised eternal ''tenderness and laughter.'' In Act II, everyone is jolted into the woods again - this time not to cope with the pubescent traumas symbolized by beanstalks and carnivorous wolves but with such adult catastrophes as unrequited passion, moral cowardice, smashed marriages and the deaths of loved ones.

The conception is brilliant, and sometimes the execution lives up to it. Mr. Sondheim has as much fun as one expects with his wicked airing of the subtext of the old tales: Mr. Westenberg's rakishly sexual wolf sings, ''There's no possible way/To describe what you feel/When you're talking to your meal.'' Mr. Lapine's script has its own bright jokes, many of them belonging to the production's two performing finds - the sassy Ms. Ferland, whose Lolita-like Red Ridinghood evolves into a ferocious little fox in a wolf stole, and the tender Ms. Crosby, whose insecure, weak-kneed Cinderella has a lovely, comic fragility that recalls the young Paula Prentiss. Only when Barbara Bryne is mugging campily as Jack's mother does the humor compromise the production's fundamental belief in grave, ontological fairy-tale magic. The designer, Tony Straiges, transports us from a mock-proscenium set redolent of 19th-century picturebook illustration into a thick, asymetrical, Sendakesque woods whose Rorschach patterns, eerily lighted by Richard Nelson, keep shifting to reveal hidden spirits and demons.

Unfortunately, the book is as wildly overgrown as the forest. Though the structure of ''Into the Woods'' leans on Sondheim trademarks - puzzles and scavenger hunts - its architecture has not been ingeniously worked out in Mr. Lapine's script. Perhaps the enterprise could use less art and more craft. The interlocking stories, coincidences, surprise reunions and close calls do not fall gracefully into farcical place as they did in the theatrically equivalent books for ''A Little Night Music'' and ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.'' Instead, the various narrative jigsaw pieces often prove either cryptic or absent, and, with the aid of a sort of post-modernist anti-narrator (Tom Aldredge), they must finally be patched together to achieve a measure of coherence.

The confusion breeds stasis; the show stands still during the huffing and puffing of voluminous plot information. Worse, the convoluted story has a strangulating effect on the musical's two essential sources of emotional power, its people and its score. The characters are at such frantic mercy of the plot that they never gather the substance required to make us care, as we must, about their Act II dilemmas of conscience, connectedness and loss. This is often true even of the musical's real leads, the baker and his wife, in spite of a good performance by Mr. Zien, who is funnier than his wimpy Chico Marx costume promises, and a wonderful one by Ms. Gleason, whose intentionally anachronistic suburban matron blossoms in fairy-tale land.

Mr. Sondheim's numerous songs, though often outfitted with incomparably clever lyrics, sometimes seem as truncated as the characters, as if they were chopped off just when they got going to make way for the latest perambulations of the book. With the exception of ''No One Is Alone,'' the most effective songs are directly tied to the plot (as in the extended title number, a gloss on ''A Weekend in the Country'' in ''Night Music'') or are their own self-contained jokes (as in ''Agony,'' a duet for philandering princes).

Too many of the other songs bring the action to a halt, announcing the characters' dawning self-knowledge didactically (''You've learned . . . something you never knew'') rather than dramatizing it. And sometimes the soliloquies describing psychological change are written in interchangeable language, as if the characters were as vaguely generic to Mr. Sondheim as they are to the audience. Time and second hearings always tell with a Sondheim score, but this one, its atypically muted Jonathan Tunick orchestrations included, makes the mildest first impression of them all.

The work's weaknesses and strengths alike are emblemized by the predicament of Ms. Peters, who is very funny as a cronish, crooked-finger witch but whose connection to the many plots is so tenuously gerrymandered that she is assigned a sermonizing song in Act II for no apparent reason other than her billing. Without this star, who delivers her numbers with enough force to bring down houses (whether theaters or little pigs'), ''Into the Woods'' would be a lesser evening, but the paradoxical price for her appearance is a deflatingly literal-minded explication of the musical's message (and of the witch's character), not to mention overlength.

