That murkily alluring hinterland is explored in Stephen Sondheim’s musical, with book by James Lapine. Will Tuckett’s production, effectively designed by Lez Brotherston, strikingly points up the way in which the wild and primal lurks beneath the surface of civilised sophistication.

Oversized storybook pages supply the initial backdrop to the cast of fairytale characters, as if each has literally stepped out of fiction in search of an alternative happy ending. But as Cinderella, the childless Baker and his Wife, Jack and his cow, Little Red Riding Hood, the Witch and Rapunzel break free from the confines of familiar prose, a bleak, frightening and unlovely wood is revealed: twisted black trunks and shards of mirrored glass illuminated by bare bulbs.

The jaunty bounce of the show’s first act concludes with wishes come true. But in the darker second act the characters count the cost of getting what they thought they wanted; the set collapses as the limitations of romantic and familial love are pitilessly exposed and the fabric of fairytale happy-every-afters disintegrates.

Sondheim’s music and lyrics are characteristically complex and dazzling; and they are well served by a mixed cast of actors, opera singers and musical theatre performers. Suzanne Toase’s scrumptious Little Red is outstanding, eyes naughtily atwinkle at the sight first of the Baker’s pastries, then of Nicholas Garrett’s sexually rapacious Wolf, part hairy ravening beast, part muscular tattooed man. This toothy creature is the alter ego of Cinderella’s handsome Prince, who, having won his prize (a wistful Gillian Kirkpatrick), finds like many a married man that monogamy chafes and that he is doomed to pursue the woman he cannot have.

Also excellent are Beverly Klein’s Witch, transforming from vengeful hag to curvy femme fatale in red velvet; and Clive Rowe and Anna Francolini, delicately moving as the Baker and his Wife, whose dream of blissful domesticity is snatched away.

Not all the voices are up to Sondheim’s score, and the conductor, James Holmes, needs to tidy up some ragged ensemble singing. It’s a pity, too, that Gary Waldhorn as the drily affable narrator struggles with music and movement. But the show’s blending of the mundane and the fantastical is so deft and deliciously dark that it’s impossible not to gaze at it, entranced and see fragments of your own life reflected.

Source: The Times Online.