Royal Exchange,Manchester
Matthew Xia’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s dark, grownup musical lacks the light touch needed to quit it straying into the preachyIn the darkness, and a child cries at the terrors of the world. A mysterious man takes him by the hand and begins to declare him a epic. 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 epic firmly in the here and now. The child and the narrator sit in the audience, or 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, or 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, and they are grappling with how to live in a frightening world where what we want and need are different,desire trips us up, we dont always make wise choices, and we lose people along the way.
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Source: theguardian.com