Into the Woods
Stephen Sondheim (Music & Lyrics); James Lapine (Book)
San Francisco Playhouse
In many respects and for many reasons, the following is a meaningless review. At least a score — and probably many more — reviewers have already raved about the continued proven genius of Susi Damilano’s directorial abilities, about a stage-filling cast that to a person excels, about Heather Kenyon’s creepy but beautifully inviting designed forest of giant tree trunks and choking vines, about Christian Mejia’s other-world lighting that changes a witch’s skin into hues from raging red to Elphaba green, about Kathleen Qiu’s eye-popping and fantastical costumes, and overall about a production of Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and James Lapine’s (book) Into the Woods that delights with childlike images and yet delivers foreboding yet hopeful messages relevant to our current world. From the opening “Once upon a time” until the closing “I wish,” San Francisco Playhouse has once again staged a phenomenal revival and reimagining of a beloved musical that even after eight weeks has not one seat available for its final five performances.
As a reviewer who has been out of the country for six months and whose last review was in July of SFPlayhouse’s “exuberant, electric, and absolutely exciting” (my words) My Fair Lady, I am so pleased that my first review upon return — while coming too late to draw in more audience members — can alert my loyal readers not to wait too long before securing tickets to upcoming Playhouse productions that time and again sell out to the very end. This is a Bay Area company that is bucking the trend of some local theater companies on the wane and is instead, continuing to thrive to the max.
Cast members that have now had dozens of performances to hone their parts to incredible excellence have not after these many weeks lost their edge or desire to find newly discovered ways in the run’s final nights to embody those characters that have populated children’s story books for generations. When Heather Orth snaps her fan with a look of holier than thou as she struts around like a pompous goose in her house-sized gown, Cinderella’s Stepmother is everything and more that we remember from bedtime tales. As her flakey daughters (and Cinderella’s wickedly funny stepsisters) Florinda and Lucinda, Rachel Fobbs and Callahan Gillipse find a myriad of ways to distort their facial expressions and to wander about with the silliest displays of awkwardness — especially when blinded by a flock of revengeful birds.
When the deliciously bratty but also boldly assertive in vocals and demeanor Little Red Ridinghood (Olivia Hellman) ventures into the woods, she is met not by one, but a pack of two snarling, seducing, yet silly wolves (Trevor March and Johann Santiago Santos) who later will receive some of the evening’s biggest rounds of audience laughter as two princes whose entrances into any and every scene are marked by antelope-like leaps, arms slashing like attached swords, and airs of incredibly inflated egos that have not a clue how ridiculous others come to see that they really are. One of the princes seeks a golden-haired maiden, Rapunzel (Samantha Rich) — towered away by her witch-of-a-mother — whose only words are a echoingly sung “ah-ah-ah,” made particularly funny when she lets out at one point a big yawn, evidently as boring to herself as she is soon is to her husband-to-be.
With none of the more minor characters ever fading into the shadows or out of our post-show memories, Jack’s poor cow, Milky White — who is doomed by his mother (a wonderfully voiced Eiko Moon-Yamamoto) to be sold — is in many ways one of the biggest stars of the night, given a director’s clever decision to have the bovine bell walk on two legs and to be bursting with her own personality as displayed through constant facial reactions that speak volumes without spoken words or moos. Damilano offers Maureen McVerry a myriad of opportunities to come near stealing scene after scene.
All of the above fit into a story whose first half is in many ways familiar to all and is on track seemingly to end with lots of “happily ever after’s.” Cinderella — a clearly voiced Jillian A. Smith bringing a teenage girl’s energy to her part — cannot go to the Festival while her step-uglies are all a titter about meeting the Prince there. Jack (a wonder-eyed and a naively bumbling teen played by William I. Schmidt) and his mother are starving; and she sends him off to sell their bony, white cow (who happens to be his best friend). The local witch has towered away her daughter Rapunzel and has doomed the baker and his wife childless (the only two characters not found in our growing-up fairytale books). Little Red Ridinghood heads out to Grandma’s house to meet the twosome pack of you-know-whoms along the way. Together, the entire group sings and dances, “Into the woods to get my wish, I don’t care how, time is now.”
Much of Act One is centered on the Baker and his Wife looking to break the next-door Witch’s curse once given to his father (who stole some beans from her yard). All they have to do is find “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold” (all of which we can readily identify where they are, but which of course they have no clue). Phil Wong is wonderfully cast as a loud-mouthed, quick-to-react Baker who has a big streak of macho in him and whose character is one of several to learn important life lessons after repeated trips into the scary but life-affirming woods.
Ruby Day is in many ways — both by Sondheim/Lapine’s design and by her own stellar capabilities — the focal star of the evening as the Baker’s Wife. She is the steadying force of the couple and of the entire story — one who knows the practicalities and bent-rules it takes to succeed in these woods. “What matters is that everyone tells tiny lies … What’s important, really, is the size,” she sings in “Maybe They’re Magic.” When she has a happenstance tryst with a wandering, lusty, and devilishly debonair prince (Trevor March), Ruby Day is both hilarious while enjoying with tongue-dripping pleasure her spontaneously infidelity and is instructively insightful as she reflects in song, “Just remembering you’ve had an ‘and’ when you’re back to ‘or,’ makes the ‘or’ mean more than it did before.”
Their nemesis is the green-cloaked, scraggly-haired Witch with long, twisted nose full of warts. With a convulsive laugh and hair-tingling scream that seems to last for minutes, Alison Ewing is a witch through and through. But as the second half’s story darkens, her own heart, longings, and regrets reveal a real person and a loving mother as Alison Ewing captures our sympathies and expresses our own deeply held paternal emotions and fears with each of her increasingly emotional, haunting solos: “Stay with Me,” “Lament,” and “Last Midnight.”
With twisting, turning storylines and Sondheim lyrics characteristically complex and unexpected, Into the Woods has many discoveries to be found, even for audience members who have ventured into these forests many times. And however happy the “Ever After” is at the end of Act One’s grand finale as it is preformed exuberantly by the full cast, we and they soon learn that even in these woods, disappointed dreams, infidelity, deceit, death, and, of course, giants lurk in the shadows.
It is Jillian A. Smith’s Cinderella whose character undergoes the greatest of change and maturing after her own various ventures into the woods. With a voice soothing and caressing in its outreach and clarity, she sings to the Baker in “No One Is Alone” their mutual realization that ever-after happy is not always the outcome of life: “Witches can be right; giants can be good; you decide what’s right; you decide what’s good.” As Phil Wong’s Baker begins to come to new, important realizations about life in a world full of unexpected and often horrible surprises, the two sing words that in 2026 take on erringly and important new meanings:
“Maybe we forgot … no one is alone.
Hard to see the light now,
Just don’t let it go.
Things will come out right now.
We can make it so.”
Thank you, San Francisco Playhouse, for once again presenting a holiday gift extraordinaire to the Bay Area. I for one am so glad that I and my husband were lucky enough to make it home in time to relish this already much-lauded, much-attended hit.
Rating: 5 E
Into the Woods concludes its 8.5 week run with the final, sold-out performances running through this Saturday, January 17, 2026. For those who now wished they had bought tickets earlier, I encourage you to grab seats now for the next, sure-to-be-hit, Henry David Hwang’s M. Butterfly, running February 5 – March 14, 2026, at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415-677-9596.
Photo Credits: Jessica Palopoli
