Rob Marshall Directing Into the Woods Film For Disney — Page 6

I would love to see Neil Patrick Harris as the Baker. Beyond that, I'm sort of afraid to see the casting.

I hadn't heard the term ... then again, I didn't come of age in an era where there were quite so many "park and bark" songs in musicals to coin a phrase like that.

I remember the "sing one song then die" approach, taken right from the Les Miz spoof in Forbidden Broadway.

But in the past 25 years, there's been a whole lotta parking and barking going on.

I was more of the "power ballad" era myself. :0)

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I first heard it from an acting teacher in college thirty years ago. It wasn't necessarily a pejorative- he told an actress she was killing her laugh with all the extraneous business. "Stand there and say the line- sometimes all you need to do is park-n-bark."

I don't think the Narrator necessarily needs to be narrating to someone. Fairy tales are often narrated to the audience and I think the audience would accept it, even a modern one. I like the idea of the narrator being dragged on screen that was mentioned earlier.

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Another worry about the Midnights, i fear those will end up on the cutting room floor despite their beauty. They are some of my favorite parts to

Streisand for The Witch

Sad. I doubt Disney can handle the depth to which this magnificent work can be taken. Please cast it well, at least!

Someone PM me about the Ganz/Mandel screenplay, as apparently this is easy to find and yet i never have...

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I still think even his death is meant to be a little funny. Maybe uncomfortably funny...but the squelch etc.. is kind of humorous. Similar to the humour of "Johanna" when Sweeney is slitting throats.

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I'd love to be order to get a Milky White Hamburger Happy Meal with a Bakers Wife wind-up toy inside.

It'll have to be seriously reworked for film, but it's more than possible.

"Agony" can maybe take place at the palace in front of the King when he asks his sons if they've found any fair maidens around.

Act II is gonna be a walk in the park for a film version. They can add awesome special effects and action scenes. Just imagine the Baker and his wife running away from a giant's foot tearing up an entire village as they head out into the spooky, fog infested woods? It could be visual candy!

The first act is really all that need to be retooled, especially the "Midnight"s and the "I Know Things Now" kinda songs. Not to say they should be cut, because they are important, but there will be huge modifications to make them acceptable for a film version. I'm sure Sondheim is already up to the task. As mentioned before, he loves trying new things and making sure his film versions work.

I'm actually sort of excited. This has the most potential to be a huge hit out of all of Sondheim's work.

I had always heard that Park and Bark originated as a British expression... Hrmm

"Also the show is chuck-full of subplotting and crazy details that I find distracting. It just goes on and on and I'm at a loss as to who is our protagonist. This might play better in film, I don't know, but in musical theatre it gets cumbersome."

I actually agree with you that ITW is a flawed (brilliant) work. On the Sondheim forum it didn't come up as one of the fave three shows amongst most of the major posters in a poll, although many of us got into Sondheim via it (I was ten, and caught Act II on PBS randomly and then had to track down the full thing--found the London album at my library, but the program itself was near impossible to find at the time due to some weird rights issue they had giving Image Laserdisc the exclusive home entertainment rights for a while...)

That said, I also agree with Sondheim's statement that Act I is the best example of farce in musical theatre since Forum. It's BRILLIANT and the subplotting and crazy details are a huge part of this--without them a lot of that brilliance for that part of it would be lost.

The show is seen through the eyes of the Baker and the Baker's Wife primarily--they were written to be in most respects a contemporary seeming couple as a way to let the audience in--I don't get why they'd tell it from the Witche's perspective or why we need to have one clear protagonist at all. However, if you look at Sondheim's new opening song lyrics, I Wish, for the earlier proposed film version as published in Look I mAde a Hat, it's clear they did want to slightly make the focus more clean (the way the song is described going through the town, while a bit like Bell from Beauty and the Beast, sounds like it could have looked wonderful).