Fewer Trees in a Fairy-Tale Forest

These are the woods that you want to get lost in, a place you’ll find buried treasures that you didn’t even know existed. Fiasco Theater’s truly enchanting production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, which opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater, makes the best case ever for a musical that interpreters have been trying to get right since the show was first staged in the mid-1980s. Directed by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, but obviously the product of a fully collaborative troupe, this Into the Woods reminds us that it takes a village to give myths enduring life. The particular myths under consideration here are ones you’ve known since before you could read, involving archetypes like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and the beanstalk-climbing Jack. And Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine’s reimagining of these fantasies have received so much exposure of late, that just mentioning Into the Woods makes eyes glaze over. The show has received three major New York productions (the last in Central Park, only two and half years ago), and is the basis for the current, starry Disney movie, which has the virtue of not being nearly as bad as many predicted it would be. But as any child with strong preferences in bedtime readers understands, tellers count as much as tales do. And you need to feel that those tellers, like all great fabulists, trust in what they’re saying. No narrative tool is more infectious than belief. Such faith, of course, is a central dynamic in fairy stories, as it is in self-help books and inspirational fiction. So it might seem odd to apply the “only believe” principle to an artist as notoriously skeptical and ambivalent as Mr. Sondheim.