This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Ben Rimalower: Broadway Podcast Network presents Giants in the Sky, How Sondheim and Lapine Went Into the Woods with me, Ben Rimalower.

[0:08] Ben Rimalower: Today's guest, Steve Saklad, assistant to the set designer.

[0:11] Ben Rimalower: Once upon a time.

[0:17] Steve Saklad: I was an assistant to set designer Tony Straiges on the original Broadway production of Into the Woods. I also assisted the set designers on several other Broadway shows, including The Phantom of the Opera, La Cage aux Folles, Starlight Express, Legs Diamond, and Brighton Beach Memoirs. I later went on to a very successful career as the production designer responsible for such films as the 2011 musical reboot of The Muppets.

[0:51] Steve Saklad: I studied at the Yale School of Drama.

[0:51] Steve Saklad: I came in to get the draftings ready for the final bids. So, they had already done the show in La Jolla, I believe, and they had modified the design for Broadway, and Tony Straiges was out in his, you know, one-room studio/apartment in Brooklyn. The process was he and his assistants would be building these beautiful model pieces. Just before the show goes to bid for all the different production houses to bid on building the show, the sort of definitive draftings have to be created. Usually, they're done in a great hurry, and there's a flurry of hiring more folks to draft what has already been completed as a model piece. I came in and worked just two weeks, as I recall. I guess it would have been in '86.

There were a few pieces that were finished model bits that I was going to just commit to draftings that were, you know, half inch to the foot or three-quarters to the inch of the foot, detailed drawings of finished pieces. Then there was one unit which had yet to be designed, and that was Rapunzel's Tower, which was great fun.

[2:32] Steve Saklad: Tony had stacks and stacks of research books. This is back in the mid-'80s. There was no, of course, no internet, but there were no real tear sheets the way we would do collages of research now. Like every show, we had stacks and stacks of research books taken out from the public library or out of Tony's own collection, all page marked. I think this predated post-its, even, so there'd be slubbed cards set into, you know, 80 different pages in a given book. He had these fantastic images of French chateaux, and we sort of culled from those his favorite bits. He had done a very quick croaky kind of sketch of what he wanted, but he had this great idea for the tower to be in three cylinders that segmented and would telescope one into the other into the other, so that the tower could actually grow from the deck upward into the sky.

Out of the topmost tower section, there was a little gothic window where you saw Rapunzel, who was singing her sort of plaintive Sondheim melody that was the sort of coral spine of Into the Woods. We scribbled together for a little bit, and then I started drafting. That was what I spent most of my time doing there, a little give and take, a little back and forth. We got the draftings to a point where then model makers could take what I had done and turn it into a model for the final show and tell.

[4:19] Steve Saklad: I gotta say, I'm terrible at model making. I tried, but I knew this was not my strong suit. I was really quick at drafting and had an eye for doing dimensional stuff, sculptural stuff really well. I'm quick on my feet with a drafting pencil and love doing organic shapes and shapes that are not necessarily done with a straight edge and the parallel rule, but this tower piece was wonderful for that. Tony had a great idea for this beautiful gothic tracery built into the stonework and a kind of parapet that was true, sort of 15th-century chateau design. We got all of those bits into this one single tower. Then there was the physical need for the witch to climb up the tower to reach her in the castle window.

One of the layers of the drafting was the metal framework of ivy that sort of spiraled around the castle tower pieces that allowed it to be climbable, which was its own drafting piece. I remember seeing the model come together as I'd moved on to draft other things, and to see the model sort of make it flesh. There was a rotating piece that rotated around to present the ivy lattice work, which was pretty great to see. Of course, Tony hand-painted all of the models himself. He was very much about the tangible sculpting of these pieces, and the painting of them was this sort of very unique stippled technique that was Tony's own.

