[QUOTE=jayjay]
Oh, and Cosette the limp rag. But that’s baked in.
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I’m convinced Castle on a Cloud was intended to be a pre-intermission bathroom break. 
I liked Gavroche in the movie, and I understand he plays Jack in ITW.
Yes, it’s the same actor.
So, I assume in the movie the wolf isn’t walking around with his, ahem, equipment hanging out.
I saw the movie without ever having seen the play, although I was broadly familiar with the plot and a few of the songs. The only place where a stage-to-screen change left an obvious hole for me was with Rapunzel. She and her prince just sort of ride off into the sunset well before the ending of the movie and are never seen or IIRC mentioned again. Given everything else that happens, it seemed unlikely that they were meant to live happily ever after, especially since Rapunzel’s prince didn’t come across as any more sincere than his brother. (I did know that in the play both princes take up with other fairy tale princesses, but it made sense to cut this for time.)
During the movie I did also kind of expect that they’d find a non-violent way to deal with the giantess, probably because in the movie she doesn’t kill anyone – at least not directly. Little Red Riding Hood’s mother and granny are missing and presumed dead and other people were presumably killed in the destruction of the village, but this all happens off-camera. Knowing now that in the play the giantess stomps both Rapunzel and the baker’s wife (who falls off a cliff a little too conveniently in the movie) she seems like more of a legitimate threat, but in the movie the justification for killing her seemed rather weak.
I can’t speak to this specific case, but generally I feel that if there’s a movie coming out that looks good and that’s based on a book I haven’t read yet, it’s better to just see the movie and read the book later. I used to think the opposite, but since a book always has to be cut down for the movie version then having recently read the book often leaves one thinking “Oh, they left out this and that and the other thing!” even when the cut material wasn’t particularly important and didn’t leave any plot holes in the movie. I remember in the thread about the first Hunger Games movie some people who’d read the book were saying so much had been cut that the movie probably didn’t even make sense to people who only saw the movie, but I hadn’t yet read the book and the only things that confused me in the movie were things that are ambiguous in the book as well (e.g. how Katniss feels about Gale).
Nope. He’s basically Johnny Depp cosplaying the wolf from Red Hot Riding Hood.
Nope. Like I said, no rubber phallus. 
For that matter, he isn’t even made up to look much like a wolf. For all we know, he might just be a guy whose last name is Wolf. Little Red does call him “Mr. Wolf,” after all.
As to ThelmaLou’s question, I would advise seeing the movie first, without having the Bernadette Peters version in your recent memory. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment to see how the movie plays to someone who isn’t immediately familiar with its stage version.
Do see the stage recording at some point, though, because it’s excellent.
I agree that some of the cuts were disappointing, but I think that overall the story still mostly works, and for the most part the cuts were well-chosen. The biggest flaw, really, is the lack of an intermission. Without a clean break between Acts One and Two, a chance for the audience to pause and reflect, the movie just goes barreling straight from “Happy Ever After” right into “OMG, everybody’s dying!” I’ve seen some criticisms of the film that complain about “multiple, fake-out endings,” and I think this is really what they’re talking about. It feels like we’ve come to the end, and then there’s another half-hour of frantic running around.
But overall, it’s a much more faithful adaptation than I ever expected, especially coming from Disney. Think how strong the temptation must have been to just end it after Act One, like the Junior version does.
I was thinking about this, actually, with regard to some posters’ concerns about casting younger (prepubescent-looking and -sounding) actors as Jack and especially Little Red Riding Hood.
To me, speaking as someone who did see the stage show but didn’t remember it particularly well, it absolutely worked for me to have both the actors come across as kids, not as grownups. I didn’t have anything invested in the “traditional” way of doing it, and thought it was extremely effective doing it this way.
In fact I have trouble imagining what the show would have been like with LRRH being played by an actual woman. It seems…wrong.
I read the comments above, by posters whose opinions I respect, and I think, “But what’s the beef? It works this way!” And I’m not saying I’m right and they’re wrong, or for that matter that I’m wrong and they’re right, but clearly I enjoyed the movie in a way they couldn’t because I didn’t have the expectation that it should have been done differently.
So if you want to maximize your enjoyment of the movie, yes, see it before you see the stage show. It’ll make it easier to see it for what it actually is rather than what you think it ought to be.
Now I’m thinking I should go see the stage show again, or the video of it, and check out what it looks and feels like with Jack and Hood played by adults…
I’d referred to the abrupt “barreling” from part one to part two (using other language) in my first post. I think you’re exactly right that an intermission would have helped.
Haven’t seen it, and am unlikely to, from the reviews. A friend went to see it with her family and they all left after half an hour.
I had very mixed opinions of the film version of Sweeney Todd, but I did like that in the movie and in the recent Live From Lincoln Center concert production the role of Tobias was played by a kid instead of an adult pretending to be a kid. I find the latter takes me out of the play moreso than the singing or bad props or anything else.
We went yesterday, and quite liked it. I’m very familiar with the stage play, having run lights for a production in Boston back in the day. This was (in my opinion) a pretty good adaptation.
Singing was better than I expected (having seen the Le Miz picture also), and the cast seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some really nice moments.
I personally missed “First Midnight” and “Second Midnight” as musical interludes, but that’s just me. I agree with people who said that this picture could really have used an intermission, and some form of the Act I Finale song (yeah, we sort of got it with Cinderella traveling in the carriage, and the scene outside the castle before the earthquake, but…).
I thought that the scene with the Baker telling the story to the kids at the end (and reprising the opening lines of the movie) worked quite well, and was a touching end scene.
