You May Know What You Want

Basically Into the Woods is a huge retelling of a bunch of fairy tales all twisted up together. All the stories take place in one magical forest, and there's only two adulterous princes and one cursed witch for all of the characters to share. Cinderella, Jack, Red Ridinghood, and Rapunzel all have something that the witch needs to reverse the curse her mother put on her, so she sends The Baker off in search of them in return for lifting the curse she put on his family for stealing the beans that caused her curse in the first place.

Act One ends pretty much with the Happily Ever Afters that the Grimm Brothers left us with.  Jack and his mother have plenty of money from the gold-egg-laying-goose that he stole from the giants, Cinderella and Rapunzel have their respective princes, the Baker has a baby, and the witch is pretty again (think Tangled).

Sondheim's special twist really comes into play in Act Two.  Apparently Happily Ever After actually only lasts for like, a week.  Then the money isn't enough, the Prince loses interest, the baby is a loud smelly pain in the butt, marriage is boring, and giants come down for revenge.  Oh and everybody dies, except like five characters.

The whole show is really just making a point about greed being part of human nature. Everybody gets exactly what they wished for, but then its not enough. To top it off, when everything blows up in their face, nobody wants to admit that they screwed up so they go in circles playing the blame game (literally there's an entire song about it).

If you want specifics, check out wikipedia.org. There's literally a summary that's like four pages long.

Even better, check out the original Broadway cast production.. It runs about two and a half hours but it is definitely worth a watch. Below is a slideshow featuring the main characters of the production.