I still wish I could have heard what Yazbek did with the material: he hasn't turned in anything that isn't "at least as good as the source material, sometimes better" yet. Guettel strikes me as possibly being not in on the joke, and the Lopezes are going to be good but they might be a little TOO in on the joke.
The funny thing about Princess Bride is that it actuates one of the original concepts for Into the Woods: the transgressive insertion of Jewishness and Jewish perspective into an extremely Anglo folk tradition. Half a century later, assimilation is MUCH more forward than it was in the eighties, and a thing "being Jewish" is more about its being explicitly Jewish; the idea that a postmodern perspective with wry humor, cynicism and a love of nuance and debate is explicitly Jewish had gone out the window by the end of the Seinfeld era.
Goldman inserted Miracle Max and his wife, two Catskills-esque comic side characters, to be the more explicit example of this phenomenon in the story, but even that doesn't stand out as out-of-place the way it would have, since Mel Brooks and many others have used the "unexpected alter-kocker" character trope so much it's not pointed anymore. I guess what I'm wondering is, where will the tone for this piece sit, so many decades on? The essential philosophical culture clash that drove the original doesn't exist anymore and won't be perceived the same way. Will it be played too straight? Not straight enough?
