Giants In The Sky- Into The Woods Revival- Page 3

Posted: 7/18/07 at 8:18pm

Who are you agreeing with on the new lyrics? Cuz I dislike them And I've never hear danyoen prefer them before.

I'm with you on Our Little World though :)

[artscallion]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 8:21pm

AmericanBoy, I will exempt Edelman and Sieber from my previous statement. I agree with Brantley's assessment of them. I'd forgotten about them when I painted the entire cast with such a broad brush. Their duets were the highlight of the show.

I stand by my opinion of Benanti. Quoting critics is meaningless. I think what I think, and you think what you think. What Brantley thinks doesn't prove anything. In fact, I find Brantley's reviews of pretty young women are often slanted toward the glowing so quoting him doesn't impress or sway me. I saw none of the things he mentions when I attended.

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 8:22pm

I'm not agreeing with anyone. I was just pointing out that I like the lyric updates. Maybe, I'm the only one, but I love the Witch singing "Last Midnight" to the baby and the ending with "mother here I come!" I guess I like it better because it just speaks to me a little bit more. And the "On the Steps of the Palace" ending is pretty much just because I'm a sucker for harmonies.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 10:27pm

IMO, the revised ending for "On the Steps of the Palace" was absurd, unnecessary, and ruined the original ending.
Laura Benanti is quite a talented girl and I like her Cinderella, but Kim Crosby got that character to a T and truly made it work in so many ways, her change from a maid to princess to survivor was ingenious. Also, her "On the Steps of the Palace" was both hilarious and a kind of self-reflective song a la "The Road You Didn't Take," Benanti missed the humor of the song, IMO.
The lyrical changes to "Last Midnight" are just sacrilegious.

[ljay889]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 10:34pm

I like the new ending to "On The Steps of The Palace." The harmonies are really powerful..and make me all gooey inside lol.

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 11:14pm

Back to whomever said this, but I do think that Wylie was having the "change" vocally, if you watch that season (3, I think), of "Gilmore girls" his voice is deeper when he returns after his run in "Into the Woods" than it is in earlier episodes.

And, as a late bloomer, at 16, it was all I could do to hold a note steady and not warble, and even then I didn't typically succeed.

[istillbelieve24601]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 11:28pm

Well, if Wylie's voice hadn't matured yet, why did they cast him? I understand they wanted a youthful quality for Jack, but it's Broadway, for god's sake. It's like the casting directors wanted to see the poor kid make a fool out of himself with his voice changing in front of a highly-paying audience.

That being said, I don't think Wylie was the main problem with the ITW revival. I remember being on another site and discussing the revival vrs. original recording. My problem with the actors and actresses in the revival that none of them seemed to show emotion.

I've noticed whenever I watch old movies or listen to older cast recordings that in recent years, Broadway has a lot of better singers. Even in the fifteen years before the ITW original and the revival you can see how the quality in singing has improved. But as the singing in Broadway musicals gets better, the acting grows thoroughbly more and more miserable.

Seriously... the Broadway stage is a theatre, not a concert hall. Directors need to start hiring actors who can sing, not singers who can act, especially for Sondheim.

[Lisa2]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 11:34pm

Maybe they cast him before his voice had started to change. But regardless, I think that as opposed to cutting out one of the bigger (and IMO one of the best) songs from the show at any given performance is unacceptable. The understudy should have just been put on.

[jewishboy]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 7:00am

I agree with the consensus of Laura Benanti, Gregg Edleman and Christopher Sieber. I think they were all wonderful and surpassed their predecessors. I am also on of the few who thinks Vanessa Williams is a better Witch than Bernadette Peters. While Peters did get many laughs (including from me when I watched the video. I love when she is explaining the Giant's footsteps in the Act II opening.), I truly think that her witch is more of a Jewish mother than a real witch. She displays the maternal side of the Witch excellently in "Stay With Me" but really falls down from there. Her Witch in Act II is not scary and the way she plays the witch in act II is too cutesy for my taste. I thought that Ms. Williams' darker interpretation of the witch was excellent and her cold/ frightful stage presence was excellent in the later scenes. Also, her sexuality really creates the exact opposite of the revolting witch she is in Act I. Her "Last Midnight" besides for the lyric changes, was nothing short of brilliant.

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 10:13am

jewishboy-
I hate to point this out, but the Witch is not meant to be scary, especially in Act II. If you look at her lyrics in "Last Midnight" she says that she isn't good or nice, only right. The Witch is the only person (Narrator aside) who knows exactly what is going on, with three exceptions. She doesn't know 1) How to keep beauty and power; 2) How to keep Rapunzel; 3) How to stop what is happening from happening. Nothing she does is scary, or intimidating, if anything she's the most human and proactive. Her sacrificing the Narrator (or the attempt with Florinda and Lucinda) are not her being dangerous, but trying to solve the problem at hand. Her descision to give Jack to the Giant is not a difficult one to come to, she's lost a child, destruction is all around, so she is going to stop it by giving her what she wants. It's only when the others try to be nice (there isn't any real reason for them to save Jack, none of them have an emotional connection), that she turns even remotely scary, and even then "Last Midnight" (Which is her "Rose's Turn" in a sense) is watched with more fascination than true terror (Until she starts throwing beans about, but that's not horror so much as panic).

