TGA’s ‘Into the Woods’ and the fragility of storytelling in the Philippines

MANILA, Philippines – “Once upon a time” is supposed to promise safety. A beginning. A map. But what if that map has been redrawn too many times to follow? Too many times that it no longer leads home?

At the media briefing for Theater Group Asia’s (TGA) production of Into the Woods, held at Samsung Performing Arts Theater (S-PAT) on Thursday, July 31, the cast and creative team hinted at a version of the Sondheim-Lapine classic that isn’t just magical or whimsical, but deeply Filipino — a version that perhaps recognizes the slipperiness of story in a country where truth is malleable, history is often rewritten, and memory depends on who’s telling the story.

TGA’s Into the Woods opens on August 7 at the S-PAT, kickstarting a 24-show run that stretches through to the end of the month. The show sold out within two hours of tickets going live, prompting the company to add more dates due to the overwhelming demand.

The production boasts an all-Filipino, star-studded cast, with Lea Salonga in the lead as the Witch. She is joined by Arielle Jacobs, Eugene Domingo, Josh Dela Cruz, Nyoy Volante, Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante, Nic Chien, Joreen Bautista, Mark Bautista, Teetin Villanueva, Tex Ordoñez-De Leon, Sarah Facuri, Kakki Teodoro, Carla Guevara Laforteza, Jamie Wilson, and Rody Vera. Covers include Ima Castro, Niño Alejandro, Jillian Ita-As, and Jep Go.

“We really wanted to look at this through the lens of the Filipino experience,” said director Chari Arespacochaga. “The show is like a very smart, clever putting-together of fairytales. And as a people, we are storytellers. We build community by sharing stories. And I think that was our main sort of way into it.”

The company refused to offer spoilers — like specific staging choices or contextual shifts. Still, what little they shared was telling.

“I think, when you really look at the musical, the meat of the musical, it speaks to who we are, our history,” TGA artistic director Clint Ramos told Rappler in a separate interview. “So it was an easy translation. I think Filipinos will recognize themselves,” and maybe that’s the point.

Here is a show about fairytales, staged in a country where history itself is a contested narrative. What happens when you tell a story about storytelling in a place where stories are sometimes all that’s left — and even those can be forgotten?

Into the Woods has always been a story about stories.

A story about stories

Into the Woods is about the stories we tell ourselves, the structures we inherit, and how these shape us as human beings. The beloved musical by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine explore how characters’ choices create new narrative paths, and how these come with unforeseen consequences.

Into the Woods takes several well-loved and familiar fairytales — “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Rapunzel,” among others — and weaves them together into a single narrative, via a baker and his wife.

The Baker and Wife want a child but have been unable to conceive, due to a curse placed upon the Baker’s father’s house by a Witch (the original beginning of the Brothers Grimm’s “Rapunzel”). In order to break the curse, they must venture into the woods to fetch four items, and their search leads them to encounter the characters from our tales.

Act I concludes with the interwoven fairytales playing out the way we know them to.

But by Act II, the musical dismantles the fairytale logic, introducing grief, blame, loss, and community fracture. Here, theater breaks its own spell, inviting the audience to see how stories fail us, and how we must keep telling them anyway.

The titular Woods are, as Sondheim put it, “The all-purpose symbol of the unconscious, the womb, the past, the dark place where we face our trials and emerge wiser or destroyed.”

By describing the woods as the unconscious and a place of trial, Sondheim reveals that Into the Woods is not a fairytale, but a deconstruction of one — where archetypes are unmade, and happily-ever-afters are questioned, not promised.

This musical isn’t just a whimsical stage show — it interrogates narrative structure, consequence, and inheritance.

A Filipino wood

While the cast and creative team were tight-lipped about their reinterpretation of the beloved Sondheim-Lapine musical, one thing they repeated — dropped like breadcrumbs in a forest — was that this production grapples with “the Filipino condition.”