There is enough to look at and think about, however, that the overlength rarely induces tedium. As director, Mr. Lapine may make little call on the services of his musical stager, Lar Lubovitch, but the tales keep sprinting on stage and into the auditorium. The result is unique to its composer's canon - the first Sondheim musical whose dark thematic underside is as accessible as its jolly storytelling surface. ''Into the Woods'' may be just the tempting, unthreatening show to lead new audiences to an artist who usually lures theatergoers far deeper, and far more dangerously, into the woods. The Dark Places INTO THE WOODS, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by James Lapine; directed by Mr. Lapine; settings designed by Tony Straiges; lighting by Richard Nelson; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward, based on original concepts by Patricia Zipprodt and Ms. Hould-Ward; orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick; musical director, Paul Gemignani; musical staging, Lar Lubovitch. Presented by Heidi Landesman, Rocco Landesman, Rick Steiner, M. Anthony Fisher, Frederic H. Mayerson and Jujamcyn Theaters. At the Martin Beck Theater, 302 West 45th Street. Narrator and Mysterious Man... Tom Aldredge Cinderella... Kim Crosby Jack... Ben Wright Baker... Chip Zien Baker's Wife... Joanna Gleason Cinderella's Stepmother... Joy Franz Florinda... Kay McClelland Lucinda... Lauren Mitchell Jack's Mother... Barbara Bryne Little Red Ridinghood... Danielle Ferland Witch... Bernadette Peters Cinderella's Father... Edmund Lyndeck Cinderella's Mother, Grandmother and Giant... Merle Louise Wolf and Cinderella's Prince... Robert Westenberg Rapunzel... Pamela Winslow Rapunzel's Prince... Chuck Wagner Steward... Philip Hoffman Snow White... Jean Kelly Sleeping Beauty... Maureen Davis

RIP Metaverse

An obituary for the latest fad to join the tech graveyard

The Metaverse , the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old.

The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie "Tron" and the 2003 video game "Second Life," was born in 2021 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his trillion-dollar company to Meta. After a much-heralded debut, the Metaverse became the obsession of the tech world and a quick hack to win over Wall Street investors. The hype could not save the Metaverse, however, and a lack of coherent vision for the product ultimately led to its decline. Once the tech industry turned to a new, more promising trend — generative AI — the fate of the Metaverse was sealed.

The Metaverse is now headed to the tech industry's graveyard of failed ideas. But the short life and ignominious death of the Metaverse offers a glaring indictment of the tech industry that birthed it.

Grand promise

From the moment of its delivery, Zuckerberg claimed that the Metaverse would be the future of the internet. The glitzy, spurious promotional video that accompanied Zuckerberg's name-change announcement described a future where we'd be able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds: Users would "make eye contact" and "feel like you're right in the room together." The Metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an "immersive" experience, he claimed.

These grandiose promises heaped sky-high expectations on the Metaverse. The media swooned over the newborn concept: The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word-long interview with Zuckerberg immediately following the announcement — in which the writer called it "an expansive, immersive vision of the internet." Glowing profiles of the Metaverse seemed to set it on a laudatory path, but the actual technology failed to deliver on this promise throughout its short life. A wonky virtual-reality interview with the CBS host Gayle King , where low-quality cartoon avatars of both King and Zuckerberg awkwardly motioned to each other, was a stark contrast to the futuristic vistas shown in Meta's splashy introductory video .

The Metaverse also suffered from an acute identity crisis. A functional business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow: a clear use case, a target audience, and the willingness of customers to adopt the product. Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the Metaverse as "a vision that spans many companies'' and "the successor to the mobile internet," but he failed to articulate the basic business problems that the Metaverse would address. The concept of virtual worlds where users interact with each other using digital avatars is an old one, going back as far as the late 1990s with massively multiplayer online role-player games, such as "Meridian 59," "Ultima Online," and "EverQuest." And while the Metaverse supposedly built on these ideas with new technology, Zuckerberg's one actual product — the VR platform Horizon Worlds, which required the use of an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — failed to suggest anything approaching a road map or a genuine vision. In spite of the Metaverse's arrested conceptual development, a pliant press published statements about the future of the technology that were somewhere between unrealistic and outright irresponsible . The CNBC host Jim Cramer nodded approvingly when Zuckerberg claimed that 1 billion people would use the Metaverse and spend hundreds of dollars there, despite the Meta CEO's inability to say what people would receive in exchange for their cash or why anyone would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality, cartoon concert.

