Can the beans ever justify the ends? It's a question you might ask of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1987 fairytale musical for adults, which has Jack and his cow, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and others running wild in the dark woods of the subconscious. A first half in which the Baker and his wife are sent by a wicked witch into the woods on a scavenger hunt, which if completed will lift the curse of their infertility, appears to end with a flurry of happy ever afters.
But the price of individual happiness versus the good of the community becomes the theme in a contrasting second act, in which Jack's beanstalk brings a marauding giant into the village, Cinderella's Prince turns out to be a lech, Rapunzel goes mad, and lives are abruptly terminated. Sondheim and Lapine wag their finger rather forcefully, but with musical ingenuity, as they tell us we must be careful what we wish for.
The lurch from romp to morality tale is hard to pull off, and the first mistake here is a design that suggests the woods have a geographical location when in fact they are, of course, a state of mind. The second is to have Paul Nicholas playing the narrator on video, a device that not only was hit by a technical glitch on the night I was there, but which looks cheap and tacky.
One of the pleasures of Upstairs at the Gatehouse is the chance to see young musical performers getting a bite at the big roles, and Dominic Brewer and Rachel Bingham as the Baker and his Wife take the biscuit for doing full justice to Sondheim's alternately jaunty and haunting score.