It’s a phrase that surfaced again and again in the press briefing. They wouldn’t say much more.

But what’s clear is this is no ordinary revival of a musical about wishes, but a reckoning with where those wishes lead when entangled in real-world hunger and family legacy.

Fairytales, like national myths, promise comfort, clarity, and moral order. They tell us that good is rewarded, evil is punished, and everything makes sense in the end. But what happens when the stories we inherit are incomplete or deliberately distorted?

In a country where “never again” is challenged by “never happened,” Into the Woods becomes more than a clever interweaving of familiar stories. It interrogates the cost of wishing, the price of forgetting, and the power of stories to either obscure or illuminate the truth.

As Lea Salonga noted, “Each historical period is going to inform the show — how it’s directed, how it’s staged, what the design is going to be.” This is what gives Into the Woods its staying power: it’s a show that grows up with its audience.

“Now in 2025,” she said, “it doesn’t seem like the world is very innocent at all… and so what does that mean?”

The stories may be familiar, but their meanings shift in the light of a changing world — and a changing Philippines.

If our forest is the Philippines, then is the Witch a villain, or a mother hardened by diaspora or state neglect? Is the Giant a fable-scale threat, or a metaphor for systemic violence — something so large and untraceable, it can crush lives without being named? And what of the Wolf?

And the Woods? According to Sondheim, the woods aren’t just a dark fairytale grove, but a place where rules break down. And, in the Filipino context, the rules have long been bent by power, silence, and forgetting.

Do the Woods represent a liminal space? Somewhere between history and collective forgetting, between overseas work and broken families, between truth and algorithm?

In this telling, the woods aren’t just the backdrop for a fable, but the terrain of memory and myth-making, where old stories are questioned, new ones are forged, and the next generation is always listening.

‘Children will listen’

At its core, Into the Woods isn’t just about desire or consequence, but about community responsibility. Songs like “No One Is Alone” and “Children Will Listen” shift the tone from individual yearning to collective reckoning. The questions are no longer: What do you want? What are you willing to pay? But instead: What stories do we leave behind? And what do they teach those who come next?

What tales are parents, teachers, and governments telling to justify harm? What parts of history are passed down, edited, or erased? When myth becomes memory, and memory becomes silence, storytelling becomes ethical.

As Lea Salonga explained to Rappler, “You have this character, the Witch, who is all about the truth, and all about being right. Not being nice. Not being good. Just being right.”

“And in the very finale of the show,” she continued, “she’s the one who cautions the audience, ‘How are you going to influence your children? Because the things that you tell your children, they will carry.’”

This ethical dilemma makes the show’s moral land heavily in the Philippine context. In choosing to restage Into the Woods in 2025, TGA’s production implicitly asks: What kind of future are we shaping, and with what stories? If we don’t confront what has been distorted or omitted, what ghosts will the next generation inherit?

Bringing these questions to life is a creative team as expansive and deliberate as the woods itself. At the helm is Chari Arespacochaga, joined by music director Gerard Salonga, with Ohm David on set design, Raven Ong on costumes, Cha See on lighting, and Megumi Takayama on sound. Under the artistic direction of Clint Ramos, the team includes Cecile Martinez, Manman Angsico, GA Fallarme, and Aina Ramolete. Together, they recast the fairytale’s familiar shadows through a Filipino lens.

For Ramos, the act of restaging Into the Woods is inseparable from questions of artistic inheritance and responsibility.

“Every artist that we engage with, we actually contractually obligate them to do master classes for free,” he shared during the press launch.

It’s not just about mounting a show — it’s about making sure the knowledge of how, gets passed on. “I think our goal really is, how we can expand the richness that we have,” he added.

In that way, TGA’s Into the Woods is both a revival, and a reminder that storytelling is never neutral. That who gets to tell the tale — and who gets to listen — shapes not just the ending, but also the beginning. In a nation still haunted by what’s been rewritten or silenced, this production insists: the next chapter starts with remembering. – Rappler.com