🎭 ParamountAurora revival of Into the Woods offers a spellbinding mix of spectacle and contemplation. | ✍️ kerryreid
now onstage at Paramount Theatre in Aurora, new resonances and nuances I’ve not fully appreciated before came into view. Codirectors Jim Corti and Trent Stork certainly use the large stage and 16-piece orchestra to good effect: Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s scenic design, José Santiago’s lights, Paul Deziel’s projections, and Jordan Ross’s costumes look lush and fantastical .
So on one level, it’s a cunning riposte to fairy-tale notions of happily ever after. But that’s far too easy a bar to clear.
Natalie Weiss’s Witch, whose long-ago curse is the catalyst for the journeys all the other characters take, is also the harsh conscience of the tale, particularly in “The Last Midnight” and “Children Will Listen.” In the former, she challenges the survivors of the giantess to face their own greed and selfishness. “No, of course what really matters/Is the blame/Somebody to blame.”
A community built on transactionality, as we see in the first act, is ill-equipped for altruism. Or, as Larry Yando’s wry Narrator tells us, “These were not people familiar with making choices.” I know it’s cliche as hell to keep viewing theater through a pandemic lens, but that line hit me, as did so many other moments, as an encapsulation of what happens when people’s comfortable assumptions about how life should unfold run headfirst into unpleasant realities beyond their control.
This isn’t an overtly political rendering of the musical—that would be entirely tedious and tendentious. But it is a staging that, through both the strength of the performances and the spectacle of the setting, asks us to consider who we are in relation to each other, even when we’ve been traumatized.
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