Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Play “into the Woods”: A Postmodernist Study

Abstract

Postmodernism is an intellectual movement that embraces meaningless and fragmentation. The concept of scepticism will be its dominant feature. Scepticism means to challenge and to question the fixed view of certain beliefs. Sondheim's Into the Woods (1986) is a musical play that consists of traditional famous fairy tales. Sondheim deconstructs and challenges these traditional fairy tales in order to be appropriate for postmodern age. Definitely the fairy tales are marvellous stories that have a simple structure but at the same times it reflects the ideological and the cultural elements of the society. Two tales in Into the Woods; Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk, will be studied according to postmodern strategies and techniques such as intertextuality, deconstruction theory and fragmentation to scepticise the cultural and ideological elements that exist under the simple structure of these traditional tales.