Co-Op Heads Into The Woods

From left to right: Elle McPhaill, Payton Goodwin, Kayla Quintanilla, Dakarai Langley, and Aaron Steed. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Caden Davila-Sanabría was having quite the Monday afternoon. Already, she had slipped into costume and practiced a curtain speech, her first ever in four years of high school. She had given peers a crash course on the Brothers Grimm, complete with a reminder that not everything was ever as it seemed. Now, she was shape-shifting into a world-weary single mom, ready to give her son Jack—who had sold a cow for magic beans—a stern talking to.

That burst of energy and enchantment landed at 177 College St. this month, as Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods comes to Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School for a whirlwind 72 hours. Directed by drama teacher Robert "Espo" Esposito and a talented team of students, educators and tiara-sporting administrators, the work has become a testament to teamwork, unexpected camaraderie, and the belief that magic can happen anywhere, if there are the people to make it so.

No beanstalks were harmed in the making of this show. Performances run March 11 through 13 at 6 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.

"I thought, 'It's way too hard, it's way too complex, it's way too long—so it's perfect,'" said Esposito with a laugh at a dress rehearsal Monday afternoon, as a Giant (Elodie Lafortune) scurried up behind him before checking her mic. "It's been a wonderful and unique experience. It is a hard show, and they [students] have come to embrace it so fully. They have made it shine."

Top: Kayla Quintanilla and La’riah Norman. Bottom: Esposito gives the cast notes. 

First written in 1986, Into The Woods follows several Grimm-era fairy tale characters who become unstuck in time and space, and sing their way to a not quite happy ending. There is the Baker (Aaron Steed) and his Wife (Marangelie Colón), who desperately want a child; Little Red Riding Hood (Payton Goodwin) on her way to visit her Granny (Jeniya Henry); Cinderella (Elle McPhaill) and her evil stepmother (Max Hoffman) and sisters (Jayla Bosley and Nadia Okwuosa); Jack (Dakarai Langley, who folds in some fancy footwork) and his bedraggled mother (Davila-Sanabría); a Prince (Ali’jah Steed) and his winsome brother (Robert Jones), who are both looking for brides.

And of course there’s a Witch (Kayla Quintanilla)—what fairy tale is complete without a witch?—who keeps her adopted daughter Rapunzel (La’riah Norman) locked away in a tower and propels the dark, strange and sometimes dreamy magic of this show. In another world, these fantastical characters might remain separate, relegated to the neat confines of their respective stories. But this is Sondheim, where stranger and more macabre things have happened. So when a narrator (Fallon Williams) appears onstage with a heavy, well-loved tome, we know it’s only a matter of time until these fairytale worlds collide.

“This show is incredibly layered and incredibly complex, dealing with themes of guilt, loss, love, friendship, breaking the cycles and finding who we’re meant to be,” said Davila-Sanabría, a senior in the creative writing department who jumped onboard as the school's inaugural production dramaturg, at a rehearsal Monday night. “This cast has handled it incredibly well.”

Davila-Sanabría and Dakarai Langley. 

Esposito, who arrived at Co-Op in 2005, has wanted to direct the show for years; it’s been on his short list (“which is two and a half pages long,” he joked) for as long as he can remember. But it always seemed like a little bit of a gamble: Into The Woods runs almost three hours, with a score that is rigorous and complex enough for even seasoned actors to get tongue-tied in. It’s darkly layered, with nods to pedophilia, lying, theft, infidelity, and abandonment that can feel heavy, even in a farce.

“It’s musical Shakespeare,” Esposito said. On top of it all, characters have to balance that weight with an ability to poke fun at each other and themselves. So he was thrilled when, after the show was announced, students hit the ground running.

The result is a play suffused with wit, humor and immense humanity, in which students carry not just their own parts, but also each other. As the curtain opens on a storybook freeze-frame—or several, arranged as vignettes across the stage—they root themselves in this place, turning a high school auditorium into an enchanted universe. From the audience, a person can hear and see the Baker’s longing for a child, sense the Witch’s smoldering, sizzling hurt, feel Jack’s connection to his old, emaciated cow, Milky White. At the center of it all, Quintanilla is electric, with rafter-raising vocals that the auditorium can barely contain.   

There are plenty of moments like this that make the show surprisingly propulsive for its marathon-like run time. Take Cinderella, who McPhaill mines for both her humor and her heart. As she raises her voice towards the rafters, there’s a sadness and edge there that seems well beyond her years, a reminder of how much her character has lost. But there’s magic too: birds flock to her, a tree opens up to reveal a sweet-voiced, midsummery forest spirit (Jakelyn Reyes-Barrios); a ballgown appears from thin air and gets her to the ball on time. And she’s funny, perhaps the first to question what happens after happily ever after becomes a thing. 