[6:19] Steve Saklad: I'll back up for a second. I had met Tony Straiges, oh, what was it, eight or nine years earlier? He was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I was a first-year student at Yale Drama School, and he'd come back to design a beautiful set for Tales of the Vienna Woods, which is this very abstract piece with birch trees arcing across the stage and this sort of white-on-white sculptural shutter cityscape with pieces that moved. He had us build up the textures on these sculptural architectural pieces and then overglaze them with radiant tones and then overglaze that with white so that it was a white set with these gorgeous shimmery undertones. When the lighting designer washed it with blues or greens or oranges, all those colors came out.

He was doing something similar painting-wise on these set pieces that seemed to be one color, but the technique for getting them to that one color was a sort of wonderful undercoat of radiance and then a sort of more neutral tone glazed on top of it all. I could watch Tony hand-painting that, and he was a great teacher. He would share what he was doing, and he would share how we should sort of work our way into his vision. Seven years, eight years later, it wasn't from zero when I first met Tony Straiges. We had a little bit of a working knowledge of each other. By this point, I was sort of an accomplished draftsman in Broadway. In fact, I think right after I finished a couple of weeks at Into the Woods, I went on and drafted for a couple of weeks on The Phantom of the Opera, the other giant show that was sort of going to bid at the same time.

At that point, I was wrangling, I was the first assistant on some shows. My pride of place was I had been the first assistant on La Cage aux Folles back in '82, '83, done a whole bunch of David Mitchell shows after that. The last David Mitchell show I think was in '89, which was the super famous Legs Diamond fiasco. I spent seven or eight months as the first assistant on that show trying to make that thing work. These jobs for Phantom of the Opera and Tony for Into the Woods were just bread and butter. I was one of several people who were in just to get these draftings finished.

[9:08] Steve Saklad: I know I drafted on the Cinderella Stepsisters, the carriage that would carry them to the ball, the little horses, and this beautiful kind of skeletal carriage, true 18th-century carriage, but sort of simplified into this elegant set piece. I drafted that piece, and then I drafted a few of these surreal alien kind of plant life pieces that Tony designed as foreground. There were these four, five-foot tall sort of giant bulb shapes on stems with long leaves that made sort of a ground row in effect for certain ones of his forest look. Those were finished model pieces already, and I was simply recording them into a piece of drafting that the set shops could measure and bid on and then build from.

[10:08] Ben Rimalower: Okay, that's fascinating. You've given me so many more questions. Just randomly, it's something detailed just because it piqued my interest. I don't want to forget it. This might be a dumb question, but you weren't doing that undertone layering color on the model though, right? That was just what would be done on the actual set piece.

[10:27] Steve Saklad: That was, I'm flashing back to the Tales of the Vienna Woods set that I was painting for Tony at Yale. He did do, there was definitely a sense when he was painting the model of Into the Woods, similarly to what he had done on Sunday in the Park, where there was a sort of stippled color put on the piece, it was sealed, and then there was an overglaze to the local color that was the final look. Because it was such a set that was not a specific world, it was almost abstract sculpture that set, though that sort of the laciness of the profiles that became the sort of tree silhouette panels of tree silhouettes and the decking, that was all a kind of sculpture that could be anywhere, but it wasn't even real, it wasn't green, it wasn't verdant, it wasn't soft in the way you think of a woods. It was this very brittle sculptural piece. I think he was painting it more like a piece of fine art than anything that was to resemble real greenery.

[11:43] Ben Rimalower: I'm so interested that you said a 15th-century chateau as a sort of inspiration for Rapunzel's Tower. Then you specifically said an 18th-century carriage.

[11:58] Steve Saklad: Yeah, it's true. I think they were very deliberate. They certainly were with the wardrobe to keep this timeless, to keep this not locked into one exact year in all of the history of fairy tales. I think they wanted to be a merging of things, and I think in the costumes, you know, Van Hulse and Pat Zipprodt, you see that really well because there's so much pulling from Bruegel and pulling from earlier, the Book of Hours, this great 14th-century tapestry or illuminated manuscript that has these beautiful images of medieval life. I think they had a range that they were using. Certainly, the gowns with their petticoats and pennies and stuff were more 18th-century than medieval. I think it was deliberate that when they did those houses, they were kind of those half-timbered draftings of the houses that opened the show. It was something that could have been true for any of three different centuries.

