Actress

STEPHEN SONDHEIM Ihave written more material for this show than I have for any other, with the exception of Forum. I'm used to writing shows where we plan it out very carefully, and I've known that if a song is any good at all it will be used. I am a slow worker and write very carefully. But Jim likes to experiment with a song the way he does with his own writing-to be able to change a scene around, or try half a song in one place, and half in another. I've been thinking about it. I think that as soon as you get into this approach, there is no way around writing more material. It requires more, to have more to experiment with. I was brought up by Oscar Hammerstein to integrate songs thoroughly into the development of a piece. It was Burt Shevelove who taught me, during Forum, the entirely different approach of savoring the moment. The song is not there to carry the action forward, but rather to take any given moment and to expand upon it. It isn't until the second act of Woods that the songs actually become necessary to the action; it is essentially the book that carries the plot. I had written three songs in the first act for the main mythological figures, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack, and finally Cinderella, where they stepped out to the audience and described, quite literally, the adventure they had just had. Jim had this notion of "psychological songs," that instead of dealing with the facts, these songs should describe the psychological changes they were going through as a result of their adventures . JOANNA GLEASON, ACTRESS Ihave never had an experience like this in which a role was built on me like a carefully-crafted costume. They use you to make their work and it makes you feel like a collaborator, not a hired hand. What I had in mind, and what I was encouraged to do, was to take a rhythmically contemporary attack on the material, combined with a stylized approach to what is in effect a classical setting. People ask me if the show is about world destruction, if my sleeping with the Prince is really about AIDS. There's no denying that what you are thinking about is going to affect what you see on stage, but I choose not to underscore these issues because I do not think it was the intent of the writers, nor is it useful to me as a performer. I prefer to use the literary and historical sources the writers worked with to develop the piece, the patterns of behavior that occur over and over again in the fairy tales themselves: fathers are historically weak or absent, mothers die and fathers abandon you. There are a lot of actors in this show who are parents and then, we are all somebody's child. How we were as children and how we are as parents 64 were themes which resonated. It gives us a unified tone to work frommakes us a tighter ensemble. I think that the show is illustrating what fairy tales are designed to accomplish: they are a way to pass messages on to your children. 1.to r.: CHIP ZIEN AS THE BAKER, JOANNA GLEASON AS THE BAKER'S WIFE AND BERNADETTE PETERS AS THE WITCH BERNADETTE PETERS, ACTRESS Iwas involved with Sunday in the Park with George from the first workshop, and came into this only after the show had been well established. Though James was comfortable with a lot of the choices he had already made, he certainly wanted me to make the role of the Witch my own. What was interesting and very helpful to me in the way James approached the Witch was that he didn't think of her as being ugly, and then beautiful-what we discovered is that even though she gets her beauty back, she's still the same miserable person she was when she was ugly. James was interested in what was going on with her inside. 65 ...