‘Into the woods to get the thing /That makes it worth the journeying.’ Belvoir is luring us into the dark mysterious forest, the setting of so many fairy tales and of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 musical, Into the Woods.

After the rather surprising success of their first collaboration, Sunday in The Park with George (1984), considered by many, at the time, to be too esoteric for the general public, Sondheim and Lapine were eager to work on a fairy tale quest story. For Sondheim, the problem with this concept was that the plots of individual tales were so brief and simple that they could not support a full show. So Lapine came up with the idea they should invent a couple, a baker and his wife, who would interact with characters from the classic fairy stories.