@ Edinburgh Playhouse, until Sat 1 Aug 2015

Bruno Bettelheim, the renowned child psychologist, knew a thing or two about fairy tales. He said that the child reader “intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal they are not untrue.” Today’s tots are probably more familiar with the Gruffalo and Isaac the endangered polar bear, but the best traditional tales have a visceral, haunting quality that taps into our fears and phobias quite unlike anything else.

When Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Into the Woods in the mid-1980s (James Lapine wrote the book) it was seen by many as a metaphor for  the AIDS epidemic. In our own time the news headlines are riddled with fear-inducing stuff about suicide bombers and high school shootings. Why is the world so full of bad stuff?

Sondheim conjures up a dark world best summarised as being lost in the forest – an uncomfortable place to be as any number of Nordic noirs tell us. There is a host of familiar tales told here simultaneously (Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Ridinghood among them) in what’s perhaps Sondheim’s most complex and demanding work. The Edinburgh Playhouse Stage Experience is the flagship of its community outreach programme. Choosing the sung-through Into the Woods to celebrate the programme’s 10th anniversary is a bold and brave step on the parts of producer Adam Knight and director Peter Corry. They have to be commended for it.

Too often in large, non-professional productions of this kind the whole cast seems to be on the stage the whole time, which just gets in the way of the plot, not to mention spoiling the mood. It has to be said that here Sondheim’s wonderful lyrics with their clever internal rhymes are often lost as the singers compete with the orchestration. Many of the individual roles are excellent, however. Olivia Hemmati is a knockout Little Red Ridinghood, Gordon Horne is in fine fettle playing Cinderella’s Prince and the big bad Wolf, and Ross Tucker is a bell-voiced Jack (of beanstalk fame), as is Megan Travers as his comically nagging mum.

It is wonderful to see Sondheim on an Edinburgh stage. Too many modern musicals are brash and slick and too quickly forgotten. As one of the characters in Into the Woods states “nice is different from good.”