By Helen Musa

In what promises to be a tour de force performance, Canberra pianist Caleb Campbell will be the solo accompanist and musical director in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, coming up for just two nights as an ACT Hub fundraiser. 

“No grand sets, no spectacle, just the truth behind the fairytales,” director Jarrad West promises of their “unplugged” version of Sondheim’s wry take on tales such as Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Jack and The Beanstalk and Rapunzel. 

The complex story follows a baker and his wife, who want a child; Cinderella, who wishes to attend the King’s Festival; and Jack, who wishes his cow would give milk. When the Baker and his wife learn that they can’t have a child because of a witch’s curse, the two set off on a journey to break the curse. So far so good, but in Act II, things unravel.

Replacing an entire orchestra is no mean feat as I find when I catch up with Campbell, who tells me it’s always difficult to play a reduction (that’s an arrangement for fewer instruments).

“An instrument like the flute, being a flute, means you have to somehow make that work on a piano,” he says, adding that in this show the hardest of all is the trumpet fanfare that signals Cinderella and Rapunzel’s princes. 

“Piano can’t be bold and brassy, so I have to make a more delicate signalling for the characters,” he says.

In recent years, Campbell has played in shows that are either folky or jazzy, but Sondheim definitely falls into the classical world.

“The score may be stripped back,” he says, “but I still have 350 pages to work through.” The Into the Woods opening prologue alone occupies 99 pages of the score. 

This reduction, of course, is not done by just anyone. There are officially licensed reductions for different instruments and in this case it is stipulated that its musical director must be a professional.

Campbell is just that. A graduate in jazz piano from the ANU School of music, he teaches music at Burgmann Anglican School, but by night has been music director for many shows in town, not least Dramatic Productions’ 2025 staging of Come From Away.

The production will feature a local cast of identities, including director West and Louiza Blomfield as the Baker and his Wife, Kara Murphy as Cinderella, Deb O’Toole as the Witch, Katie Lis as Red Riding Hood, Dave Collins as Jack, and Pippin Carroll as both the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince.

The vision for the production is stripped back, but not to the point where it becomes a concert. There’ll still be costumes, supervised by Carroll, and West himself is looking after sets and props.

Into The Woods, ACT Hub, Kingston, May 29-30.