Entertainment

Woods a fine fairy-tale setting

10.1e039.woods2--300x300.jpg

“Into the Woods” goes into the park with a jumbled Public Theater production whose greatest assets are stars Amy Adams (above, with Ivan Hernandez) and Donna Murphy. (
)

For its outdoor program’s 50th- anniversary season, the Public Theater put the park back into Shakespeare in the Park.

In June, we were treated to a lovely production of “As You Like It,” where the play’s Forest of Arden seemed to meld with Manhattan’s favorite green grounds.

Now the Delacorte Theater’ s stage has been turned into an elaborate, multistoried treehouse for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods.”

For nearly three hours, the cast climbs ladders, runs up and down stairs, goes from one elevated platform to another. It’s like a life-size game of Super Mario. Except instead of a plumber collecting power-ups, we have a baker (Denis O’Hare) on a quest. And standing in for Mario’s invincibility stars, we have no less than Amy Adams — in a touching New York stage debut — and Sondheim pro Donna Murphy.

The 1987 musical subverts familiar fairy-tale characters like Cinderella, Rapunzel and Little Red Ridinghood. In doing so, it tells us that growing up is hard, being a parent even worse and having your wishes come true can totally backfire.

While there’s plenty of humor throughout, this isn’t the cheeriest work. Act 2, set in the not-so-happy ever after, boasts the most famous songs — “Children Will Listen” and “No One Is Alone” — but it’s also about bitter disillusionment.

Timothy Sheader’s hyperactive staging is effective for most of the first act, but after intermission it fails to bring the often divergent moods into a coherent whole.

The problem is that the production — which originated at London’s Regent’s Park but was recast with Americans — insists so much on busy cartoonishness that it lacks emotional resonance. Without it, you’re left with a mere jumble.

Sheader’s big idea was to make the narrator a boy (Noah Radcliffe, at a recent performance) who’s run away from home and escapes into fantasy.

“Into the woods and through the trees” we go, and meet the baker and his wife (Adams) who, desperate for a child, must find items like “a cape as red as blood” for the witch (Murphy) who’s cursed them.

Along the way, they meet a gang of colorful oddballs, including Sarah Stiles’ spunky Little Red Ridinghood, Gideon Glick’s endearingly dumb Jack and Ellen Harvey’s mean stepmother, who seems to have picked up pointers from Cruella DeVil and Susan Sontag.

The production is literally all over the place. Inventive visual feats, like a beanstalk made of opened umbrellas, can’t make up for the lack of coherence.

And then there’s that tricky second act, which is especially deadly here as the story implodes in barely connected bits.

A handful of performances keep us engaged. Stiles’ Little Red is an uproarious smart-aleck, and O’Hare (a memorable vampire king on “True Blood”) is great as long as he isn’t singing.

But the show’s greatest strengths are Murphy — nailing the witch’s humor and pathos — and Adams, who, nearly unrecognizable under the world’s ugliest wig, has a lovely warm presence and terrific pipes.

We’d follow these two into any woods, and beyond.