Director Lear deBessonet on ‘Into the Woods’ t

by Jim Gladstone

“Youneed to use your time machine to understand why we chose to do ‘Into the Woods,’” explained Lear deBessonet, who directed the new production of the 1987 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine that will play a limited engagement at the Curran Theater next week.

“The decision was made in the very early days of the pandemic,” said deBessonet, 42. In 2019, she was named Artistic Director of the Encores! series at New York’s City Center, which over three decades has built a reputation for presenting short runs of infrequently (or never) revived Broadway musicals.

Often, these older, lesser known shows have admirable scores but dated scripts that feel disconnected from contemporary attitudes about gender, race or class. (“L’il

“Grand Hotel”).

But “Into the Woods” not only has a book that avoids those issues, it’s also hardly obscure, with a fairly prominent place in public consciousness as far as musicals go. It’s been revived on Broadway, at the Hollywood Bowl and Central Park; adapted for a Disney movie; and is widely produced by schools and regional theaters. A touring production played the Golden Gate Theater in 2017.

For deBessonet, though, turning to “Into the Woods” was not just about the revival of a particular show, but of a spirit and a belief system.

“We were just two months into the pandemic and it was killing people in the theater community,” she recalled in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter.

“The very act of gathering, which is part of theater’s essence, had become toxic. People weren’t able to be togeth- er and we really didn’t know when that might resume.”

Grimm times

‘Into the Woods’– which cleverly interweaves and reframes the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales – is often discussed as an examination of parent-child relationships (in no small part due to its bedtime story source material). But deBessonet was also attracted to the way the show reaches beyond the dynamics of individual families to address the family of mankind.

“Thematically,” deBessonet explained, “the story is about a group of people who go from wanting things for themselves individually to realizing that our very survival as a species is about figuring out how to become a ‘We,’ about how we are inseparably tied to each other through all of our hopes and fears.”

The musical opens with self-cen-