Theatre Nebula opens its season with 'Into the Woods'

Theatre Nebula, winner of the Illinois Theatre Association's Excellence in Theatre Award, opened its 2010-2011 season last weekend with its production of the musical comedy "Into the Woods" at Cutting Hall Performing Arts Center, 150 E. Wood St. in Palatine. There's still time to catch a performance of this Stephen Sondheim classic, which runs at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays Sept. 17-26.

The show features professional actors, many of whom are former and current Palatine residents, as well as professionals from the Chicago area, led by veteran director Frank Roberts, of Schiller Park, and musical director Jon Landvick, of Mundelein.

This Tony Award-winning musical, with book by James Lapine and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them further to explore the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests.

While the faces and names are familiar, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and company inhabit a sylvan neighborhood in which witches and bakers are next-door neighbors, handsome princes from once-parallel fables are competitive (and equally vain) brothers, and all the stories intersect through unexpected plot twists.

Stephen Sondheim's Tony-winning score provides a backdrop for the characters' divergent, then overlapping fears and desires. And it's the latter that provides a thread to James Lapine's ingenious puzzle of a book, which centers around the inevitability - and treachery - of our innermost wishes. That theme is given farcical energy in the first act; a bold, darker second act takes a look at what happens after "happily ever after."

"Into the Woods" should appeal to all ages and interests with its witty music and dramatic fairy-tale narrative.