Tonight when the clock strikes 12:00 AM it will literally be the last midnight for Tony Award-winning actress Patina Miller. For come tomorrow at 8:00 PM the first performance of Into the Woods at the Hollywood Bowl will begin. Miller is playing the Witch in the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical which will continue there through Sunday.
Miller won her Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical for the Broadway revival of Pippin. She won for the role as the Leading Player – the same role that garnered Ben Vereen a Tony Award in the original production.
But Miller hasn’t been on Broadway since her run in Pippin ended in 2014.
“To be honest I haven’t been back on stage because I’ve been doing Madam Secretary for the past five years,” she says by phone earlier this month. “That was a blessing to go into another medium that I hadn’t done before. That’s the honest truth. And I also had a child. I’ve been taking this time – she’s almost two, to be in motherhood and experience this. It’s the newest thing in my life.”
Miller admits to missing the stage so when the opportunity to play The Witch in Into the Woods came her way, it was irresistible.
“Knowing the original and listening to the soundtrack and being a Sondheim-head,” she reveals, “I think Into the Woods happens to be one of his most beautiful works. I think the witch is super-complicated. It’s one of those roles where I get to roll up my sleeves and dig into this. Now that I’m a mother I’ll understand her and the show in a different way. The message in the piece is really beautiful. You can take what you want from it, but as a mother it means a lot to me.”
Her experience as a mother these past two years gives her more compassion for the witch and her journey.
“I get wanting to protect Rapunzel. I get wanting to keep your baby locked away from the world. As a society, as world, as a country, there’s a lot of bad stuff that as a parent you want to protect your children from and what does that make you do? I keep reading Into the Woods over and over again to see how we can make this relevant for the time. I don’t think we have to work that hard because the piece lends itself to what’s going on right now.”
While the witch is usually seen as the evil character in most stories, Miller agrees with Bernadette Peters, the actress who played The Witch on Broadway, that the witch is the voice of reason.
“She is the truth-teller. She has all the wisdom. She’s teaching the lessons. She sings ‘I’m the witch, you’re the world.’ You think I’m the bad one? You’re all liars and thieves! She’s pushing everyone to get the things she wants. She has selfish reasons to get what she wants, but she’s also trying to save the kingdom.”
Part of that truth-telling comes in the pivotal song, “Last Midnight.” This is the moment where the witch has to challenge the other characters and come to terms with her own decisions.
“It’s a warning,” Miller says of the song. “She’s been warning them all through the show. One midnight. Two midnights. Up until this point everybody has been tested on will and how they will survive. It’s not a F-U to them, but a warning. You’ve had to want what you want. I plan to attack it the only way I know how, with honesty and truth.”
In August of 2018, Miller posted to her Facebook account “If it’s both terrifying and amazing, then you should definitely pursue it.” No doubt putting together this insanely complicated show in three works qualifies.
“Yes God it does!” (She lets out a beautifully infectious laugh.) “I’ve never done something so fast, so challenging in my life. This is going to be a whirlwind, but I think it’s going to be fantastic. It’s great to throw yourself into the work. This is really difficult material and you want to get it right. These are all characters you know and love and three-dimensional characters that have a life and a quality to them. It’s exciting and thrilling and amazing.”
There are so many ways in which any musical, but Into the Woods in particular, can go wrong. Miller both understands and accepts the challenge of getting it right and why the entire company must do so.
“When you step back and examine what the creators are trying to say, it is a comedy. But there’s so much darkness under the comedy. We’re talking witches, ghosts, giants and wolves, but they are metaphors for life and how chaotic this world can be. The thing you think you are doing right by trying to protect your children isn’t doing them any good because things will happen anyway. What this music requires and what the pieces requires is for people to sort of think through all of that and get under the surface.
“Just to play the witch as a villain is not interesting. I get the witch. She wants to be beautiful and accepted in a world that has told her she isn’t those things and she wants to be perfect for her daughter.”
As if on cue, it was time for her to go back to her own daughter, Emerson Harper Mars. It seems as though the last midnight had chimed for our interview as well.
Into The Woods is being performed at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Main Photo: Patina Miller as “The Witch,” Shanice Williams as “Little Red” in “Into the Woods” photo by Craig T. Mathew and Greg Grudt/Mathew Imaging/Courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association
Update: This post has been updated to include a photo from the Hollywood Bowl production of “Into the Woods”