Or Davila-Sanabría, who tells Colón to be careful with her kids—not realizing she has struggled with fertility—with a tenderness and hurt there that feels impossibly, shockingly deep and vulnerable. So too when Colón responds, and Davila-Sanabría breathes a gentle “That’s okay too!” Suddenly, and just for a moment, they could be two women in a coffee shop, hashing out their plans and regrets together. That revelation strikes again with Langley, a fast-emerging triple threat whose big-voiced Jack is entirely relatable.

Students also understand the farce, playing it straight until suddenly they don't. As the Baker’s Wife, Colón refuses to make herself small or docile (she channels more of Sarah Barielles, who held the role in a 2022 Broadway revival, than Joanna Gleason, who originated it in 1987), jumping into casual, sometimes barbed conversation without ever straying from her lines or missing a note.

Goodwin, a senior in the dance department, plays Red as something of a springy, bright jack in the box, delighting the audience when she imbues the role with big Buffy the Vampire Slayer energy. As the Prince, Steed nails it, puffing out his chest and dramatically flinging his cape for a rendition of “Agony” that makes it nearly impossible not to laugh. Norman, who has acted since her freshman year, turns Rapunzel inside out, rocking a blonde bob by the end of the show. 

Even smaller performances shine here: a beaming, comically suave Willie Smokes and papier-mâché sidekick steal the spotlight as Milky White more than once. A bearded, manic Lyric Albo is the Mysterious Man that the show didn’t know it could have, with a shock of bright white hair and kind of elven two-step that is magnificent. In a breakout role as the Steward, Alyah Rodriguez makes fun of both herself and of the idea of royalty, miming a horse as she lays the comedy on thickly.

Ali’jah Steed as the Prince.

And of course, the music does the rest. At a dress rehearsal Monday afternoon, Williams let one hand glide through the air, the other cradling a giant storybook as she spoke into the audience in a muscled, even voice and got the ball rolling. At one corner of the stage, Langley sat cross-legged on the ground, looking despondent, Milky White beside him. At the other, McPhaill crouched by a cardboard chimney, flames springing up inside. In the middle, Steed and Colón looked into a hearth, the roaring center of a home that was still too empty for them.

One by one, characters began to share their wishes until their voices were weaving in and out of each other, scaffolding for the show that was about to unfold. By the end of three hours, their ranks would be reduced, and they would be reminding each other how not to let the isolation get the best of them.

Surely, several students said afterward, it’s meant to feel like a journey that is foreign and yet not, particularly for a number of seniors in the show. After four years inside Co-Op’s walls, they are preparing to fly out into the world. Whether they will choose to stay close, like Cinderella’s trusty companions, or spread their wings is up to them. 

“As children, we are taught to see life in black and white, thinking if we can just make the right choices, we’ll be guaranteed a happily ever after,” Davila-Sanabría writes in a production note for the show. “But the real world is not so simple. Witches can be right, giants can be good, you may stray from the path, or the path may even stray from you. And in these moments of uncertainty … we must forget the path we are ‘meant’ to be on, and instead forge a new one through the darkness.”

Around her Friday, fellow students agreed. Colón, a senior in the theater department, said that she’s holding fast to the importance of collaboration, which she has felt more strongly in Into The Woods than in years past. Since her freshman year, Colón has played both lead and ensemble roles in shows including Sister Act, Hairspray and The Wiz. This year, she realized that the divide between them is as fictional as the bedtime stories people read to their kids.

“This is the type of show where everyone has an important part, and if one person is off their game, even a little bit, it throws everyone off,” she said. “So it's like, holding yourself accountable so that you can show up for the people around you.”

“There’s a lot of things that we have learned about ourselves throughout the show,” Norman added. “Throughout the past three years, I was struggling to find out who I was, and I really found my purpose and found what I am supposed to be doing through this show by doing something so completely different.”

“You really have to be patient with Sondheim,” she added. “With the way he wrote the show, with the way he wrote the notes, the songs and stuff. Like it seems like it's wrong, but it's not. It's a very time-consuming musical, but patience is what I really learned.”

McPhaill, who transferred to Co-Op from Waterbury's Crosby High School, added that she's been grateful for the chance to work with a new group of students. While she doesn't think of herself as shy, "I'm not a person to open up to people that easily," she said. The play pushed her to do that.

"When I started working with people more closely, it was really enlightening," she said.

Students aren’t the only ones who are excited about the play. As she watched from the auditorium, Assistant Principal and Arts Director Amy Migliore said she’s thrilled to have the show at Co-Op—so much so that she makes a cameo appearance in the second act.

Twenty years ago, Into The Woods was her entry point into musical theater: she first saw it in a summer performance at Neighborhood Music School with Miguel Benitez and Michael John Improta. Both of them are now professional artists. As she became a mom, it only grew on her.

“We knew that they would be able to do it so we asked them to do something really hard,” she said. “We raised the bar. I love the message that you’ll never be alone … it resonates with you as a parent.”