Into the Woods Witch Jennifer Mudge on Bernadette Peters’ Enchanting Hair & Being Off-Broadway’s Meryl Streep

Between casting spells, rapping and singing “The Last Midnight,” there’s no question that the Witch in Into the Woods deserves a catnap (or at least a few sips of coconut water) during her backstage breaks. But Jennifer Mudge, who plays the iconic role in the reimagined off-Broadway revival, doesn’t get any of those breaks. Just like her nine co-stars, she spends the entire show onstage—when she’s not front and center, she’s playing a toy piano, clanging pots and pans, moving set pieces, making Cinderella’s bird buddies fly and tons more.

Even Mudge has no idea how she handles the extreme multitasking for over two hours. “We had little cheat sheets because we’d changed so many things,” she tells Broadway.com. “Like, in the Prologue, there’s ‘greens, greens,’ but the rest of the time I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, am I the birds? I’m the birds. Bring the shawl to Cinderella. Get the toy piano, slide your mask down, jump on top of the piano!’ I just freak out.”

With a set filled to the brim with found objects, Mudge describes the musical as taking place in a “memory attic,” not on a stage. “To me, it looks like a little storybook,” she says. “There aren’t trees, there aren’t forests, but it’s full of obstacles and objects that mean something—things we pass down and inherit.” With only 10 actors and a piano accompanist, the production, conceived and performed by members of the Fiasco Theatre Company, feels surprisingly large-scale—almost as big as that other Into the Woods everyone is buzzing about.

“People kept saying to me, ‘Did you know there’s a movie coming out?’” Mudge explains with a laugh. “Hey, wait, nobody famous is playing my part in the movie, right?” The Rocky alum admits she still hasn’t seen Into the Woods on the big screen yet, but she wouldn’t think twice about borrowing from a certain Oscar-winner’s bag of tricks. “Oh, I would totally steal from Meryl Streep if it’s something really good,” she jokes.

Meryl Streep hasn’t yet made the trip to New York City to see the new take on Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved musical, but Mudge was shocked when another important member of the Witch Sisterhood, Bernadette Peters, stopped backstage. “She was lovely and gracious and beautiful,” she says. “Good Lord, her hair is so beautiful! Lady, what are you putting on your skin?! Whatever is happening there, that is a spell.”

See Into the Woods at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Steinberg Center for Theatre, opening January 22.