In the darkness, a child cries at the terrors of the world. A mysterious man takes him by the hand and begins to tell him a story. The opening scene of Matthew Xia’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, which features some of the composer’s most glorious songs and dextrous wordplay, is brilliant. It sets the story firmly in the here and now.
The child and the narrator sit in the audience, making us complicit, and the characters we meet – the Baker and his Wife in a quest to get a child, Cinderella being chased by the Prince, Jack taking his cow to market, Red Riding Hood visiting her Grandmother – turn out to be not fairytale archetypes, but flesh and blood. Like us, they are grappling with how to live in a frightening world where what we want and need are different, desire trips us up, we don’t always make wise choices, and we lose people along the way.
It’s such a seriously grownup show, originally written during the Aids crisis of the 1980s, that it’s not an obvious festive choice. Families taking younger members on the basis of the botched Disney movie may not just be surprised by the three-hour running time, and a particularly predatory wolf, but also by the philosophical turn of the second half.
Xia doesn’t always have a sufficiently light touch to stop it straying into the preachy. Sondheim provides the means with lyrics that are warm, witty and wise, and a score of brilliant variety, which comes finely orchestrated for a small band by Jonathan Tunick. The message – community matters and we must pass on what we have learned to our children – is important, but it needs more humour in the delivery than it gets here.
This would benefit from a more pared-back aesthetic; on occasion it feels as if the production is caught, like Cinderella herself, by an inability to decide what it wants to be. Jenny Tiramani’s design, with its odd palm tree trunk style forest, often looks cut-price rather than restrained. Like the production, it’s just not dark and wild enough.
Amy Ellen Richardson is sweet-voiced and moving as the Baker’s Wife, particularly in her encounter with the wolfish Prince in the forest, and David Moorst brings genuine complexity to Jack. But several of the cast lack presence, vocal power and variety, so the evening feels significantly less rich and mottled than either Sondheim or Xia surely envisaged.
• At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 16 January. Box office: 0161 833 9833.
