Happy Now & Happy Hence! Into the Woods, with 10 Actors & a Piano, Opens Officially Off-Broadway

You wish to go to the Festival? Off-Broadway’s the place to be! The Roundabout revival of Into the Woods opens officially on January 22. Directed by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, the stripped down production from Fiasco Theater will run through March 22 at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre.

The beloved re-imagining of fairy tales centers on a childless Baker and his wife, who embark on a quest to find the four items required to break a witch’s spell: the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold. The new production ditches the original orchestrations for a single piano, with the performers chiming in with everything from a bassoon to a waterphone.

The cast features Brody and Steinfeld along with Jessie Austrian, Paul L. Coffey, Andy Grotelueschen, Liz Hayes, Claire Karpen, Jennifer Mudge, Patrick Mulryan and Emily Young. All the actors are reprising their roles in the staging, which has played both at New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre Center and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.