What 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.