[13:06] Ben Rimalower: Interesting. My brain was going, oh well, Rapunzel was living in a 300-year-old tower. And that was two characters brand new because the witch is supposedly hundreds of years old. I mean, there's some backstory of the witch that they never really spell out, but I feel like, yeah, she's kind of a vampire character.

[13:25] Steve Saklad: Right.

[13:25] Ben Rimalower: Speaking of the witch, you're saying that the ivy that goes around Rapunzel's tower was actually made of metal, and that served as like rungs that she could climb on to get up.

[13:39] Steve Saklad: Yeah. There was, I can't remember if it was just profiles in rigid material or if it was soft felt. There was a greenery sort of leaf design with that metal work, but I remember, because they had to build it in a metal sort of way, it was very much its own layered drafting that was a separate page from the drafting that showed the styrofoam carving, the stone face of the tower, and the sort of detail quatrefoil, the specific chateau imagery that was put into that. That was all carved in styrofoam or bead foam and then hard-coated, but then on top of the stone face was this metal layer that was the climbing surface for the stunt stuff.

[14:03] Steve Saklad: It was organic vines that we drew to get up to as far as she was, as far as the window was. I'm sort of reaching back into my unfortunately I have no record, no images of any of my draftings. However, just on my last trip to New York, we stayed at the Civilian, this wonderful hotel in Hell's Kitchen, full of these magnificent models and set designs and stuff. In one of the little display boxes is, in fact, the model piece from the original 1987 Into the Woods design of the tower piece. It's a paper model, but it's painted, and for the first time in what is it now, 35 years, 38 years since I drew on it, I suddenly was able to see it again.

[15:26] Steve Saklad: I mean I could watch the, you know, the video recording of the '87 production, but yeah, there was definitely this organic IV thing that we drew, and it must have been drawn in segments because the tower collapsed in three segments.

[15:48] Ben Rimalower: And what was the inside like?

[15:52] Steve Saklad: I mean, what would—there's no—oh, I don't remember an inside.

[15:57] Ben Rimalower: Or was she—was it just like a flat that she got behind to be in?

[15:57] Steve Saklad: No, it was a round cylinder. They, you know, it was probably four or five feet in diameter at the base and it stepped down narrower. It came out of a trap in the floor, and she was seen, I guess there must have been an access ladder up the middle zone, but she was seen perched with her arms on the windowsill of the like window in the topmost zone in the topmost chunk. I don't think there ever was an interior. Trying to think if it rotated like a—was there a ledge for her to stand on up there other than a ladder? You know, yeah, there must have been this—I have no recollection. In fact, there could have been a whole floor because that segment was the smallest. As I recall it, the top section is the smallest, but atop the top section was this very wide parapet, the sort of cornice for the whole thing, and that dropped down into the second level, which dropped down into the first level. I think they had a limitation of just how deep into the below stage space that could go.

[16:03] Ben Rimalower: Where was that, the Martin Beck?

[17:15] Steve Saklad: Yeah, I think that was the limitation. Usually, the substage is where all the trap—the trap room is for all the winches and all the winch cables, the decks. So, in all likelihood, there was a limitation. They already knew that the whole stack all stacked up could only be whatever, six feet tall.

[17:37] Ben Rimalower: And then that would leave enough room for the hydraulics below it before you hit the ground of the trap room.

[17:45] Steve Saklad: I think the trap was covered up by, you know, there was this big swinging deck piece that sort of pivoted from side to side when you're in the woods. I think that deck piece covered up the trap for most of the show and swung right when we wanted to expose the trap that out of which the tower could come. I think it only made two appearances in the whole show or something.

[18:10] Ben Rimalower: Yeah.

