Into the Woods - UMD Theatre

Be Careful What You Wish for in UMD’S Into the Woods

Sheryl Jensen

Duluth New Tribune

April 13, 2018

“The cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold.”  With these reverberating words, a childless baker and his wife set off on a frenetic treasure hunt in UMD’s production of the musical Into the Woods.  The other characters, taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, are each following their heart’s desire into the dark recesses of the forest.

Composer Stephen Sondheim is notoriously challenging to sing.  UMD’s 20 cast members have varying degrees of success with the nuances of his songs and with the layers of wit and double entendre of James Lapine’s book.

The evening’s musical highlight is “No More,” with the Baker (Zach Churchill) and the Mysterious Man (Brendan Finn).  Churchill and Finn blend beautifully, and Churchill’s solo work is stunning.

The accusatory song “Your Fault” is filled with lyric and musical landmines.  The Baker (Churchill), Jack (Jake Nelson), Little Red (Rachel Williams) and Cinderella (Amelia Barr) make this intricate musical blame-game seem effortless.

“No One is Alone,” with the same quartet, is a gorgeous musical statement of the play’s ultimate theme of both caution and caring, about growing up but still needing support from each other to depend on in times of trouble.

As the Witch, Amada Hennen struggles to project her lines and music in Act I where her large prosthetic nose and chin muffle her to such a degree that she is difficult to hear and understand.  When she hits her stride is in Act II and has transformed into the beautiful witch, we can hear the power, resonance and beauty of her voice in “Last Midnight” and “Children Will Listen.”

Rachel Williams is on point as Little Red with the right mix of adorable little girl and cute  bloodthirsty avenger.  Cinderella’s Prince (Reese Britts) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Ole Dack) are the comic standouts of the evening with their hysterical “Agony,” played with royal arrogance and preposterous swagger.  With the dark tone of the show, humor is needed.  These three provide the comic relief that is, at times, missed elsewhere.

Brandin Stagg’s colorful and inventive costumes and Mags Scanlon’s evocative lighting design help to create the fairytale world.  Curtis Phillips’ set features two large stacks of aged fairy tale books that work well as multi-leveled acting spaces.  Less successful is the set’s monochromatic brown (with nary a green leaf or vine is sight) and the towers that look like an Arizona landscape with stacked rocks.

While music director Andy Kust’s eight-piece orchestra is a little thin at times on what is a lush score written for twice that many, they do provide a solid underscore to feature the singers.

UMD’s production, with even-handed direction from Ann Bergeron, is successful on many levels in creating the lighter fairy tale world in Act I and the much darker vision in Act II where not everyone does get to live “happily ever after.”

  Yet even that dark ending is tempered with the final words “I wish,” echoed from early in the show, that they each can somehow achieve their dreams.

These Shining Lives - UMD Theatre

Performances Glow in UMD's These Shining Lives
Sheryl Jensen
Duluth News Tribune
March 2, 2018

"This isn't a fairy tale, though it starts like one.  This isn't a tragedy, though it ends like one."

Setting the framework for Melanie Marnich's lyrical script, These Shining Lives, the play's central character, Catherine Donahue (Sarah Dickson), warns us early on about the fateful journey we are about to go on with her.

Set in the 1920s and '30s outside Chicago, the play is based on the true story of women who worked at the Radium Dial Company, painting the glowing numbers on watches and clocks.

The lethal effects of exposure to the radium-based paint became even more direct since the women would moisten the tip of their paint brushes in their mouths and then dip them in the radium, repeating for every number.

After years of exposure, the women got increasingly sick as they moved slowly toward their excruciatingly painful deaths.  Denying the effects of the radium, the cold-hearted company fired the women when they were too sick to work any longer.

Sarah Dickson brings a nobility, elegance and luminosity to Donahue, who was one of the real-life "Radium Girls."  Donahue's courage and tenacity in fighting against the company helped pave the way for worker protections.

Lovely character work is also performed by the actresses playing Donahue's friends at the factory: Charlotte Purcell (Grace Kelly Smith), Frances O'Connell (Andrea Leonard) and Pearl Payne (Tolu Eskisola).

Each of the women has chances to shine as they show first their humor and camaraderie, and eventually their horror over what is happening to them.  Charlotte laments, "They did this, and they knew it!  They threw us away for a few watches!  That's what we're worth!"

Addison Sim has a sweet turn as Tom, Catherine's husband.  Mitchell Dallman is convincing as Rufus Reed, the smarmy company foreman who keeps silent, even as he knows too well what is happening to his workers.

Ellen Monzo's elegant costumes are spot on, both to evoke the time period and also to establish the characters' personalities.

Projections are used effectively on several panels to give a sense of time, place and mood through stills, film, abstract stars and constellations.  Newspaper clippings from the period also add power and veracity to the play's themes.

Performed without intermission, the scenes flow one into another with minimal changes in between.  Director William Payne decided to add period music sung by the cast as a chorus for pre-show music, as underscore for some scenes, and during shifts.

While the singing adds to the period flavor, at times it slows the pace.  Sometimes two or three verses are used where one might do.  The music is haunting but there are occasional pitch problems with harmonies.

The strongest of the vocal pieces is the stirring "Bread and Roses," an anthem that came out of the early women's trade union movement.

While this could just be a play about dying, the women's transcendent spirit to support each other, and to worry about those who followed them, keeps the torch of that anthem aflame.