Samuel Barber / Into the Woods

On this day in classical music: The string orchestra version of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” received its premiere in 1938, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. Toscanini subsequently performed Barber’s “Adagio” on a tour to South America and Europe, the first performances of the work on both continents. The composer’s most famous work is frequently heard during times of national mourning. It was played following the deaths of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein and Princess Grace of Monaco. Listen to Leonard Slatkin conduct the Barber “Adagio” with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sftaC0yC714

On this day in the musical theatre: Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods” opened on Broadway in 1987. Sondheim and James Lapine borrowed characters from familiar fairy tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood) and created an original story about a baker, his wife and their desire to start a family. Thrust into the woods together, these characters undertake a journey that explores the notion that not all fairy tale characters live happily ever after. “Into the Woods” opened in the same season as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.” Many expected “Phantom” to sweep the boards but “Into the Woods” was a surprise win in the best book and score categories. It has since been frequently revived, most notably on Broadway in 2002. Watch the original cast perform “Into the Woods” and “Children Will Listen” on the 1988 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z3_YcMa-cA

Musical musings: When Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood and their fairy-tale friends venture into the woods in the new Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, you can be sure that they won’t miss the subconscious forest for the picturesque trees. The characters of “Into the Woods” may be figures from children’s literature, but their journey is the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past. Like the middle-aged showbiz cynics who return to their haunted youths in “Follies” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” or the contemporary descendant who revisits Georges Seurat’s hallowed park in “Sunday in the Park With George,” or the lovers who court in a nocturnal Scandinavian birch forest in “A Little Night Music,” Cinderella and company travel into a dark, enchanted wilderness to discover who they are and how they might grow up and overcome the eternal, terrifying plight of being alone. To hear “No One Is Alone,” the cathartic and beautiful final song of “Into the Woods,” is to be overwhelmed once more by the continuity of one of the American theater’s most extraordinary songwriting careers. “Into the Woods” may be just the tempting, unthreatening show to lead new audiences to an artist who usually lures theatergoers far deeper, and far more dangerously, into the woods. – Frank Rich in The New York Times

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