[18:14] Steve Saklad: It was a moment, but it was not like a made—it didn't last, you know, that many minutes of stage playing time.

[18:22] Ben Rimalower: But it makes an impression.

[18:23] Steve Saklad: Um, and I mean, was there a sense it rotated as it came?

[18:29] Ben Rimalower: That's right.

[18:29] Steve Saklad: Yeah, so it was a turntable and hydraulics altogether.

[18:37] Ben Rimalower: And what was there a sense with any of this that it was sort of like cutting edge or kind of anything kind of groundbreaking?

[18:47] Steve Saklad: I know that like with other design elements, like some of the materials that Ann Hold Ward was talking about to be like the witch's fur, it was like kind of the beginning that she later used a lot in like Beauty and the Beast, and you know, that it's kind of become the standard of how that's all done, but it was kind of new then. It's funny. I mean, I'll be honest, I can only speak about it from spectator seeing the show on stage from having participated, you know, at Tony's studio for those two weeks. There was a sense the show had not worked in La Jolla. I know that there was sort of—there was no sense that it was going to be a hit in New York either. I think they were sad because Bernadette Peters was there who had not been there in La Jolla.

I know that they'd rewritten things, but remember, Sunday in the Park was a critical success, but it was so not a monetary success at all. Coming out of it, there was still half the people who went said, "Why did they have a second act of Sunday?" And now you're coming to Into the Woods, which again has a false ending at the end of Act One, and then a whole second act where everything you thought you knew falls apart. So it was not in any way a surefire—it was a risk.

[20:17] Steve Saklad: I think Tony, because he was well, he started the show with a very conventional, you know, the etched etching of the image of the houses and Cinderella's castle, the beginning in the beginning of the three images on that drop curtain, and then the built pieces. So it started out very conventionally, but as soon as it got to the woods, Tony was playing with toys that had very little to do with telling you where you were or scenery that you could sort of fall in love with. It was very aggressive. There was a definite Arthur Rackham sense of danger. The woods were full of spikes and thistles and thorns and stuff. So it was a very kind of uneasy to love, unromantic idea of where we were gonna live for this show.

And then it had that wonderful finale of Act One with the giant brocade sort of wedding dress kind of feel to it, and the false, you know, happy ending. But all of Act Two is even more aggressively difficult, and how to present the giant was difficult. I think I don't think anybody had a confidence that the tone was this thing and that they had all nailed it. I think everybody was trying gambling. They were gambling with their visual choices, they were gambling with the tone swings. All of this, when I was there, it would have been after they'd already gotten basically the design approved with James Lapine, and going to bid would have meant there would be usually about eight weeks or so before the show would open or the show would start teching on stage.

So it was before rehearsals had started. There was no sense of, "Oh my gosh, these great new songs are landing in the middle of that two that we didn't know how they'd be." So none of that existed yet. It was only the La Jolla memory and things that were being signed up, but they hadn't seen them in rehearsal yet.

[22:40] Ben Rimalower: Interesting.

[22:42] Steve Saklad: Um, that's interesting, especially because just today of all days, I happened to talk with Jacqueline Dankworth, who she's a jazz singer and actress. She was Cinderella in the London production of Into the Woods, but her mother was Cleo Lane, is Cleo Lane.

[22:59] Ben Rimalower: Oh, wow.

[22:59] Steve Saklad: Which in the national tour. Jacqueline said that when Cleo came to see her as Cinderella in that London production, she said, "Oh, it's not as romantic and beautiful as it was in James Lapine's production."

[23:15] Ben Rimalower: Ah, even more hard-edged.

[23:18] Steve Saklad: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wonder which production that was in the line in—I was Richard Jones directed it.

[23:25] Ben Rimalower: It was the Regent Park production.

[23:27] Steve Saklad: This was way, way before that. This is like 1990.

[23:30] Ben Rimalower: Oh, got it.

[23:31] Steve Saklad: Yeah.

