“Into the Woods was a uniting show.”
When producer Nandi Hildenbrand said this to me, she was talking about the first time she watched the 2014 musical movie, a blockbuster rendition of Lapine and Sondheim’s 20th-century masterpiece with a cast full of 21st-century icons: Anna Kendrick, James Corden, and Emily Blunt, to name a few. Part of its appeal certainly was rooted in these names, but also its modern retelling of a 30-year-old musical that was itself a retelling of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. It was the epitome of the epitome of a unifying adaptation. The perfect fit for Hildenbrand.
“It was such a magical show. I knew it would bring people together,” said Hildenbrand. Thus began the year-long production process of Into the Woods, the Yale Dramatic Association’s pick for the fall musical.
When I walked into the theater, I wasn’t surprised to see a packed house. I went alone, but quickly ran into several friends after I arrived. For some, it was their first time seeing the musical. For others, it was the fifth or sixth or seventh—or however long it took to commit the songs to memory well enough to silently mouth along to the words during the show. For everyone, the musical was captivating. People laughed throughout the two princes’ (Jaden Nicita and Eason Rytter) hilariously affectatious rendition of “Agony,” intently listened to Jack (Benjamin Jimenez) sing a seraphic lydian scale as he descended down the words “There are giants in the sky,” and applauded the crowd favorite, Milky White (Nire Oloyede), whenever she re-entered the stage.
A few minutes before the beginning of the show, the house lights illuminated everything on the stage: a towering clump of ladders to the back right, a web of lift lines, a two-seat tartan-clothed couch, a lamp, a stainless steel table, a single folding chair, a plain, blue scaffold, and several wheeled clothing racks. With the playbill and its dreamlike cover in hand, the audience must recognize this image of the stage and experience the dissonance between the musical’s fantastical world and its mechanistic production simultaneously.
After the characters set out on their adventures into the woods in the first act, the clothing racks animate the forest and swirl around the cast members. At angled, disjointed positions, the clothing racks resemble trees, and their hanging clothes—light and ephemeral—look like leaves. This is all counterposed by the obvious fact that the clothing racks are just clothing racks; their painted neon orange bottoms serve as obtrusive reminders of this fact.
Like the stage before the beginning of the show, realism and fiction appear in the same place. Into The Woods tests its audience’s refusal of illusion. It doesn’t hide anything from the viewer; you can, for instance, see that clump of ladders in the background at all times, just like you can see the clothing racks as clothing racks.
What the musical has to do, then, is break the boundary between the imagined and the realistic. However, Into the Woods proves that fantasy does not require elaborate, otherworldly stage designs. Only the bare bones of the theater are required—some clothing racks, a stage platform, the costumes, and the actors. As director Ryan Dobrin wrote in the program, “We have stripped the theater back to its bare walls and are using objects one might find around the University Theater.” In this world, everything—even plain clothing racks—can be part of our fantastical imagination. Like a child’s vision of the universe, ordinary signs of reality are enveloped in a fictional narrative without having to do much. This is a musical where Little Red Riding Hood can wear a Target bag, where the giant’s golden harp can be a comically large triangle ruler, where Rapunzel’s tower can be a plain blue scaffold, and where Harvard-Yale sweaters—not decorated satin—serve as signs of princes.
These incongruities are what makes The Dramat’s rendition of Into the Woods refreshingly fascinating. As a member of the audience, you’re encouraged to synthesize reality and fantasy, to free yourself from the confined boundary of either realm and immerse yourself in the hyperreal presentation of the musical in which they entwine. Here, you are both spectator and participant, watching the show and actively suspending your disbelief alongside the actors. You must be creatively brave enough to see the set as them while peering beyond it. In an instant, you witness the process and the result, the year-long production begun by Nandi Hildenbrand last fall, and the fruits of that labor, all of which can be located in the clothing racks. They stand as a testament to the entire production process—the collective work of the costume, set, and props designers (Matthew Eggers and Emily Currie, Christian Fleming, and Jessica Oserogho, respectively). Each time we see a clothing rack, we’re reminded that each piece was carefully chosen and that this three-hour show was composed of an uncountable amount of hours behind the scenes.
After intermission, realism disassembles fantasy again. The tired trope of a conveniently smooth fairytale plot—where the witch just happens to need the white cow, yellow hair, the slipper, and the cape from the bakers, who just happens to save Little Red Riding Hood, who happens to egg Jack into stealing the harp, who happens to sell his cow to the bakers in the first place—unravels instantaneously. The giant’s (Elsie Harrington) vengeful entrance—and the closely timed death of the narrator—marks the transition between the characters’ fantastical fates and their pragmatic reality. At this critical juncture, actions have consequences, motivations conflict, characters die, and choices are made. His death means that the characters and audience lose him as insurance for the plot’s fairy-tale ending. “If you drag me into this mess,” the narrator (Crawford Arnow) says, “you’ll never know how your story ends. You’ll be lost!”
The musical can no longer work out ideally. By the second act, Into The Woods has changed genres, entering a world where death, adultery, and sex—tainted themes that were not possible in the first act—now exist. The giant must be dealt with, regardless of how sympathetic the death of her husband makes her to be. Besides, her husband’s murderer, Jack, has too much plot armor to be given up to her anyway. Therefore, by leaving us with her own death, the musical completes the motif that its set design already pointed to: a fantasy that isn’t quite fantasy, a reality that isn’t quite reality. A world where murder exists in fantasy, and even fairytale characters must face the consequences of their actions. A world in between.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
