We’ve said it before about other productions by the Jefferson High Drama students, and it definitely bears repeating: If you missed the latest show, you truly missed a delight. Last week’s staging of “Into the Woods” was superb in every way. The Steven Sondheim musical based on fairy tales features many challenging songs, with syncopated rhythms, minor undertones and big jumps. Many of those songs include overlapping voices and lyrics.
The JHS singers ably stepped up to the challenge. The play also has many entrances and exits where timing is critical, and the actors were right on cue. The scenery for the JHS production was exceptional, probably the best we have ever seen in the history of the JHS drama department. While intricate and elaborate, it also had simplicity in its ease of switching from location to location and back.
The backstage crew handled all of that so flawlessly that their work could have been easy to overlook, exactly as it should be. One actor who would have been easy to overlook filled the role of the horse. Without a single line, he conveyed emotion, garnered laughs and made the most of the part. So, too, did actors with many, many lines in the complex production. There were so many moments deserving of praise and so many actors/singers with sparkling work that trying to list them would inevitably miss something or someone important.
