January 8, 2021

 We started off today watching an original cast recording of Into the Woods, a show that takes well-known fairytales and places them all in the same world with an interconnected storyline. In the first act, you see these common musicals play out relatively normally: Cinderella goes to the ball and leaves her shoe and the prince uses it to find her, little red riding hood brings goods to her grandmother but gets tricked and eaten by a wolf but then saved, Rapunzel is held captive by a witch but is saved by a prince jack gets magic beans that make a beanstalk which he climbs to find a giant which he robs… you know, the usual. There is a difference in that there is an additional set of characters that ties all the other stories together, the baker and his wife who are on a quest to break a curse so they could have a child. Even with this change though act one plays out as a fairly standard fairytale. The weird part comes in at act two. At the end of the first act we see the characters living happily ever after and just as it ends, the narrator says “to be continued” as another beanstalk grows from the ground. In the second act, everything falls apart, and the show goes off the rails. After watching it, we all talked about what we liked and did not like about it. And, although I really enjoyed the show, it was not a fan favorite. Criticisms included that it was unsettling and the music felt repetitive. And the biggest compliment was that it was “creative.”

In the afternoon, we got to work in small groups working on the script. The story was fully fleshed out and by the end of the day, we had a full script (or at least a rough draft of one) and while I don’t want to go too in-depth due to spoilers, I will just say that it is great.  I have the part of the narrator so I mostly worked on transitions between scenes as well as my big monologue at the beginning. 


-Nathaniel Samuels


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