A high-flying life

The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way didn't get in the way of its ascension to the top of the business world. In the months following the Meta announcement, it seemed that every company had a Metaverse product on offer, despite it not being obvious what it was or why they should.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would say at the company's 2021 Ignite Conference that he couldn't "overstate how much of a breakthrough " the Metaverse was for his company, the industry, and the world. Roblox, an online game platform that has existed since 2004, rode the Metaverse hype wave to an initial public offering and a $41 billion valuation. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry took the ball and ran with it: The people behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT company conned the press into believing that uploading someone's digital monkey pictures into VR would be the key to "master the Metaverse." Other crypto pumpers even successfully convinced people that digital land in the Metaverse would be the next frontier of real-estate investment . Even businesses that seemed to have little to do with tech jumped on board. Walmart joined the Metaverse. Disney joined the Metaverse.

Companies' rush to get into the game led Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to try to one up each other's projections for the Metaverse's growth. The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever . The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to "$5 trillion in value," adding that around 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to "positively impact their industry" within five to 10 years. Not to be outdone, Citi put out a massive report that declared the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity .

A brutal downfall

In spite of all this hype, the Metaverse did not lead a healthy life. Every single business idea or rosy market projection was built on the vague promises of a single CEO. And when people were actually offered the opportunity to try it out, nobody actually used the Metaverse.

Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based Metaverse product (effectively a wonky online world you can "walk" around), only had around 38 daily active users in its "$1.3 billion ecosystem." Decentraland would dispute this number, claiming that it had 8,000 daily active users — but that's still only a fraction of the number of people playing large online games like "Fortnite." Meta's much-heralded efforts similarly struggled: By October 2022, Mashable reported that Horizon Worlds had less than 200,000 monthly active users — dramatically short of the 500,000 target Meta had set for the end of 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported that only about 9% of user-created worlds were visited by more than 50 players , and The Verge said that it was so buggy that even Meta employees eschewed it . Despite the might of a then-trillion-dollar company, Meta could not convince people to use the product it had staked its future on. 

The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its "industrial metaverse team ," and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team . Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people losing their jobs .

But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta's "single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products." Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers , despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be "Metaverse first." While Zuckerberg may suggest that developing games for the Quest headsets is some sort of investment, the writing is on the wall: Meta is done with the Metaverse.

Did anyone learn their lesson?

While the idea of virtual worlds or collective online experiences may live on in some form, the Capital-M Metaverse is dead. It was preceded in death by a long line of tech fads like Web3 and Google Glass. It is survived by newfangled ideas like the aforementioned generative AI and the self-driving car. Despite this long lineage of disappointment, let's be clear: The death of the Metaverse should be remembered as arguably one of the most historic failures in tech history.

I do not believe that Mark Zuckerberg ever had any real interest in "the Metaverse," because he never seemed to define it beyond a slightly tweaked Facebook with avatars and cumbersome hardware. It was the means to an increased share price, rather than any real vision for the future of human interaction. And Zuckerberg used his outsize wealth and power to get the whole of the tech industry and a good portion of the American business world into line behind this half-baked idea. 

The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has clearly stepped away from the Metaverse is a damning indictment of everyone who followed him, and anyone who still considers him a visionary tech leader. It should also be the cause for some serious reflection among the venture-capital community, which recklessly followed Zuckerberg into blowing billions of dollars on a hype cycle founded on the flimsiest possible press-release language. In a just world, Mark Zuckerberg should be fired as CEO of Meta (in the real world, this is actually impossible ). 

Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street. There is no reason that a man who has overseen the layoffs of tens of thousands of people should run a major company. There is no future for Meta with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm: It will stagnate, and then it will die and follow the Metaverse into the proverbial grave.

Ed Zitron  is the CEO of  EZPR , a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter  Where's Your Ed At .

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