So not a bad afternoon’s entertainment. Although now, when I see trailers for “Cinderella” (another Disney pic), my mind starts playing “He’s a very nice prince…”
I don’t think a literal intermission would be neccesary, but a cinematic one. By which I mean, there are plenty of cinematic tropes to tell us that some time has passed…zoom out of the woods, leaves change color, pan to the sky, whatever. Classic ways to change beats on film, and they add only seconds to the running time.
But not only didn’t they do that, but they actually sped up time, by having The Baker’s Wife go from barren to 9 months in a magical blink. I actually got disoriented from that point until the Giantess showed up. Poof pregnant! Poof pretty witch! Poof married! Poof waving at the populous! (wait, is this the wedding reception wave? Or is this later? Oh, she’s holding the baby now…what is going on?) Poof “earthquake”! Yes, barrelling, indeed.
It’s not like they had to create much to fix this. All they had to do was leave in two rather short songs that have already been written. It fixes the barrelling and the thematic and the character problems all in one fell swoop. In it, we find out that both Cinderella and her Prince are kind of bored with each other, The Baker and The Baker’s Wife are bickering, Jack is yearning to go back to the sky… yet they’re all trying terribly hard to convince themselves and each other that they’re so happy. Those parts alone let us know that some time has passed and we’re moving into another part of the story.
Truly, I’m not a Broadway purist. I even liked Chris Columbus’ RENT, for goodness sake (or at least, I didn’t hate it.) I didn’t hate this film, and I really wasn’t sitting there thinking of everything they left out. (Okay, I was a little. But most of it made sense without it. Even my favorite song, “Maybe They’re Magic,” - while I missed it, the movie didn’t need it. So I don’t hold it against the filmmakers that they cut it.)
But… “Once Upon a Time, Later” into “I’m So Happy”… darn it, those *needed *to be in there, OR they needed to do something to accomplish the same ends that those songs serve in the stage show. Doing neither is where they went wrong.
The stage show is slightly more even in bloodshed. The Narrator and Mysterious Old Man/Baker’s Father dies on stage. The same actor plays both roles. As the M.O.M/B.F, he dies suddenly but not violently, of an apparent heart attack the moment The Baker discovers who he is. As The Narrator, The Witch pushes him to The Giantess (who is nearsighted and has lost her glasses), telling her he’s Jack. The Giantess picks him up and then drops him when she realizes he’s “not the lad,” and he falls to his death.
I saw “Annie” one night and “Into the Woods” on the next. I thought Into the Woods was good, but the thing I was missing was an emotional reaction to the action on the screen. Annie grabbed me emotionally, but Into the Woods did not. There were too many different subplots going on and none of the characters were particularly grabbing for me. The filming was beautiful and the acting was great, but it just didn’t grab me.
So I’d give Into the Woods 4/5 stars, and Annie 4.5/5.
J.
Not necessarily adults, but older. In the original Broadway production, Danielle Ferland (Red) was 16 at the time, and Ben Wright (Jack) would have been 18. If you see the video of the stage version, it was recorded a couple of years later, so they would have been even a bit older. Most stage productions that I’m familiar with have tended to cast people in the their late teens or very early twenties in those roles.
It does give the show a different vibe, but I suspect that the age of the actors on stage had as much to do with the demands of doing a big Broadway show every night as it did the sexual implications.
I also agree with you that, regardless of how they did it onstage, I do think the movie version works the way it is.
Saw it last night.
Out of balance is my reaction. I don’t think at intermission would have helped. Act 2 just shows characters suddenly changed, behaving in ways inconsistent with how they had been established and without enough there to justify the arcs. The tone is more like the was some drug that they all ingested than that what wish for may not turn out the way you’d wish. Or that this was Act 3 and they cut out a complete Act 2.
Beautiful to watch and to listen to. Did love the “raised to be charming not …” line.
I saw it today with my twenty-year-old nephew and sixteen-year-old niece. We all felt that the second act (everything after the fairy-tale wedding) dragged unnecessarily.
Slightly off-topic trivia: In Assassins, the Balladeer was originally intended to gradually morph into LHO by the end, but they couldn’t find an actor who could convey both ends of the spectrum as they envisioned it, so they split the role. This is how it was played OB and recorded on the original Off Broadway cast album.
When Assassins finally came to Broadway in 2004, they found an actor who could pull off the transition, and so cast it that way. My source is John Weidman (wrote the book), who confided this bit of trivia in an after-performance onstage chat following a matinee of the 2004 production. The actor playing both roles was Neil Patrick Harris, who was also onstage for the chat at the time. He looked down and blushed at the praise, which was awfully cute.
I wasn’t planning to see it, but my son, his friends and their Moms had an impromptu idea to go see it, and I went along.
My son liked it more than I expected him to, and on the whole,I enjoyed it. The biggest problem is the problem I have with almost every Sondheim musical: the guy writes music that’s perfectly pleasant and completely serviceable for his shows, but none of which is even slightly memorable.
But… MAYBE that’s a good thing! I’ve had to hear every song from Frozen ten trillion times at the roller rink the past few months. But none of the kids at the rink is going to request any songs from Into the Woods.
Having never seen the play, just many many previews, i was rather surprised to note the entire movie was in song. Hardly a line of spoken dialog. Altho of course you know it’s a musical, that was not at all apparent from the previews.
If you judge from the early trailers, you’d think it wasn’t a musical at all. They shied away from touting it as a musical for about 2/3 of the production process, as far as mass-media trailers and such went.