✭Matinée Wednesday: Round Eight
When I was in high school, one of the things that I looked forward to was the annual music department trip. We would travel to places near and far to perform our repertoire and somehow learn about music along the way. My freshman year, we went to Baltimore and Colonial Williamsburg. My sophomore year was an amazing trip to Montréal, Canada, where we sang the French and American national anthems at a Montréal Canadians hockey game. And then came September 11th…. And for the trip my junior year, we made the 23.87 mile hike into Manhattan. Instead of going away for an extended period, which during those uncertain times, the Garden City school district forbade, we spent the day in the city attending a broadcast of MTV’s TRL (my second time there) and seeing a matinée of one of my favorite musicals, Into the Woods.
This fantastic Sondheim musical about what happens when things don’t exactly end up ‘happily ever after,’ first opened in 1987 and featured Bernadette Peters as the Witch. This 2002 revival starred Vanessa Williams (who I rung-up at sbux many moons ago, but that’s an entirely different story) as the Witch, a role well within her realm of acting.
Into the Woods is truly a fantasy, sweeping the audience away to that world ‘once upon a time,’ through wonderful songs and clever plot-lines. Intertwining the most classic fairytails into a single, abet moral-bound, story is quite ingenious, in my opinion, and made for a wonderful day at the theatre.
