Stephen Sondheim's long-term writing partner reveals why legend almost quit writing musicals for surprise career ...Middle East

Both of these works are the result of a creative partnership between Sondheim and James Lapine, with the former writing the music and lyrics and the latter writing the book in both cases.

While Into the Woods is now regarded as a key part of the musical theatre canon, Lapine revealed that things could have taken a very different path: "Before we did Sunday, he was coming off Merrily We Roll Along, which at the time was a big flop, but of course has now turned into a big hit.

Fortunately, indeed. Since its premiere in 1986, Into the Woods has become one of the most beloved musicals to take to the stage, praised for its challenging score and intricate plot.

"Steve said, 'Well, the only thing I know about fairy tales are the Disney cartoons.' And I said, 'Well, we've never read the Brothers Grimm or Perrault,' so I started to write an original fairy tale.

"I started talking about this other idea I had about doing a TV special where I brought the characters that I had watched as a kid and brought them all back together and weaved together an episode. I had this idea of bringing all these characters together, but it spun into this idea of writing a fairy tale."

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Speaking about the process behind the famous opening number, he said: "I wrote all these characters in that first opening scene, and I said to him, 'There's no way you can write an opening number to this,' which, of course, is the only way to get Stephen Sondheim to actually work. If you tell him there's something he can't do, he's going to do it."

Sondheim was also notorious for continually tweaking his work, which Lapine described as: "Steve never finished his work. We went and we worked on it out in San Diego, and then brought it in, but he still was working on it all the way until it opened in New York."

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"The woods became such a real character in ways that I've never seen before. I came to see it for a preview and I was going to go back to New York, but I stayed two more days to see it again."

Into the Woods is running at the Noël Coward Theatre from 22 September 2026 until 9 Jan 2027.

Buy Into the Woods tickets at ATG TicketsBuy Into the Woods tickets at LOVEtheatre

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