Into the Woods | Utah Shakespeare Festival

I spent most of yesterday in a dark theater in technical rehearsals for "Sense & Sensibility". A tech rehearsal is when the producers, stage managers and directors collaborate to add all of the technical elements of a show: lights, sound, music (sometimes in the form of a live orchestra), props, scenery, costumes and storytellers. Today, I begin tech for my second show "Into the Woods", where I play Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother, the Giant from Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella's Mother (an apparition who appears at the base of a Hazel Tree).

I've have loved working on this Sondheim musical. The cast is outstanding, the music is sublime and the direction is lovely. The show has also got me thinking about fairytales and their origins. Most of them come into being well before the Brother's Grimm decided to write them down. I love the dark undercurrent and the sense of real and gruesome danger that awaits the characters. Sondheim's telling is very entertaining, but it also strikes at the core of what it means to be human in a world that doesn't always end "happily ever after".

For information about this production and the many others on offer 

this summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, click HERE.