Hopefully that all makes sense and I didn't just sit here and babble.

[bwaygal3]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 10:44am

Just wanted to throw out this piece of info after reading the initial posts about hearing that "Giants" had been cut from some shows:

"Giants in the Sky" was cut from the show on ONE occasion only, the matinee on Saturday, June 1. Adam had a speaking voice, but no singing voice - even after trying the song in a different key. There were no clothes that fit in the building for either understudy yet (you can debate separately why that was not a good thing - happens all the time), so Adam went on. During the matinee the wardrobe person did some emergency shopping, and Chad went on for the evening performance.

I hope that helps.

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 12:23pm

I LOVED the OBC - the movie of the show is great. I think what they did with Little Red Riding hood was brillant - making her a fat, slob type person. My problem with the revival was that they didn't seem to have a sense of who the story was about. In the Original it seemed like the show was kind of about the Baker's Wife and so you actually felt for her, but the Revival didn't really seemed focused on anyone therefore you didn't feel for anyone.

[Jon]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 1:58pm

I think the original SEEMED to be about the Baker's Wife because Joanna Gleason was such a strong personality.

I think if you look at the text, Cinderella is really the center of the show - even though the Witch tends to be cast as the "star" role. Cinderella's "I wish..." starts and ends the action, and we follow her on her emotional journey. A dull Cinderella can kill a production. The audience must love her and care what happens to her.

[Elphabuff2]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 4:55pm

My comments, which contradict one another. Go figure.:

1. Agree with jewishboy about Peters' Witch being a Jewish mother.
2. COMPLETELY agree with what husk_charmer replied.
3. I also, like RentBoy, felt the revival was unfocused.
4. At first I thought the show focused on the Baker's Wife, like RentBoy, which is evidenced in the OBC dvd. On paper, it makes sense that Cinderella is the focus.
5. bwaygal, do you have a source/citation/link for that info? I'm not doubting, just curious.

[Mother's Younger Brother]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 5:06pm

Hmmmm...and I always thought the Baker was the focus.

[artscallion]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 5:11pm

I think another problem with the 2002 revival is that they tried too hard to not be seen as a copy of the original. One of the ways they accomplished this was to go against the natural flow of the comedic writing. Many of the lines and moments that were written to be funny were played seriously.

I assume this was so they wouldn't be percieved as copying the original cast's interpretations of these lines. But the original cast was not just giving comedic interpretations of lines; the lines were actually written to be comedic and should be played that way. Playing them seriously only made them sound odd and flat. I spent most of the time sitting there thinking, "ooh, you missed a really good opportunity for a laugh right there. Why?"

They then tried to create comedy in places it didn't naturally exist in the script. This appeared as mugging. Can you tell I didn't care for this production?

Updated On: 7/19/07 at 05:11 PM

[BroomstickBoy]

Posted: 7/19/07 at 9:30pm

And then of course there was the fact that they looked like fairytale characters, but had no fairytale-esque qualities about them to fit the material.

It was like a vegetarian substitute to a really great burger. Looks like it, has the same condiments, but tastes like garbage.

[jewishboy]

Posted: 7/20/07 at 1:11am

husk_charmer, thank you for your smart reply, it was not just babble. I really do agree with a lot of what you said, but one thing still bothers me. The character is The Witch. And although she may not be scary a witch has so many connotations that when a character is a Witch it has to frightfull/intimidating. That intimadation can come from wanting to be able to solve the problem of the giant.

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 7/20/07 at 1:26am

Jewishboy-
You miss her point. Besides, not all witches are frightening (I cite one Glinda the Good, and one Hermione Granger). In fact, saying she should be because of the word makes you "the world" she refers to in "I'm just right/I'm the witch/you're the world"

She is never meant to be intimidating. She's honest, she is the only one who lays all her chips out on the table. She learns her lesson in Act I, that deciept and trickery to get what you want are not the way to go, and as a result her powers are lost. Consequently in Act II, she tells us that she will take the boy to the giant. That becomes her goal, her driving force. It is her one moment where we truly see her real maternal instincts come to life, and that she actually did try to be a good mother, she just didn't know how.

[artscallion]

Posted: 7/20/07 at 8:11am

"a witch has so many connotations that when a character is a Witch it has to frightfull/intimidating."

One of the main points of the show is that "giants can be right, witches can be good," that life is not as simple as our standard perception of fairy tales, what people are complicated and so is happily ever after. The characterizations are all about blasting stereotypes.

Cinderella's prince tells us he was "raised to be charming, not sincere", but the reality, when you think about it, is that he's really not charming either. Look at the way he talks to people throughout the show. He's closer to intolerant, condescending and manipulative. The typical storybook prince is charming, sincere and faithful.

Little Red is not the innocent victim that's usually portrayed in books. Cinderella is usually sweet and eager in books, not conflicted, standoffish and bold.

Updated On: 7/20/07 at 08:11 AM