Dining Chicago

Scott J. Sumerak plays the giant-killing Jack and Kristen Leia Freilich his worried mother in Porchlight Music Theatre’s “Into the Woods.”

If you can’t summon up the $100 for top seats to Billy Elliot: The Musical, don’t despair, because there are other great musicals in town at a fraction of that price.

Porchlight Music Theatre’s “Into the Woods” may not have the dazzling dancing of the hot new show downtown, but it does have all the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning score and James Lapine’s delightful book, a cast of lovely singers and a fairy-tale plot that’s scarcely more of a fantasy than “Billy Elliot’s.”

A clever reworking of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, beginning with “Rapunzel,” whose tower imprisonment resulted from her mother’s craving for greens, “Into the Woods” features some of the best lyrics ever written about vegetables. As the witch tells it:

In the past, when your mother was with child, she developed an unusual appetite. She took one look at my beautiful garden and told your father that what she wanted more than anything in the world was

Greens, greens and nothing but greens:
Parsley, peppers, cabbages and celery,
Asparagus and watercress and
Fiddleferns and lettuce!

He said, “All right,”
But it wasn’t, quite,
’Cause I caught him in the autumn
In my garden one night!
He was robbing me,
Raping me,
Rooting through my rutabaga,
Raiding my arugula and
Ripping up my rampion….

(Are any local chefs cooking rampion?)

Intertwined in the story are the plots of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood” — why are these creepy tales considered appropriate for children? — and in the second act, the even darker and more musically beautiful story of what came after the happily-ever-afters. “Into the Woods” is Sondheim at his best, full of atonal dissonance that somehow becomes incredible music.

This would be a magical production even without the unusually nice use of a half-moon-shaped video backdrop that enhances the show without distracting from its intimacy. (I suspect the trend toward video screens on stages will become tiresome all too soon, but here it works.)

Director L. Walter Stearns and Musical Director Eugene Dizon auditioned some 365 performers to cast this show, and they found some incredible singers (which “Billy Elliot” does not have, by the way) — most notably Bethany Thomas as the witch. Thomas may not metamorphose into a great beauty at the end of Act I, but that’s forgotten as soon as she opens up into Act II’s “Witch’s Lament.”

We also see exceptional performances from Scott J. Sumerak as an eager Jack and Brianna Borger as the matter-of-fact Baker’s Wife. Veteran local actor Henry Michael Odum is fabulously frenetic and richly voiced as the Narrator and Mysterious Man. Cameron Brune makes a full-throated and dangerous Wolf and Kristen Leia Freilich creates a wonderfully worried Jack’s Mother.

Unlike the sometimes hot, sometimes not visiting Broadway biggies downtown, Porchlight Music Theatre is a local gem, and if you haven’t seen one of their shows, you owe it to yourself to go.