[23:32] Ben Rimalower: Yeah, the Regent Park production was cool too. It was gorgeous. I thought that found something, a way to do it that was sort of—I thought that was a superb design.

[23:44] Steve Saklad: Did you see the revival, the storybook revival?

[23:48] Ben Rimalower: I thought that went in exactly the opposite direction because that went Disney, and I was like, "Wow, if anything, this is so not Disney."

[23:55] Steve Saklad: Yeah.

[23:56] Ben Rimalower: And I think that was Doug Schmidt. I love Doug Schmidt's design.

[24:00] Steve Saklad: Yeah, I think I guess Lapine wanted to try something very different after having done it already.

[24:06] Ben Rimalower: Right.

[24:08] Steve Saklad: Yeah, and I mean, so for me too, the very first time I saw any of this together or heard any of the music was when I actually paid money to, you know, sit in the audience for a preview.

[24:18] Ben Rimalower: They didn't even give you a comp.

[24:20] Steve Saklad: No, didn't get a comp. I wasn't there long enough. The, you know, I'm not listed in on—I am I B D B. I'm not—I wasn't in the program or anything.

[24:27] Ben Rimalower: You were in the Playbill, that's how I found you.

[24:32] Steve Saklad: Oh, really?

[24:32] Ben Rimalower: Yeah, I wasn't in the Playbill.

[24:33] Steve Saklad: Okay, so then I misspoke. Well, that's nice, but yeah, we ticket. And it's funny because I was a huge fan of Sunday. You know, I'd seen Sondheim shows since the original Little Night Music.

[24:49] Ben Rimalower: Wow, because today's Glennis Johns' hundredth birthday.

[24:53] Steve Saklad: That's right. Happy birthday, Glennis Johns.

[24:58] Ben Rimalower: My whole career, I was dying to actually work more than two weeks on a Sondheim.

[25:04] Steve Saklad: Of course, never happened. But that was the closest I got.

[25:08] Ben Rimalower: Well, listen, he's gone, but there'll be many more productions of his shows. It's funny that you bring up Little Night Music because in some ways these are two shows that could be done on the same set.

[25:20] Steve Saklad: They could be.

[25:21] Ben Rimalower: That's so interesting.

[25:23] Steve Saklad: And there's also this sense of both of them being—you think where you know where you are at the end of Act One, and then you sort of get lost in the haze in Act Two.

[25:32] Ben Rimalower: Yeah.

[25:33] Steve Saklad: And in a way, you kind of feel like they're both a kind of maze, and you're in a place that doesn't have an entrance or an exit until you get to the very end.

[25:43] Ben Rimalower: That'd be interesting to see those in repertory. That would be amazing.

[25:49] Steve Saklad: Yeah, how do we make this happen?

[25:51] Ben Rimalower: You can design them.

[25:53] Steve Saklad: And the same cast.

[25:55] Ben Rimalower: Yeah, that could work, right?

[25:57] Steve Saklad: Yeah.

[25:57] Ben Rimalower: All right, well, I'll have to start fantasizing about who to double cast from these.

[26:02] Steve Saklad: I love that. That'd be great.

[26:04] Ben Rimalower: There was another set thing I wanted to ask you about, though.

[26:12] Steve Saklad: The, oh God, it went out of my—

[26:18] Ben Rimalower: I should have written it down.

[26:19] Steve Saklad: I knew I was getting—did you see the concert production?

[26:24] Ben Rimalower: The Encores, yeah.

[26:27] Steve Saklad: Well, I didn't see it with the original cast. I saw it with sort of the second cast on Broadway. Not to misspeak, you know, a production that everybody was raving about, but I did not understand what the excitement with that one was, except for the cow, which was Milky White was brilliant. But I like the people, but I was like, "But they're all just standing in a row in front of a bunch of three steps in an orchestra." So I wasn't on the wavelength that everybody else was when they said this is the one everybody should see.

[27:00] Ben Rimalower: Interesting.

