...into the woods freaked me out.

So I've had three encounters with Into the Woods. The first I hardly remembered until today, which was the full version. The full version has two REALLY REALLY long acts, and I saw it when I was a little kid with an atomically correct wolf. Little red gets rape, as does jack, the stepsisters get their feet chopped up to fit into some shoe, and that's just the first act. The second act like everyone dies, and to a little kid this is pretty disturbing. What's worse was I saw it when I was little with a group called "Broadway Training Center" and all this was done with kids. I was a mature little kid, and I got that red was singing about rape. Not even on broadway do they use a kid in this play.

The full version I saw today was with a performing arts high school and it was really good, if not disturbing, though they cut the wolf dick. not literally.

But so then I worked the jr. version, which only has the first act. So when I walked into my friend's play, I totally thought it was about the first act, which pretty cleverly and slightly creepily incorporates a bunch of fairytale characters into one story line, and nothing else. It was a fairy tale with a happy ending. So naturally, everything falls apart second act, and with everyone dead, we explore what you really want and happy endings and sex and sins and repercussions.

Everything we know was bad and we ignored because it was just a story, or a fairytale, this play made you feel bad about. The wolf and the giant were dead, but they were people too. Whenever we watch something, like a war, we are so happy our character is winning we don't care that he's killing the other side. What if the other side is right? Like, in my math class, on a smaller scale, there's a poster with Micheal Jordan pushing past someone to make a slam dunk with a quote about success. Well clearly the guy Mikey's pushing is failing.

Now my mother collects old fairytales, and I know real old ones. Disney lied. The little mermaid had her tongue cut out, snow white was almost killed like three times and still let the old witch in. Grimm brothers didn't create the myth of the happy ending. We did.