Thursday, August 8, 2013

"Into The Woods" Has Full Cast, Started Rehearsal Aaaand Some Controversy... (Yes. Already.)

First order of business:

Disney's "Into The Woods" movie now has a full (and 100% confirmed) cast!


All the cast are as per the (GIANT) graphic I made HERE, with the addition of young Sophia Grace Brownlee as Little Red Riding Hood.
✒ ✒ ✒  ✒ (click the "Read more" link below this line) ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ ✒ 



Second:
The cast has already started rehearsing and instagram-ing pics & tweeting scoops of first days hijinks. ;) (And if you look closely you can see their "working logo" at the moment...)

Third (and highest trending re Into The Woods movie in social media): 
With the announcement of ten year old Sophia Grace (of Ellen and YouTube fame) joining the cast to play opposite Depp's Big Bad Wolf, there is already a little bit of unrest among the masses.

Fans of the musical who have been enthusiastically following the casting reveals with a critical eye have, overall, not had a positive reaction to Sophia Grace's addition.

The reason, you'll be glad to know, has nothing to do with Miss Brownlee herself but with her age. As one person blunty said:
Eight-year-old cast as Red Riding Hood in . And you thought "Hello Little Girl" was creepy before. 
(She's actually 10 but the comment still applies.)

And another:
I kind of really don't wanna see Johnny Depp try to rape Sophia Grace
That's two reactions of MANY similar ones. And you can see their point. Hopefully this is where the medium of a movie will differ greatly from the medium of theater and things won't be as... graphic.

Maybe this is why they waited so long for Little Red to be announced. Between this and Jack's casting though (also much younger than usual) perhaps these are indications of some heavy rewrites for the big screen.

I guess we'll see.

I'm hoping this quote from Sondheim contains clues about how this will be approached:
Into the Woods Original Cast by Al Hirschfeld
"PC: So many songs in this book seem to deal with the idea of family and parents - "Children Will Listen" from INTO THE WOODS being the foremost example. 
SS: That's the whole idea - that's the whole show; fairy tales are about the relationship between parents and children. If you look at all the fairy tales, they are all about that - Cinderella; Jack and the Beanstalk; they are all about it - because that's the way fairy tales were told. You know, they weren't written down - they were told from generation to generation and, usually, matriarchal. So, often, it's from the woman's point of view - because in many of the fairy tales, if not most of them, the fathers are missing and the mothers are left. So, that all has to do with the tradition of fairy tales. The Grimm Brothers just collected a lot of them - as all the other fairy tale collectors did - but, they were all from an oral tradition. So, that's what accounts for the fact that most of them deal with parents and children."
Thoughts?

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