WAY TO THE WOODS CREATOR HOW TO
WAY TO THE WOODS CREATOR FULL

Kanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”

“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see. Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre) and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds.

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“He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”Īs high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.

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“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements. In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack - the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame - for a pittance of five magic beans. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’” “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. “There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “ The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.

But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor - the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa - is operating her. We, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be.

Way to the woods creator