Into the Woods

To celebrate their 40^th Anniversary Ignations Musical Society embarked on a concert series of musicals based on literary works. Produced over a three week period, with three different casts and creative crew, it was a mammoth undertaking which this experienced company came through with flying colours.

Into The Woods, the second in the series, was blessed with an exemplary cast who brought Sondheim and Lapine’s Freudian take on a group of fairy-tale characters vividly to life. The first time I saw Into The Woods I came out of the theatre thinking I’d spent the evening with a rhyming dictionary and subsequent exposure to the piece has not made me change my mind. It’s rhyme crazy and sometimes forced-clever (“There’s no time to sit and dither/While her withers wither with her”) at the expense of character, but despite my misgivings about the work, there were no misgivings about Ignations concert production of it. It was top class.

The score’s two best songs, “No One Is Alone,” and “Children Will Listen” were the highlights - “No One Is Alone” in the quartet version with Cinderella (Lisa Marie Gargione), Little Red Riding Hood (Heidi Enchelmaier), the Baker (Chris Kellett) and Jack (Conor Ensor), and “Children Will Listen” in a powerhouse performance by Miranda Selwood as the Witch. Others to be noticed were The Baker’s Wife (Ashleigh Stove), the two Prince’s Cinderella’s (Stephen Hirst) and Rapunzel’s (Tom Markiewiez), Jack’s Mother (Colleen Firth), Rapunsel (Rhiannon Marshall), the Giant (Kym Brown), and the Narrator (Andrew Scheiwe)

Ben Murray kept tight control of a 30-piece on-stage orchestra, but Nathan Sibthorpe’s direction, which used upstage audio-visual, created a lack of intimacy by having the cast frequently turn upstage to reference it. It’s a long show, and the content doesn’t really justify the 2 and a ½ hour length, but Sibthorpe kept it moving and capitalised on every comic moment in the script.

Peter Pinne