Into the Woods mixes hilarity and agony

Westside Weekly
It’s not often a costume steals the show. But when that costume is a ludicrous white cow and clothes a talent like Joel Field, the result at the opening night of Kelowna Actors’ Studio’s Into The Woods was exactly a show-stealer.
Besides giving a highly funny play its most comedic moments, Milky White, as the cow is affectionately known, seems to defy the human body’s ability in contortionism. What’s more, that cow can dance.
Stephen Sondheim, lyricist and composer, took a book by James Lapine and created the musical Into The Woods, which juggles a collection of our favourite Grimm’s fairy tales and gives them a twist.
What comes out is an ambivalent Cinderella, played by Westsider Gillian Reed, who also starred in the traditional rendition of Cinderella. This time she’s not so sure about her prince and palace life, but her musical ability is truer than ever.
We also get a somewhat vicious Little Red Riding Hood, a Rapunzel who can’t shake the effects of her dysfunctional childhood and a witch who raps.
Watch that witch, played by Kelly Whelan with her customary gusto. She manages to combine treachery with tender parental feelings, and her costume is scary and brilliant. She alternates between making the audience roar with laughter to running shivers up their spines, in switches as quick as her pyrotechnic explosions.
“Children can only grow from something you love to something you lose,” she laments, and you’re never sure if she’s really on the dark side or not.
Quinn Bates, another Westsider who has grown into his professionalism at KAS, plays the naive Jack, of Jack and the Beanstalk fame. He comes into his own singing, Giants in the Sky, tapping into our realization that we all have them in our skies.
Noreen Morrow as Jack’s mother, is someone KAS fans know from her skills with sets and costumes, but she can also sing and act. She pulls off a death scene that offers high hilarity.
Westsider Janet Jansen played Cinderella’s stepmother with appropriately brittle style and a bit of blood thirstiness. Joe Sorestad is a Westsider found in the sound booth.
Morrow and Nate Flavel, the show’s producer, are behind the outstanding set decor. Those huge tree trunks look absolutely real and the atmosphere is sauced with woodsy intrigue. You’re never sure what those woods are hiding.
Megan Delowsky pulls off a characterization of Little Red Riding Hood way beyond Granny’s little errand girl. She turns out to be a pint-sized fighter, and Delowsky articulates the rapid-fire lyrics better than anyone in the play.
I’d like to read the play or go see it again in hopes of catching more of those lyrics. They’re filled with clever twists of phrase, puns and ironies, but I’m afraid I missed all too many because of the break-neck speed.
One I did catch: The baker’s wife is played by songstress Gwen Plitt. She has compromised her honour by using stolen beans to remove her curse of childlessness, but says drily, “If the end is right it justifies the beans.”
But Into the Woods isn’t limited to laughs. As artistic director Randy Leslie said, “It’s a witty exploration of the parent-child relationship, the responsibility of community and the act of maturing and seeing the world as it really is.”
The witch’s pathetic attempt to lock her daughter away fails, and she laments with many parents, “Couldn’t you stay safe behind walls? Children won’t listen. No one can stay untainted from the world.”
Without doubt, the woods, metaphor of the big bad world out there, destroys some people. But it challenges and matures others. Flavel has never been better than singing from the Baker’s despair, “No more questions, no more tests.” His character rises above timidity, organizes the ragtag group, and grows into fatherhood.
When tragedy strikes the narrator, the survivors don’t know how the tale will end, and think they have to find their own way, reminiscent of real life. But wait--the sense of group will rally.
All finally face their own complicity in guilt—not a bad idea for humans in any tales.
Into the Woods runs through June 19 at Kelowna Actors Studio, 1379 Ellis St., Kelowna. Phone 250-862-2867 or check www.KelownaActorsStudio.com for tickets.

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Into the Woods mixes hilarity and agony