After performances over the July 4 weekend and a couple of very fun school shows, St. Petersburg Opera’s final performances of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods are this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
I’m looking forward to seeing the show Friday night myself,since I wasn’t around for the holiday weekend. I did hear rehearsals and got a chance to watch the incredible fairy-tale set, with the ancient tree growing from the center.
Tickets are available at the Palladium box office. For tickets and information call 727 822-3590 or follow this link for more info and online tickets.
Bill DeYoung, writing for Creative Loafing, praised this production as filled with many “brilliant and beautiful moments.”
For more read excerpts from the review below or check out this link to the full story:
By Bill DeYoung/Creative Loafing
July 2, 2017
Once upon a time – let’s call it 1986 – musical theater master Stephen Sondheim unveiled Into the Woods, a complex play based on simple things. With a book by James Lapine packed with one-liners, puns and witty rejoinders, the musical “re-imagines” a handful of beloved fairy tales by inter-mingling their plots and characters.
Sondheim’s music, of course, isn’t for everybody. The shape-shifting melodies and polysyllabic patter songs of his shows often seem to be trying to do nothing more than impress with their cleverness. Into the Woods, with more than a dozen major characters vying for attention, is often difficult to follow.
Caitlin Mesiano, Caroline Tye and Clayton Brown.
The St. Petersburg Opera Company’s new production at the Palladium has so many brilliant and beautiful moments that it’s a pleasure to simply watch, listen and laugh, without trying to make sense of the unfolding story.
To wit: A baker and his wife, childless, contract with a nasty, fearsome witch. If they bring her several specific items, she will grant them a child.
In fairy tales, all the magic happens in the woods. As the couple search there, they encounter the starting lineup from the Storybook Hall of Fame, including Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Jack (of Beanstalk fame) and Cinderella. Each character’s well-worn tale plays out, and Lapine’s loopy dialogue is more Fractured Fairy Tales than Brothers Grimm. If the scenes weren’t interrupted constantly by sweeping Sondheim tunes, Edward Everett Horton could narrate.
There is a narrator, however, and St. Petersburg Opera’s decision to re-imagine her as a woman pushing a baby carriage across the stage is curious. This narrator, and the oversized pram, are often right in the middle of the action; particularly during the ensemble numbers, it’s distracting.
Brian Dudkiewicz’s stage design is deceptively simple and simply effective: The rear wall is a gigantic storybook, opened to its full width. The centerpiece is an enormous, barren tree, around which the characters frolic and plot. They disappear into its roots and behind its massive trunk.
The great advantage of this production, of course, is that the cast is comprised of opera singers. These are people with strong, clear voices more conditioned to pieces like La Traviata and Rigoletto.
They’ll be the first to tell you that Italian opera and English musical theater aren’t altogether so different.
With a live orchestra behind the storybook scenery, the vocalists occasionally get drowned out, particularly on the songs with rapid-fire lyrics that overlap between characters.
When the voices do come through – which is, to be fair, quite often – many are nothing short of spectacular. As The Baker, baritone Clayton Brown brings a tremendous amount of warmth and pathos; likewise Caroline Tye, playing The Baker’s Wife, has a supple mezzo-soprano voice that fills the room. Their duet on “It Takes Two” is shiver-inducing.
Kevin Grace and Lucas Levy make a marvelous comic duo, as the two vain, strutting-ass princes who woo and rescue, respectively, Cinderella and Rapunzel. Their “Agony” is a tender love song performed by two buffoons. Grace also appears as The Wolf, whose scene with Caitlin Mesiano’s squeaky-voiced Little Red has a creepy, slightly-more-than-vaguely sexual vibe.
There’s sex and violence in these woods, albeit implied. Every once in a while, you’re reminded that the same composer gave us Sweeney Todd.
The Witch spends most of Act I under a mold-colored Kabuki mask and a prosthetic hook nose. Many of the other costumes are brightly colored and attractive; she wears what looks like layers of burlap dug out of somebody’s back yard.
Ah, but after her transformation – hey, it’s a fairy tale – the Witch is revealed as mezzo-soprano Tara Curtis, and from that point until the end of the (very long) show, she dominates the action.
Curtis’s renditions (there are several) of “Children Will Listen” and the moody, melancholic “Last Midnight” nearly brought the house down on opening night. Even the other seasoned professionals in the cast seemed in awe of her dynamism and power.
This is, however, a true ensemble, and all the pieces interlock extremely well.
With stage direction by Raymond Zilberberg, and Mark Sforzini conducting the orchestra, the St. Petersburg Opera Company production of Into the Woods is a welcome retreat into fantasy. At three hours, it’s a tad too long, but for that blame Sondheim and Lapine.
They gave us this wonderfully weird comic opera, made a lot of money, won Tony Awards … and lived happily ever after.
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