Peter and an evening remembering...

Yeah, I'm hopeless, whaddaya want. I miss him, sue me.

Tonight I was so caught up on what I wanted to see and read on the internets, I decided to re-visit a dvd I hadn't watched in a long time. And chose 'Into the Woods', the Steven Sondheim musical.

It's three hours...or thereabouts. Original cast to do a tee-vee production before a live audience. I have never seen it live, unfortunately. First heard of it from my NY friend JR, who attended the premiere. Had I been there, he probably would have dragged me to see it, am sure, from what he wrote me at the time. Must've been an awesome evening for him. He loved it.

I met my cousins in Munich in the late 70's and saw that it was playing at the opera house there, highly praised, and would have gotten a standing room ticket, but was there on a Sunday with them, and the Monday, the opera was closed. Had to be in Graz by Tuesday, so I missed out on it. It annoyed me.

It was very difficult and took a long time to obtain a copy on dvd.

It is very deceptive, on the surface. Ostensibly a fairy tale. The first act is hilariously funny. It involves Cinderella, Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk fame, a barren baker and his wife, a witch who lives next door to them and had cursed them, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, two cad sorts of princes, and they all have to go into the woods to acheive their 'Happy Ever After'. It contains the grisly elements of the original Grimm stories, which were so bowdlerised in the volumes you could get in the US libraries when I was a child, I was sort of astounded when I found out that was how the originals were really like. As in the wicked step-sisters of Cinderella cutting off a toe to fit the shoe, and the other a slice of her heel. Grisly, but funny. For instance.

But it doesn't end with 'happy ever after', and the second act is brilliant and sombre, with flashes of the humour, but very sad, in the end analysis. The wife of the giant Jack slew comes down a left-over beanstalk and wreaks her revenge. The cad princes have a wandering eye looking to free Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. One of them seduces the bakers' wife, played by Tony award winning Joanna Gleason in one of the most amazing numbers in that act, esp. her reaction to it...upon which she gets stomped by the giantess.

Sounds simple? It isn't. The music sounds simple, but is actually complex. The lyrics reflect so many themes about human relationships, you could take years picking it apart, if you so wished. And the over-riding message is you can't do things alone, you have to be together, and work as a team.

In the end, only four major characters remain alive.

So why Peter? When I first got the dvd, I watched it alone and knew he would like it... I'd moved out of the Mühlgasse already. And on one of my days off, I made him a good lunch, and then we watched it. It blew him away. Shortly before the end of the second act, there is a number called 'No One Is Alone', and he lost it. So I just held him, and he cried, and cried. The text hit him hard.

I can't do that any more. Watching tonight made me remember, so I'm sort of predjudiced, but I love that number. It's just before they slay the giantess.

Have heard that that gets an immense amount of royalties from school productions, which is sort of amazing... as simple as the music sounds, there is nothing you can sing along with. Too difficult. Unless you can do three octaves, and minor key in a wink of an eye. I could only find a very down-key version on YouTube, by the legendary Bernadette Peters, but you'll get the idea... She played the witch.



And he lurved him some feisty Red Riding Hood.