[27:01] Steve Saklad: I mean, I think people really have such fondness for the material. And we've had such interesting productions. I mean, after that James Lapine storybook, as you put it, revival in 2002, there was the Regents Park one that came to Central Park, you know, at the Delacorte. And then there was the Fiasco Theater, which I only saw pictures of it. It was brilliant, brilliant design. Very interesting and cool and weird. So I think maybe people appreciated just in this case, experiencing it, you know, just the material with almost no production really and seeing all the great performers that were in it.

[27:45] Ben Rimalower: Are there other approaches into the woods that you would like to try or see tried that haven't happened yet?

[27:54] Steve Saklad: It's funny because the Arthur Rackham idea, the really deep into the woodcuts is something that, I mean, in a way, Tony Straiges' set jumped off of the woodcut idea into something abstract, but the idea of really going into a deep layered, almost wing and drop and sort of netted old school scenic painting with a woodcut visual of a woods, I think is something that would be really interesting to do.

[28:28] Steve Saklad: What what is a woodcut visual mean? Arthur Rackham was the illustrator from these 1880s, 1890s Grimm's fairy tales. Um, and his he drew like Durer. He drew no he was drawing drawing with Incopen, he drew like those lithographic etchings of the 15th, 16th, 17th century, and the idea of really going deep into that cross-hatched etching world, maybe even black and white with barely any color, but that idea of it being illustrative, almost like we think of as scene-painted sets, but in a really hard-edged engraving style would be something I'd love to see.

[29:17] Ben Rimalower: Fascinating.

[29:18] Steve Saklad: And it would let the people stand forward because of course they're in full color, but the idea of woodcut drawings of the forest and woodcut drawings of the houses and the castle and the locations and stuff. Arthur Rackham did also Alice in Wonderland famously and that that touched stone. That could be I'm picturing I'm picturing pictures of him drawing rabbits in the woods and stuff. Um maybe it's later, 1900 or so. Um, but I know that I know that his was a jump one of the jumping off points for what Tony ended up doing. Yeah, but to go even further back into that woodcut illustration thing it's is there anything else I mean it's just so interesting to hear the design for Into the Woods talked about from a designer's perspective you know things that that we as like fans might have you know experienced without necessarily understanding anything else that you thought was cool or interesting you want to point out.

[29:55] Steve Saklad: Well it's funny you mentioned the connection to Little Night Music because the one brilliant thing among many that Boris Aronson set did was it played it did the slate of hand beautifully where you'd have these panels of birch trees painted on Lexan going by but the lower six feet of those panels was opaque it was leaves and grasses and stuff which you don't really realize so that as they move across on the stage you could tuck a couple of actors behind one and as it kept moving it would reveal two people talking or yield some furniture or it would wipe in front of a chazlong and as it kept moving the Shez long would disappear along with it because the bottom was opaque.

[31:09] Ben Rimalower: Wow Tony did things similar to that in Into the Woods because he had these series of profile panels that the slid to sort of make wipes from scene to scene exactly like Boris Aronson's panels.

[31:22] Steve Saklad: And so there was this sense that magic could happen instantly because anything could appear or disappear because of these fits. And I love that I hadn't really thought of the connection until you just mentioned what a great repertory season that could be. How similarly that idea of making magic happen with the wiping of those panels.

[31:46] Steve Saklad: Um that works in both things. I always I never quite understood why Tony did the decking that he did, that one big hill, and which was kind of um it blocked a lot of action. It was it was an odd deck deck solution. Um, and um I you know had I thought to ask him why are you doing this, it would have been a good conversation piece right now. Um, but then when you saw something like the Regent Park version that had staircases and platforms and walkways and spirals and you know ad infinitum, and you sort of saw, oh, how thrilling to sort of be off the ground into the canopy of the trees and the you know, anywhere you wanted to go, you could go. Um that was sort of sort of a brilliant explosion of what what the staging could be like, and I think there was a bit of an earthboundness by having those dexolutions the way they were.

