Danielle Ferland as Little Red in the original Broadway production of Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods in 1987. Ferland will play The Baker's Wife in the Westport Country Playhouse/Baltimore Center Stage co-production of the musical this spring.
Westport Country Playhouse has announced who’s in its upcoming production of Sondheim & Lapine’s Into the Woods.
How do we all get to know this so far in advance of the May opening? Because the show’s a co-production, and opens in Baltimore next month.
Baltimore Center Stage, which has Into the Woods as the penultimate show of its current season, March 7-April 15, while Westport is using the fairy tale musical to open its 2012 season May 1-26.
The cast:
Jeffry Denman as The Narrator. On Broadway, Denman was in the original cast of The Producers (understudying Leo Bloom) and the final cast of Cats.
Jenny Latimer as Cinderella. Another veteran of the Les Mis 25th anniversary tour—Cosette herself!—Latimer is one of the only In the Woods folks with a prior Westport Playhouse credit; she was in Mark Lamos’ production of She Loves Me! last season, which she’s said in an interview was the first show she was ever in outside of her native Utah. (She auditioned for Les Mis while starring in She Loves Me.)
Justin Scott Brown as Jack. Brown’s from Avon, Ct., and was in the national tours of Spring Awakening (which played the Bushnell) and Les Mis (25th anniversary production).
Erik Liberman as The Baker. Liberman was the choreographer for Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, the Ibsen adaptation which played the Yale Rep in 2006. He’s been in workshops of the new play Paper Dolls, directed by Yale grad Mark Brokaw. His New York credits include Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (the Signature Theatre revival) and Harold Prince’s LoveMusik.
Danielle Ferland as The Baker’s Wife. Ferland went to high school in Stratford, Ct. and in her early teens appeared in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway. She won a Theatre World award as the original Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods on Broadway in 1987.
Alma Cuervo as Cinderella’s Stepmother and also The Voice of the Giant. Cuervo’s a 1976 Yale School of Drama grad and was Madame Morrible in the first national tour of Wicked, and later played the role on Broadway. She was in the PBS-TV Broadway Theatre Archive filming of classmate Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others, which co-starred another YSD classmate, Meryl Streep.
Nikka Graff Lanzarone as Cinderella’s stepsister Florinda. Lanzarone has been Velma Kelly in Chicago on Broadway and was Marisa in the Broadway musical of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
Eleni Delopoulos as Cinderella’s stepsister Lucinda. Delapoulos did a Eugene O’Neill Theater Center workshop, Tales from Ovid. In New York, she’s done Iphigenia at Aulis and was in the original cast of A Stoop on Orchard Street.
Cheryl Stern as Jack’s Mother. Stern was in the Hartford TheatreWorks production of No Way to Treat a Lady and the Long Wharf production of Joe Keenan’s musical The Times. In New York, she’s done the recent revival of La Cage Aux Folles and the star-studded Roundabout revival of The Women.
Dana Steingold as Little Red Riding Hood. Steingold was in the national tour of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and has done Little Red previously, in the production directed by Moises Kaufman at Kansas City Repertory Theatre.
Lauren Kennedy as The Witch. Kennedy played Emma Carew in the concert tour of Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll & Hyde which played Mohegan Sun in 2004. On Broadway, she played Fantine in Les Mis and Lady of the Lake in Spamalot for a year each, and was an original cast member in the underrated 1997 musical Side Show.
Britney Coleman as Rapunzel’s Mother and Cinderella’s Mother. Coleman is known to millions of YouTube viewers as Bellatrix Lestrange in the cult hit A Very Potter Musical.
Jeremy Lawrence as The Mysterious Man. Lawrence has done biographical dramas in which he’s portrayed Tennessee Williams and Albert Einstein. How mysterious is that?—he’s an older guy with a white mustache.
Nik Walker as both The Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince. Walker is the co-founder of New York’s Burning Pony Theatre Company. He began his acting career in a Boston production of Sondheim’s Assassins.
Robert Lenzi as Rapunzel’s Prince. Lenzi was Seabee Billy Whitmore in Bart Sher’s Broadway revival of South Pacific in 2008.
I’m not seeing Cinderella’s father or grandmother on this list. Got to leave something to the imagination, I guess.
Quite the cast, huh? A delicate blend of the well-accomplished and the up-and-coming. And it’ll be interesting to see how this production squares with the rewrites and reinterpretations from the 2002 Broadway revival.
Great post.