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Review: Freefall's 'Into the Woods' is a wild ride for the imagination

 
Kelly Pekar as Cinderella
Kelly Pekar as Cinderella
Published Oct. 14, 2014

ST. PETERSBURG — Just how gigantic is Into the Woods? A sample lyric:

"There are giants in the sky! Big tall, terrible giants in the sky!"

This is meant quite literally. Jack, a slotted spoon of a boy, has gone up a bean stalk and discovered wealthy and spiteful giants living above. And when theaters do Into the Woods, they often approach it quite literally, with complicated moving sets that drop beastly heads on stage.

But we're not talking most theaters. Freefall Theatre, never known for doing the expected, has artfully condensed Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's epic fractured fairy tale to fit in the small Central Avenue venue.

It's the kind of thing that shouldn't work, but works beautifully. Freefall's artistic director Eric Davis, who both directed the show and designed the costumes and set, has fully committed to executing a stripped-down imaginarium. It's fitting for a musical that slices at humanity under the guise of fantasy.

Now's when I pause and admit Into the Woods is my favorite musical. It's not a perfect work — for one, it's verrrrry long — but the intoxicating blend of dark and light, of melody and mayhem, had teenage me wearing out the VHS of the American Playhouse production starring Bernadette Peters.

So I was both giddy and nervous to see how the hulking hunk of musical theater would translate to such an intimate space. The set is shabby chic, like an Anthropologie catalog. There are tapestries, chandeliers, art nouveau paintings, books and quirky gewgaws. Interestingly, there are no trees.

The musicians — a drummer, a cellist and a violinist led by Michael Raabe on piano — are nestled in the set. The show opens with a startle. Little Red Riding Hood, played by funny wisp Katie Berger, screams onto set. The story begins.

Everyone has a wish: Cinderella wishes to go to the King's festival; Jack wishes his cow would give milk; the Baker and his Wife wish to have a child.

The Witch has cursed them with infertility, offering to fix it if they fetch what she needs — the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold. Everyone sets off to get their wish, making dubious ethical choices along the way.

My wish is to have endless space to write about everyone, but suffice to say all the actors are up to their parts.

Ann Morrison, a Broadway veteran who originated Mary Flynn in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, nails the Witch's dry comedy and wails on the powerhouse songs, Last Midnight and Children Will Listen. Matthew McGee as the Narrator and Mysterious Man ties everything together at the rapid clip Sondheim demands. Joanna Mandel as Rapunzel has some serious pipes and a haunting countenance.

Davis' most inspired casting is in Nick Lerew and Griffeth Whitehurst, who play two dopey princes, the Wolf (you'll see) and Cinderella's ugly stepsisters, wearing the most fabulous headgear this side of Wong Foo.

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And how are we to imagine the woods in this blackened room? It's in the little things, the characters flapping books as birds, the shadow puppets on screens, the mannequin parts meant to represent whole people. Using your brain becomes part of the experience.

That's sort of the point of Into the Woods, I always thought. It demands a little from you. It's a laugh riot in the first act, followed by a dramatic tonal shift that will leave the hardest heart feeling unsound.

We start to realize that unlike storybook archetypes, no one is purely good and no one is purely evil. That nice is different from good. That everyone decides what good looks like to them, giant or small.

Contact Stephanie Hayes at shayes@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8716. Follow @stephhayes.