[32:46] Steve Saklad: It's funny because for a millisecond, I'm a I'm a production designer in movies. That's that's the career I've ended up with, and for a millisecond, I fantasized about trying to go out for the film of Into the Woods, of course. Everybody who's a good designer wants to, um, and and so I was starting to think of how to get how to put in real terms the showbiz of the songs. Some of those songs like The Wolf Has and Baker and His Wife have are real showbiz vaudeville sort of numbers, and the thought of how to stage a thing on the rocks going across a brook or something in a in a soft in a tap tap dance sort of way or a log over a log over another log and to sort of be able to do a soft shoe from log to log, but the idea of trying to get showbiz tropes into a wood setting was something that I played with in my head, and because there are parts of Into the Woods that people have not really explored that vaudeville, the vaudeville of it all, and you know, some of those a lot of the songs are vintage Sondheim, but some of them are real pastiches of vaudeville numbers.

[33:59] Steve Saklad: Uh, and to sort of bring down the flashing lights and the and the little drop curtain and stuff and let let a vaudeville be a vaudeville would be a would be a great thing to see. I would I would cheer that.

[34:11] Ben Rimalower: Well, this sounds like a Bob Fosse Into the Woods. I'm ready for it.

[34:14] Steve Saklad: It could totally be that, or at least at least a tribute to Broadway, you know, its colors.

[34:20] Ben Rimalower: Yeah, it's funny. In some ways, it seems like maybe if subsequent productions move further and further away from that.

[34:26] Steve Saklad: Um, I think that's true.

[34:28] Ben Rimalower: I think that's true.

[34:29] Steve Saklad: Um, and and that's okay. It's amazing to me that of all of his shows, that's the show that is like every every high school, every elementary school, every summer camp, yeah, Into the Woods. And that that I'm gobsmacked by because I think the singing, the songs are really really challenging.

[34:48] Ben Rimalower: Yeah, I mean, do anyone can whistle. That's easy singing, you know, a bunch of townspeople running around.

[34:55] Steve Saklad: Um, but for it to be this one that's that's the one all the all the you know, Gen Z and Millennials know is because that's phenomenal to me. That's shocking.

[35:06] Ben Rimalower: Well, it's like it's funny how like public consciousness can be so like short attentions, man, because it's like merely the fact that it's about these familiar fairy tale characters.

[35:17] Steve Saklad: If you ask a second question, no no no, it's very dark, it's very twisted, it's complicated, you might not like it.

[35:24] Ben Rimalower: But if you're just going at face value, it seems accessible more than other shows. It's like the IP, God help us.

[35:32] Steve Saklad: And and also, you know, all the the schools just do the first act.

[35:35] Ben Rimalower: So that's right. Into the Woods Junior.

[35:38] Steve Saklad: Well, and also that the original production was captured so exquisitely, um, with James Lapine directing the cameras to get it, you know, really kind of preserved in its most pure original form.

[35:53] Ben Rimalower: How do you feel that the physical production translates on that video?

[35:58] Steve Saklad: Hmm. Um I haven't watched it in a long time, honestly. Uh the um the technology of 1980s video is so huh, you know, humble compared to what we're used to now, and it's it's no Hamilton, you know, recording. Um, but um I think one thing that that I remember being bugged by was the performances were were still geared towards a Broadway audience and hitting the balcony. So there was not um I didn't feel like uh Joanna Gleason, yes, but I didn't feel like this subtle i i it it felt a little too overtly um Broadway acting once, um, which you can't get away with because those people were doing their performances eight times a week.

[36:43] Steve Saklad: Um, but I think later videos have started to be sensitive to just for the video, let's take it down instead of a 10. Um, but it's still amazing to sort of get those performances recorded. The sets, um, the lighting never was right for a video. So you never knew I was back there. You saw the sort of murkiness until the brightest scenes, but what are there? Four bright scenes and all of Into the Woods and the rest is murky. So it was not it was not friendly to sort of showing the magic of Tony Straiges' work.

