Wisteria Theater Company reimagines Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods as seen through the eyes of a child and the result is a production so sparklingly new, I felt almost as if I were experiencing the Broadway musical classic, one I’ve now seen in a whopping 24 productions, for the very first time.

Not that Wisteria is the first theater to reconceive Into The Woods’ mashup of four classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel) and a new-for-the-musical tale of a childless Baker and His Wife.

Fiasco Theater, for example, trimmed the cast down to about half the size of the Broadway original and replaced a 24-piece orchestra with a single onstage piano and cast members doubling as musicians.

 Wisteria’s latest features just 13 performers (6 fewer than on Broadway), which gives a number of cast members the chance to play a pair of distinctly different roles each, while sticking to the original orchestrations (as prerecorded tracks) of songs that are some of Sondheim’s best, ranging from his signature “where did that note come from?” ditties to instantly hummable ballads to the infectious title number, and his lyrics are both clever and profound.

Director Brayden Hade’s biggest switcheroo on the Broadway original comes from reassigning the role of the Narrator, played on Broadway by a then 50ish Tom Aldridge (and in just about every other production since then by a male actor of a certain age) to Manhattan Beach fifth-grader Hannah Rubinstein as a preteen who, left to her own devises until Mom gets home from work, sets about imagining what might happen if her favorite fairytales intertwined, then acts them out with toy figurines whom we in the audience see brought to life by Wisteria’s all-human cast (and a miniature cow toy as Milky Way).

Not only does this make Wisteria’s latest something fresh and new from the get-go, when combined with another Wisteria hallmark, i.e., Disney-style animated backdrops projected in brilliantly saturated colors on an upstage-wall-filling LED screen, this is truly A Whole New Into The Woods, both conceptually and visually, and that’s not all.

 A couldn’t-be-better cast made up almost entirely of performers who’ve become Wisteria’s de facto repertory players over the past six productions (all of them since January) deliver one magical performance after another.

Springing from the imagination of the absolutely captivating Rubinstein (who gets to double as the Giant’s Wife in Act Two), Hadiyyah Noelle Smith plays the Witch like a veritable force of nature and Renée Wylder is warmth and smarts personified as the Baker’s Wife.

Alexa Rosengaus is a gloriously voiced and delightfully wacky Cinderella, Abby Espiritu gives Little Red a deliciously deadpan charm to go with her feistiness, and Danny Holmberg makes for the most adorably dimwitted of Jacks, while Dynell Leigh adds Jack’s loving but frustrated Mother to her pages-long list of SoCal theater credits.

Last but not least among principal players, Carter Haugen’s Baker is so deeply felt and gorgeously sung that if Wisteria’s Into The Woods can be said to “belong” to any one performer, it belongs to him.

The remaining five cast members get the added bonus of bringing multiple roles to life, most of them in combinations I’ve never seen before.

 Indeed only Cameron James Parker follows Into The Woods tradition by playing both Cinderella’s Prince (dashingly) and Little Red’s Wolf (sinisterly and seductively).

Christopher Thume turns Cinderella’s Stepmother into the wildest (and wildest-haired) of drag queens in addition to doubling darkly as Mysterious Man (a role customarily played by the Narrator), and a fabulous Trae Adair is not only Rapunzel’s dashing Prince but Little Red’s crotchety Granny and the a take-charge Steward. (Cinderella’s Father has been left on the cutting room floor.)

Kiera Morris and Annie Claire Hudson are not only Cinderella’s Stepsisters in Kardashian mode, Morris is a rainbow-tressed Rapunzel whose tower is a bright pink Barbie box, and Hudson is Cinderella’s AI- animated mother.

 Add to all this Nolan Monsibay’s pitch-perfect music direction, Madison Mi Hwa Oliver’s bubbly bits of choreography, and every single other element of Hade’s prodigiously imaginative production design and you’ve got an Into The Woods that even someone who’s seen 23 previous productions can ooh and aah over from start to finish.

Lexi Collins does triple duty as producer, assistant director, and stage manager. Josh Collins is technical director. Tanya Cyr is scenic painter and David French is scenic builder. Koalani Walkoe is costume fabricator and Taylor Renee Castle is wig master. Morgan Meadows is intimacy coordinator. Castle, Collins, Hade, and Monsibay are swings.

When you’ve seen a musical as many times and in as many incarnations as I have Into The Woods, six of them in just the last three years, there’s more than a bit of “been that, done that” when attending yet another incarnation.

Thank goodness there’s little or none of that feeling at Wisteria, where Brayden Hade’s directorial/design gifts and an all-around sensational cast make this Into The Woods one that everyone who’s ever seen the show should make sure to reserve seats for even if it’s your twenty-fourth production and counting.

Wisteria Theater, 7061 Vineland Ave, North Hollywood.
www.wisteriatheater.com

–Steven Stanley
August 29, 2025

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Tags: James Lapine, Los Angeles Theater Review, Stephen Sondheim, Wisteria Theater Company