Review: South Coast Repertory Presents A Revamped INTO THE WOODS

One of musical theater's most indelible musicals that have somehow continued to find an ever-growing fandom from wide-ranging, multigenerational groups throughout the decades, INTO THE WOODS just keeps finding its way back into our stages both big and small—and perhaps why OC's Tony Award-winning theater South Coast Repertory selected it as its first show for its new 2026-2027 season, where a new, aesthetically-reinvisioned production has blossomed and continues extended performances through October 18, 2026. 

On the surface, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1987 Tony Award-winning musical looks like the ultimate mash-up of familiar childhood fairy tales—after all, it features infamous characters that include Cinderella (and her Prince), Little Red Riding Hood (and her wolf stalker), Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Rapunzel (and her super-long hair), and a (Wicked) Witch desperate to de-ugly-fy her looks. And by happenstance, all of them—by coincidence or, maybe, by fate—find themselves wandering aimlessly into the same enchanted forest, all carrying their own, um, baggage and their own wishes they want fulfilled. 

But brewing just beneath all that child-friendly storybook whimsy is something considerably more adult and complicated: a deeply thoughtful musical about wanting, then getting, then losing, then growing up, and then discovering that the thing you thought would make everything better doesn't necessarily make anything better at all. To put it in simpler terms, INTO THE WOODS is a fairy tale for those of us who have lived long enough to discover that happily ever after is usually where the real work begins…. and where reality can, ugh, smack you in the face out of your enchanted stupor. 

In celebration of the musical's 40th anniversary, South Coast Reportory recreates the Sondheim-Lapine forest with a decisively different approach, one that both entices and, at times, at least for me, triggers an uneasy vibe (at first) that seems to have oozed out from the show's darker second half. Admittedly, something felt off while watching the show unfold in its new staging—which, in the end, proved to be the desired jolt it wanted from us all along. 

This new production is defiantly a smaller-scale and more unsubtle reinvention of the superb 2022 Broadway revival that I saw four (!) times when its national tour—and many of its Broadway cast members—stopped by the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles a few years ago. While that revival mounting was more minimalist than SCR's current offering, both are certainly enjoyable as varied iterations of the same material. 

Under director Peter Rothstein's imaginative steering, this creatively ambitious new SCR production has decided to take the same familiar material many of us have come to love, but gives it a refreshed theatrical makeover, one that places the musical almost like it's put together by an old-timey, slightly unsettling, turn-of-the-century vaudeville/circus troupe—maybe even an undead one—performing a play in the weathered remnants of what I can only describe as an abandoned amusement park, complete with aging, time-worn frocks and props to present their fractured fable. 

Rather than lean too heavily into the conventional picture-book aesthetic that can sometimes make INTO THE WOODS feel like an elaborate children's story (but with an ominous, much darker second act attached), SCR's production unabashedly embraces the show's inherent darker tones and implied theatricality and even weaves the very art of play-acting as part of the drama. 

SCR's aesthetic revamp is played up in the mannered, outwardly exaggerated acting style of its ensemble "players," which are then visually punctuated by Daniel Nieves' vintage-inspired costumes that feel like they could fit right into the Haunted Mansion's spooky surroundings. All around them, Adam Koch's mesmerizing implied sets—enhanced by Greg Emetaz's awesome and, at times, perfectly subtle animated projection designs and Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz's mood lighting—complete the magic-meets-artifice machinations embedded in the show. And that visual punch is there even before the show begins with the sight of the show's suspended from high-wires signage spelling out "Once Upon A Time" in a twisted, bulb-lit sideshow font reminiscent of antiqued circus marquees. This neck of the woods definitely feels much more haunting than previous iterations I've seen. 

And just like that hangry little girl in the red hood… I, too, was "excited and scared."

The end result is an inspired staging that feels more palpably fluid and creatively stylized, which can, at times, make the show more dreamlike than ever—but also a little inexplicably shudder-inducing, too. 

At first I didn't quite know how to feel about this revisionist take, but as the show transitions its way to its darker second half, all of this show's fascinating yet confounding, and, in hindsight, purpose-driven decisions all come together and make aha! sense. That clever conceit seems like an appropriate approach for a fantastical musical in which characters are constantly moving between reality, fantasy and the increasingly blurry gray area between the two—and accomplishing it with just a notably reduced ensemble of 12 actors, who are, collectively, this production's best, most valuable aspects of all.

But the story, of course, begins just as many of us remember it: the musicalized declaration of different wishes from a cadre of characters overflowing with hope.

Enter the show's Master of Ceremonies, so to speak… the omniscient narrator (played by Chamblee Ferguson) who regales us with the criss-crossing stories involving our players, and who also occasionally inserts himself directly into the drama as a "Mysterious Man."

We then meet our "wishers." 

