Stage

...In a program note, Goodman says that she insisted that the work had to be a heroic opera rather than a satire, but she indicates that her Nixon is not the same as those of Adams, Sellars, and James Maddalena, who is so impressive in the role...

...Ever-after lasts until the second act when the characters find that they have left fairy-tale land for Sondheim country, where they find betrayal, infidelity, boredom, recrimination, the taste of ashes in the mouth of realized desire...

...And pain...

...GERALD WEALES...

...it is also a musical comedy that has fun with its music, its characters, its staging, at least until well into the second act when its best intentions weigh it down...

...To some members of the audience this scene is a letdown from the fierce cheerfulness of much of the music and action, but it seems to me a necessary finish to the piece...

...The villainous landlord is doubled by the actor who plays Kissinger ("he looks like you know who," sings Pat to Richard...

...His The Uses of Enchantment has been invoked a lot lately in comments on Into the Woods, the new Stephen Sondheim-James- Lapine musical...

...In the meantime, first Pat and then Nixon are drawn into the action on the side of the heroine, and Chiang, distressed at what is happening to her ballet, sings her authority as Mao's wife in a hysterical repetition of the "book," which is sung as a two-syllable word fluting upward...

...Once the heroine is rescued from traditional repression, she-lacking proper indoctrination-is pushed around by the revolutionaries as the action degenerates into Red Guard violence until the heroine dances her way to ideological correctness...

...Although the work may not be satire, much of it is clearly funny, and what one can make out of the rhymed libretto is witty, often in sly ways as when Chou En-lai sings about China's need to manifest its destiny, setting up echoes of America's nineteenth-century dream of hemispheric domination...

...Not a fairy tale, then, Into the Woods is a cautionary tale that ends in Broadway uplift...

...even the baker, a little older than the others, is an innocent, a likable klutz suffering from chronic indecision and a missing father who, in this over-plotted olio, inevitably turns up and, after the fashion of fathers, offers cryptic advice to all the questers...

...Sondheim and Lapine tell again how Cinderella gets the prince, Little Red Ridinghood escapes the wolf, and Jack makes a killing (in two senses: the giant and the goose with the golden eggs) out of a judicious use of the beanstalk...

...Pat's tour of the city is as foolish as such official tours are in reality, but the humor in the scene (the abrupt movement from hospital to pig farm while the chorus, singing, "Pig, pig, pig," runs eagerly ahead) is tempered somewhat by the sweetness that the music and Carolann Page's performance gives to Pat's platitudes...

...At the end, the surviving characters-Cinderella, Red Ridinghood, Jack, and the baker-sing " No One Is Alone," a song that turns Into the Woods into a standard maturation play in which preoccupation with self ("Your Fault," they sing earlier in the act) gives way to sharing...

...It may not make Nixon in China a heroic opera, but it gives a dramatic substance to the characters that rescues them from any lingering claims of caricature...

...Into the Woods is a serious attempt to deal with the necessary loss of innocence and the precariousness of dreams fulfilled...

...Dreams tarnish, ideals wither in other Sondheim musicals {Follies, for instance), but something else is going on here...

...You can't just go stealing gold and selling cows for more than they're worth, because it affects everybody else...

...In the last scene (originally a separate act), the tone of the piece changes, becomes meditative as each of the principals (except Kissinger) appears in his bed and sings his own doubts, fears, uncertainties...

...Perhaps there is a limited supply of excitement available to musical theater in any season, and this season's quota was being used up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where John Adams's Nixon in China was presented as part of the Next Wave festival...

...By the end of the act, the stories are told and it is happily-ever-after time...

...Perhaps there is an accidental symbol (if not an unconscious one) in the giant's head that-flaxen braids and all-comes crashing onto the stage toward the end of the show...

...There are many attractive things in the show-Danielle Ferland's cheeky Red Ridinghood, Joanna Gleason's baker's wife, Robert Westen-berg's priapic wolf and his bored prince, Bernadette Peters in and out of her witch makeup-but it is simply an amiable musical when one thinks of Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Pacific Overtures, and A Little Night Music...

...The show opens with the titular song, at once cheerfully brisk and somewhat ominous in the way that the music pulls the characters into the woods where they will find what they think they want...

...This puts them in the company of artists as different as Walt Disney, and Milt Gross, as Anne Sexton and James Whitcomb Riley, who once retold "Little Red Ridinghood" in baby talk...

...Much of the behavior of the Nixons in this scene is laughable, but Pat's impulse to protect the girl transcends the absurd and becomes touching...

...He has only a bewildered Pat and a fakily assured Kissinger to give him purchase...

...Peter Sellars, whose direction is strangely austere for a man with his reputation for flamboyance, has spread the chorus across the stage in a grouping that seems at once casual and controlled...

...Even the witch, who has been under a spell, turns into Bernadette Peters, her true and beautiful self...

...STAGE TALES & DRAGONS 'INTO THE WOODS' & 'NIXON IN CHINA' Once upon a time there was a wizard named Bruno Bettelheim who ventured into the dark interior of popular fairy tales in a conscious search for the shared unconscious...

...The scene that best shows the tension between fun and feeling is the one in which the Nixons join Chiang Ch'ing at the Peking Opera to see a performance of Chiang's The Red Detachment of Women...

...They stand, unmov-ing, staring out at the audience, dark figures against a coldly appealing backdrop-trees lightly sketched against a wall of white-while Adams's music begins its first pattern of intensifying repetition...

...And death...

...Yet, unlike The Juniper Tree, an opera with Jungian connections, Woods is less a probe into the unconscious than a refashioning of familiar stories to fit the thematic and aesthetic concerns of its creators...

...The scene between Nixon and Mao is essentially comic with Nixon's growing confusion as Mao insists on making philosophical rather than practical/political statements while a trio of secretaries sings his remarks over and over again...

...In a fairy tale of their own devising, librettist and composer create a baker and his wife who must succeed at an unlikely treasure hunt if they are to free themselves of the curse of sterility laid on them by the witch next door (incidentally, the mother of Rapunzel...

...Then they begin to sing -"The Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points of Attention,'' according to librettist Alice Goodman's synopsis-and it is clear, even before Nixon makes his very American entrance down the boarding steps that he is a kind of innocent abroad...

...There is something ludicrous about the subject of this opera to anyone who has survived the trashing of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Checkers speech, and Watergate, but from the opening scene, in whith the chorus gathers at the Peking airport to welcome the Nixons, it is clear that the audience is in for something a great deal more complex than political cabaret...

...In an interview (New York Times Magazine, August 30, 1987), Sondheim suggested that the characters were being punished for misdeeds and a failed sense of community...

...This sense of dislocation is underlined when he sings his eagerness, his invocation of history as a witness to his presence in China...