[37:17] Ben Rimalower: Um, but um, but that's okay. I mean, look, the fact that there's a uh an actual record of uh of Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury is amazing, but oh how heartbroken I am that they shot it on the tour, which doesn't have the giant foundry.

[37:35] Steve Saklad: Yeah, set pieces. So it's like, yes, you have a record, but if only you knew what the URS theater actually had. If only you saw the original in New York, you would you would see the difference.

[37:47] Ben Rimalower: Can you say more about when we watched the video of Into the Woods, What We're Missing that was there in that original production?

[37:55] Steve Saklad: Well, um, the the um those those sets lit the way they were intended to be lit on on Broadway stage, you could get all that nuance in a low level of lighting as a spec as a as a theater viewer, and um you could also see Bernadette Peters singing in the foreground and still see all the dappled light in the trees overhead, you know, 20 feet higher. Um, but on TV the range of lighting is unforgiving.

[38:28] Steve Saklad: So you're not so what's what's half lit is looks dark on the screen, and also um you can't quite see Bernadette Peters in close-up and see the dappled light through the trees in the same shot unless you're you know dissolving constantly or something so so um that that you know 36 foot by 20 foot image that you get as a spectator sitting in a Broadway house there's no getting that in the TV screen and um obviously you want to know what their faces are doing. You want to understand the words so you want to see the performances close up um but then you never you never sort of see what the rest of the world is around them.

[39:12] Steve Saklad: Um and uh you know I I sort of want both I'm really greedy so yeah um it's it's only it I mean I think they did have some wide shots and and bless their hearts when the uh when the Rapunzel's tower rises you know spinning out of the ground um it's a nice wide shot and and it's like as surprising as it was when we saw it on stage so so those things work beautifully and and applause that they that they shot at me.

[39:12] Ben Rimalower: Wow well I really appreciate that input um and all of this it's so it's so great to hear from you and who I'm wondering who did you have you spoken to any other of Tony's assistants I don't even know if Tony is still with us is Tony Straiges still with us?

[39:12] Steve Saklad: He is still with us but I have not been able to get a hold of him to do an interview but if there's anyone else you think from that side that I should reach out to I would love your input.

[40:05] Steve Saklad: I can't remember who I mean like I say there I was on my drafting table with my little parallel rule and my T squares and my flex curves and stuff drafting my little thing. And I remember I would leave my drafting pages at night, and Tony would have have have noted thing this or that on them in the morning, which is always what you want, because he lived there, you know, 24 hours. But um, I can't remember who was next to me. I can't remember who was at the next table.

[40:34] Steve Saklad: And I do remember this the mad factory of the model makers, um, with these weird materials and stuff and and you know, spray starts, spray smells and everything. But um I I was racking my brain in. I honestly have no clue who else. I mean, I can tell you the associate set designer was Richard Jarriss. I'm sorry to say that.

[40:58] Ben Rimalower: Okay, and the uh assistants to Mr. Straiges were Steve Rundle, Joel Reynolds.

[41:06] Steve Saklad: No, um uh you, uh James Sandifer.

[41:11] Ben Rimalower: Oh, James Sandifer, I actually knew. He he's done some great sets as a set designer.

[41:16] Steve Saklad: Yeah, that's good to know. And Linda Lee Burks.

[41:20] Ben Rimalower: Means nothing.

[41:21] Steve Saklad: I know, but James and Linda were billed after you, so maybe they were only there for one week. James Sandifer, I know you can get uh his he would be in the in uh I suppose he's in 829, but he's he's certainly in 800. Um uh and uh he would certainly be somebody who he I feeling he was more um he had more history with with Tony than I did.

[41:45] Ben Rimalower: Well, this this still has been wonderful, so I really I really thank you.

[41:52] Steve Saklad: Thank you for listening to Giants in the Sky, how Sondheim and Lapine went Into the Woods on the Broadway Podcast Network. Look out for episode 37 with Ben Wright, the original Jack.