Witches Can Be Good :: Meryl Streep on 'Into the Woods'

Meryl Streep is easily the most acclaimed actress in the world, as well as one of the few actresses over a certain age that remains a box office draw. Few knew, though, that she sings. But those with long memories will recall that at the age of 28 she starred in a Broadway version of the Kurt Weill musical "Happy End." "But the performance from the show comes from Meryl Streep..." wrote Clive Barnes in reviewing the show in the New York Times in 1977. "She is a knock-out. Making no attempt to imitate (Lotte) Lenya's growl, she sings and acts with uttermost sweetness and enormous style."

Cut forward nearly 40 years and Streep is singing again, this time the words and music of Stephen Sondheim in the Disney film version of "Into the Woods" that opens on Christmas Day. Streep has sung before on film -- a musical number in 1992's "Death Becomes Her" and in the 2008 film adaptation of the ABBA hit "Mamma Mia," -- but her latest role, as a craggy Witch in search of long-lost beauty, gives her the opportunity to sing songs by Sondheim, Broadway's leading composer/lyricist.

Bringing Her Voice Back

In the film, directed by Rob Marshall ("Chicago"), Streep plays the catalyst to this original fairy tale, one that ties together the stories of Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) and the Beanstallk, the Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp) and the musical's invention of a childless baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt).

Yet despite her acclaim, Streep remained humble about landing the role of The Witch.

"Why did they want me?" she asked. "That's why I was amazed that when Rob said that they were putting this together and they wanted me to be The Witch. It's just a great piece of American's theater, and to imagine that we could make a film of it and that I could sing this music is really a privilege, absolutely. And, (it's) a very high bar to come up to. I thought, 'Well, okay, man. Yes, I'm gonna do this.'"

It had been six years since Streep last sang professionally, though her background allowed her to call upon time-tested theatrical techniques she learned early in her career, not just the skills acquired in her last musical movie.

"I really worked very hard to bring my voice back. I used to have a good voice and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale (Drama School, which she attended in the early 1970s). All the things (I learned) in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that.

"Like if you stand upside down... ," she explained. "Well, I'm not gonna do it, but it really is good. Gets everything flowing. To serve [Marshall], Sondheim and his beautiful music, that was sort of our grail. We really all felt that (it was) imperative to do it as well as we possibly could. I remember how to meld the technique with the abandon that you need. There's certainly that in both of the big songs that I sing that I found myself just singing them over and over without investing because you make a lot of assumptions. You think you know this music until you really look at the sheet music... In Sondheim's mind there are little sort of elisions, things that arrest you and make you really listen harder. It's all precise and deliberately there. So we had to be exact with all of that."

Getting Emotive

Sondheim's lyrics and music are so pointed that it became too emotional for Streep to perform them at times. "I found it unbearable when I allow the story to meet the music. I couldn't sing it." (An example: 'Stay With Me,' the plea that the Witch sings to Rapunzel).

"I got so upset and, you know, you can't sing when you're upset. You can't sing when you're crying. You get all congested and disgusting. So it was just a measure of finding a way to control the emotion. Use it, funnel it, make it ride on the sound."

In addition to singing, The Witch has a rap number which dates back to the stage musical. "When Steve wrote that, did they even call it a rap then?" Streep asked. "Like, who are his influences? Ice Cube or where are we now, in '87? Who would it have been in '87? Run DMC. Okay. Well, we'll have to ask Steve. He's not here today."

Rap questions aside, Streep had seen the original Broadway cast perform "Into the Woods" in their day. More recently, she did her best to avoid previous productions, but the original was hard to shake.

"I had seen Bernadette [Peters] do The Witch 20, maybe 30 years ago, a long time ago. I remember it vividly. It just was etched in my soul. I came out, everybody says, 'Oh, Sondheim's music is unsingable,' or whatever. 'It's too complicated.' But those melodies lived in my head for, well, years after hearing the musical. I didn't buy the album, but it was in my head, do you know what I mean? And so I think I wanted to just find my own inner Witch, and I didn't even think about copying. Usually I steal from somebody... Usually I steal from men, because nobody notices when you steal stuff."

Themes That Resonate

In many fairy tales, a witch is a villain who manipulates the heroes. Snow White's witch tricks her into eating a poison apple, and Hansel & Gretel's witch lures children into her candy house. "Into the Woods"' Witch is quite honest about her mission. She needs the ingredients for her spell, and she is also Rapunzel's protective mother.

"I felt that the themes, everybody's story line has something that resonates in a modern heart. I mean the issues that The Witch has -- the idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons -- felt reasonable. So she, this little blossom of a girl [she] loves above everything, that she never even dreamed and wants to protect her from all the bad things in the world, that's something that every parent understands. And she takes it to an extreme, but this is a fairy tale.

"That resonates," she continues, "and frankly, would you let your daughter go out with Billy Magnussen (one of the film's Princes)? On that horse? That wild horse? I definitely felt in singing 'Stay With Me,' I understood. Don't you know what's out there in the world? Someone has to shield you from that.

"The other thing is that if you raise children, you forget what age they are. I mean, you don't literally forget; but you treat a 13-year-old like she's 10, and there's a big difference in those three years, and they can't stand it. They want to be treated like they're 17 when they're 13. And sometimes you can't help thinking of them as if they were 10, or 10 months old, because it's all so recent, right? So we do over protect sometimes."

Streep returned to address what attracted her to appearing in the film. "It was the music. That was the main thing, because the music is the engine through which all these stories are told, and it's sort of a wave that you can surf, you know. When you're an actor and there's no music, you have to sort of bring it all yourself. I remember when I was in my only Broadway musical ("Happy End"). Sometimes you come to the theater 10 weeks in and it's a Tuesday and you're hung over or whatever from the day off, and you just don't feel like it. You're up in the thing, putting on the makeup, and suddenly through the box comes the overture, and the sound of the music and it lifts you. I know that even Sondheim said he was just so thrilled because he'd only heard it recorded with a 16-piece orchestra in the pit of a Broadway show. He'd never heard it with a 64-piece symphony musicians."

Into the Woods is in theaters.