First, there's Cinderella (the lovely-voiced Mia Pinero), who was once the daughter of a prominent nobleman who had died. Unfortunately, she has now been reduced to being an abused housemaid, cruelly bossed around by an odious stepmother (Amanda Naughton) and two detestable stepsisters (Becca Claire Hart and Hailey Truong). On another part of the village lives young, often awe-struck Jack (the endearing Christian Tyler Dorey) and his exasperated mother (Katy Tang). When we meet them on this first day, Jack has been tasked to sell his bovine best friend Milky White to a distant market in order for their family to have some money for food, which Jack is, as expected, reluctant to do so. 

Elsewhere in the same town we meet a local Baker (Dylan Saunders) and his very astute Wife (the effervescent Danielle Hope), who desperately want to break a long-standing curse that has prevented them from having a child. After fending off the insatiable appetites of a visiting Little Red Ridinghood (also played by scene-stealer Hailey Truong), who comes into their bake shop to grab some snacks for her journey to visit her Grandmother who lives in the woods, the childless flour couple soon learns that the evil Witch (a deliciously shrill Valerie Perri)—who annoyingly lives just next door—was actually responsible for that baby-stopping curse, which was a punishment she enacted on their household as payback for the alleged garden theft committed by the Baker's father many, many years earlier. 

However, despite her nastiness and a penchant for Karen-esque rapping, the Witch offers the Baker and his wife a strange and challenging solution to their cursed problem: simply fetch for her four seemingly unrelated objects—"a cow as white as milk, hair as yellow as corn, a slipper as pure as gold, and a cape as red as blood" before the third midnight, after which their curse will soon be magically reversed.

And so, off they all go into the woods, where their individual quests intersect in sometimes funny, sometimes heartfelt, and sometimes dangerous ways. The stories of Cinderella and her pursuant Prince (hilariously debonair Michael Deni), Little Red Riding Hood and her ravenous stalker, the Wolf (also played by Michael Deni), Jack and his cow BFF, the Witch, and even tower-banished Rapunzel (also played by Becca Claire Hart) and her exhausted Prince (Cooper Lee Bennett) all get their familiar callbacks to the stories we've come to know from our collective childhoods—but now with added twists that come after they achieve their Act 1-concluding happily ever afters. 

Clearly, everybody here wants something. Everybody believes that getting that something will solve all their problems. And, for a while, that thinking actually seems to work.

Then comes Act Two.

That deceptively simple structural turn remains one of Sondheim and Lapine's greatest accomplishments. The first act gives us the fairy tales we think we want. The second act asks what happens when the fantasy of wish fulfillment ends. 

Marriages become complicated. Children become parentless. Wishes, it turns out, have consequences. And the characters who once seemed neatly divided into the familiar tropes of heroes, villains, and, maybe, comic relief purveyors suddenly become just messy, wounded, and even relatable human beings. INTO THE WOODS gradually stops being about getting what one wants and becomes much more interested in what one does after they get it.

That is precisely where Rothstein's approach pays off. The production doesn't seem particularly interested in making these characters into pristine, museum-piece versions of the roles we already know. Instead, there is an emphasis on grandiose, punctuated theatrical transformations and layered storytelling—with the actors creating a world rather than just simply inhabiting a literal one. Openly presenting them as an acting troupe of just 12 performers—some donning multiple roles in their dramatic rendering—reinforces that idea and allows the production to emphasize the interconnectedness of these seemingly separate fairy tales.

And what a wonderfully strange collection of people these are.

The SCR cast benefits from this production's emphasis on theatrical character work. 

The admirable pairing of Saunders and Hope as, respectively, The Baker and his Wife may be the closest thing the show has to conventional protagonists, but even their flawed but ultimately relatable characters are capable of making choices that are selfish, impulsive and occasionally heartbreaking. They certainly bring grounded humanity to their characters, making their increasingly desperate pursuit of parenthood feel less like a plot mechanism and more like a recognizable not-so-perfect marriage under extraordinary pressure.

Meanwhile, Perri's Witch—perhaps the show's most misunderstood figure—exists somewhere between fairy-tale villain and brutally honest maternal figure, making her eventual emotional unraveling all the more affecting. And though, admittedly, I've been spoiled by some incredibly fierce power vocalists that have filled this character's shoes in the most recent Broadway and national tour productions, the admirable Perri manages to give her portrait of the Witch a formidable presence while allowing glimpses of vulnerability to emerge beneath all that magical menace. 

