I decided not to write about Rob Marshall’s “Into The Woods”, despite it being my favorite movie of the year, because Alyson Camus beat me to it and I essentially agreed with her so why bother? Well, because I didn’t essentially agree with her about the music. She doesn’t like Stephen Sondheim, the great Broadway composer, and I admire him tremendously.
Sondheim takes work to enjoy, the way Richard Rodgers never ever did. With Sondheim, you need time for the songs to reveal themselves, an odd odd odd thing for theatrical musicals where immediacy comes with the plot lines. Listening to “Into The Woods”, you won’t find anything you will take home whistling, you won’t be singing a “On The Street Where I Love”. But if you go to “Into The woods”, and then listen to the soundtrack over and over, and then again, you will hear songs of quite astounding power and beauty.
“It Takes Two”, “Stay With me”, the disturbing “I Know Things Now”. The astonishing “Children Will Listen” and the vocal tour de force “Last Midnight”. All of these songs are as obvious as the storyline, the overlapping fairytales in act one, that reach their conclusion in act two, before restarting with a different conclusion in act three. Perhaps best of all, the glorious extended grace of “No One Is Alone”. I’ve liked Anna Kendrick’s singing since “Pitch Perfect” but her singing here takes her up to musical theatre levels. She could do Broadway and do it well.
Kendrick is an imperfect movie star visage, her nose is too long and too thick and she is compact, she could never have played Bella Swan; she’s an everygirl and not a Goth brooder. In “Twilight” she is on the sidelines for song after song, it is like she spends the movie in the bleachers. But what she has, which became clearer with “Up In The Air” (I’d seen her on Broadway in “High Society” in 1998 but she didn’t leave an impression) was the scope of a great actress, she could ACT ORDINARY. But she wasn’t ordinary.
For “Into The Woods” she is Cinderella as an ordinary girl but her singing was out of the ordinary and it was the singing that pushes her out of the cinders, away from the Prince’s provocation. Prince Charming is found in song and not in person. That is the moral of the story, it is that you are not alone through song, that the comunity of fairytale characters are these actors and sisters together.
This might not make Anna a superstar, she doesn’t have the lungs of a Streisand, she doesn’t look like a big big star, but she has the voice of a star and along with a terrific Emily Blunt and a spotty Meryl Streep, she helps give this difficult, beautiful music everything Rob Marshall needed.