With a perfect cast, Broadway has an ‘Into the Woods’ for the ages

They’ve all been encouraged by an inspired director, Lear deBessonet, to bring the bravura. That impulse on other occasions might bend the theatrical arc toward camp. But for the brand of musical comedy that Sondheim and book writer James Lapine were after — a storybook world of out-of-control anxiety — some rib-tickling personal dazzle is absolutely the right way to go.

One after another, the members of the exceptional cast — Sara Bareilles, Phillipa Soo, Gavin Creel, Patina Miller, Brian d’Arcy James, Joshua Henry, and on and on — add funny new twists to fairy-tale characters old and completely new. There’s no one who doesn’t rise to this special occasion, the Broadway transfer of a concert version that originated earlier this year in the long-standing Encores series at City Center, the institution that birthed the 10,000-performance-plus revival of “Chicago.”

If you’ve never been to a production of “Into the Woods,” which premiered on Broadway in 1987, this would be the ideal place to start. If you have, this would be the perfect place to renew the acquaintance. The physical format is basic: an onstage orchestra more than a dozen strong, conducted by Rob Berman, communicating the whimsical texture of Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations; a simple set design by David Rockwell, of platforms in front of and behind the band, and birch trees that descend for the forest quests, and shimmer with Tyler Micoleau’s lighting as a Giant rattles the kingdom; and a cast, wittily costumed by Andrea Hood, delivering Lapine’s lines and Sondheim’s score with verve.

The program lists two sound designers, Scott Lehrer and Alex Neumann, which feels particularly apt, because the clarity with which Sondheim’s lyrics reach our ears is perhaps double the norm. Have you ever experienced what I call audibility fatigue at the theater — the feeling of exhausted defeat that sets in when you lose half the words in musical amplification issues or garbled vocal execution? The opposite occurs in the St. James: Sondheim’s poetry is rousingly conveyed, down to the last syllable of recited rhyme.

“Into the Woods” is one of the best known and most often performed musicals in the Sondheim canon, but it’s a family show only if you want to explain some of life’s complexities to the little ones afterward. Lapine and Sondheim devise a kingdom of wishers: a childless baker (d’Arcy James) and his wife (Bareilles); a brutalized Cinderella (Soo); a penniless homemaker (Aymee Garcia) and her son, Jack, of “Beanstalk” fame (Cole Thompson); a wizened witch (Miller) living under a curse. The writers tie up almost everything in a pretty bow when the wish list is filled by the end of Act 1…