Truong's spunky Little Red isn't quite the innocent she first appears to be. She similarly gets to exist somewhere between wide-eyed child and unexpectedly savvy young woman. Pinero's Cinderella isn't simply the passive princess waiting for rescue. She palpably captures the character's curious ambivalence about her supposedly perfect ending while also proving that she has the capacity to be an empathetic caregiver despite her years of torture. Dorey's Jack isn't merely a dim-witted boy with an accidental magic beanstalk. He brings an appealing mixture of youthful enthusiasm and innocence to a character who ultimately had to grow up pretty quickly as he learns some devastating lessons. And his infectious gusto and killer voice makes his "Giants in the Sky" a highlight (he even slides down a fire pole!). 

The 12-person company—playing a 12-person company of actors playing multiple characters across intersecting fairy tales—all contribute to the production's deliberately fluid, eccentric storytelling style that feels like it could be a stand-alone musical episode of a vintage-era, freak show-set season of American Horror Story (with significantly less blood and gore, of course).

Obviously, none of this works without Sondheim's extraordinary score.

Four decades later, the music of INTO THE WOODS remains one of the composer's most accessible—and simultaneously most deceptively intricate—scores. The music begins with buoyant, almost nursery-rhyme-like rhythms and motifs before gradually revealing darker harmonies and increasingly complicated emotional undercurrents. 

Songs such as "Children Will Listen," "No One Is Alone," "Last Midnight," "Agony" and "Giants in the Sky" have become classic standards because they manage to be both immediately theatrical and remarkably specific in what they have to say about human behavior. Musical director Wiley Deweese and the production's incredible musicians and singers give the score the rhythmic precision it demands without eroding away its emotional rough edges.

Fun fact: INTO THE WOODS contains my favorite ever Sondheim lyric: "while her withers wither with her"—a clever bit of wordplay that summarizes his genius. When Jack's mom sings it, I still smile every time.

And then there is Lapine's book, which might be the real secret weapon here. The dialogue has a deceptively casual quality—characters interrupt one another, misunderstand things, repeat themselves, and contradict themselves. Yet beneath the humor and sardonic observations is a remarkably sophisticated examination of morality. The show repeatedly asks whether good intentions are enough. What do parents owe their children? What do children owe their parents? Is a wish still worth pursuing if achieving it hurts someone else? And perhaps most importantly: when everything falls apart, how do we keep going?

That final question is where INTO THE WOODS ultimately lands—particularly with the kind of world we live in today. While Act 1 provides some uplifting escapism we all crave, Act 2 yanks us back down to earth, a reminder that at some point we all have to face the music, however uncomfortable it may be.

The second act's darkness has sometimes been treated as a tonal obstacle, particularly in productions that become so enchanted by the first act's fairy-tale pleasures that the transition feels like the evening suddenly wandered into an entirely different musical. SCR's more stylized approach helps bridge that divide, creating a start-to-finish environment where that second act jolt has been hovering there all along. By making the theatrical world feel slightly artificial and, yes, a little unsettling right from the beginning, the production leaves room for the story to become darker without completely abandoning its visual language. The woods aren't simply a place that exists onstage—they become a kind of emotional landscape that bleeds out like a ghost haunting the entire theater.

Still, the production did make me feel, at least for most of the first act, like something was off, but I couldn't quite identify it at first, mostly from my past experiences with the show. Some audience members might grow impatient with this inexplicable feeling, and the show's theatricality may occasionally create a bit of emotional distance if that feeling persists. 

Though I am impressed by the creative ambitions on display here, admittedly, there are fleeting moments when the conceptual machinery of the staging threatens to become more noticeable than the characters themselves. Though INTO THE WOODS can survive a great deal of invention—as proven by this production—all of its machinations ultimately work best when the audience forgets about the embedded cleverness and simply feels the heartbreak. Fortunately, Sondheim and Lapine have built so much emotional truth into the material that even when the staging calls attention to itself, the songs and dialogue eventually pulls us right back into it all.

And that may be the most satisfying thing about this particular production of INTO THE WOODS. It doesn't try to convince us that the musical is still relevant simply because it has been around for 40 years. Instead, it trusts the material enough to let it breathe differently and take on new surfaces and surroundings.

The fairy tales remain. The wishes remain. The catchy melodies remain. The witty jokes remain. But the questions have become more complicated with age. As someone who experienced the show first as a much younger man than I am today, my relationship with the themes of the show have also evolved along with me.

What happens when you finally get what you've always wanted? What happens when the person you trusted disappoints you? What happens when the person you love is gone? What happens when there is no magical solution left?

Well… You keep going. You find someone so you're not so alone. You listen. And then, somehow, you gather up some courage and step back into the woods. That is the enduring magic of this musical—and in this freshly conceived production, the familiar forest feels just unfamiliar enough to make us want to wander through it all over again.

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Photos by Scott Smeltzer, courtesy of South Coast Repertory.

Performances of INTO THE WOODS at South Coast Repertory have been extended through October 18, 2026. Tickets can be purchased online at www.scr.org, by phone at (714) 708-5555 or by visiting the box office at 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa. 

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