"Children Will Listen" - thoughts on Sondheim

Anyone who has sung a Sondheim musical knows he packs a ton of words into a small amount of space. I think so many words are thrown at you, the audience member, that you never really have time to take in the lesson. It moves the plot forward, you feel like you learned the lesson, but really it takes quite a few passes through the song to really get what was going on. I can't help but think his training under Leonard Bernstein lead him in that direction.

"Children Will Listen" closes the musical Into the Woods. It opened in the Martin Beck Theater, November 5, 1987 and ran for 764 performances after its run of 50 performances in San Diego. It has toured, been revived, and it keeps coming back. I loved working on Into the Woods any time I ran into it, but often wondered if it was just someone's way of deconstructing another beautiful memory - fairy tales. Perhaps not. Act One throws a bunch of fairy tale characters together, all on separate quests - quests about what THEY want. The Baker and his Wife want a child, Jack wants to buy his cow back, Cinderella wants her Prince, and Little Red Riding Hood needs to kill off a Wolf. Act Two takes those actions a step further and illustrates the consequences of the choices each character has made. After all, for every action there is a reaction and in life when we want something we often take something away from someone else in order to get it.

So...we get to the end of the musical, after Act II has shown us what happens after "Happily Ever After" is achieved, and we see lives very different from their intended ending. The Baker, with a baby in his arms, is terrified of his life before him as his wife has been taken away by the giant that Jack has unleashed. He is scared and afraid and unsure of how he will ever raise the child alone. The Baker's wife returns once more, as a spirit, encouraging the Baker to teach his child the lesson they missed through retelling their story: every action has a consequence. Be careful what you do, what you say, and be careful of what you wish for. You may just get it, but maybe not the way you intended to receive it.

Just a snippet of the lyrics:

[BAKER'S WIFE]

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
Co learn what to be
Careful before you say "Listen to me"
Children will listen

...and below a clip of Bernadette Peters, from the Broadway Cast, singing this song. However, she played the WITCH and not THE BAKER'S WIFE, so this wasn't actually her song!