Witch's Entrance Lyrics - Into the Woods Cast

"Witch's Entrance," from the Into the Woods soundtrack, is a storytelling song that discloses history behind the curse of one Witch upon the other's family of the Baker. This tune captures the lives of the characters as they get entwined in the musical web, full of desires, consequents, and the interlacing fairy tales woven by Stephen Sondheim.

The desire of what happened to the Baker's mother during her pregnancy was followed by the story of the Witch, which then brought her to steal the cream-greens from the value-infested garden of the Witch. Not just the Witch's attitude and her affinity toward nature and magic, the garden was also full of different kinds of greens, which reflected power. So it sets up an outward series of ripples from the theft perpetrated by the Baker's father: the themes introduced during the course of the narrative, such as "The Witch's Quarrel with Her Neighbors," "The Witch's War on Innocents," etc.

The story of the song provides the perfect basis for the musical: one in which dark matters are intermixed with a fair amount of humor and cleverness. First and foremost, there is the Witch herself, who is both wronged and vengeful, because her very character is an essay by itself. Her response to the theft—a decision to take the Baker's unborn sister—marks the moral gray areas in which action is possible and the boundaries between right and wrong are blurred in the world of Into the Woods.

Further development of the story then unfolds as a further allusion to the beans that the Baker's father had stolen from the Witch is tied to the more general plot of magic beans in fairy tales, where unforeseen consequences inevitably emerge. This at once foreshadows a shared fate of the characters and the major, undeniable role that these beans play in the central unfolding drama. More importantly, of course, her curse that creates the family tree of the Baker to be barren is an analogy to a lasting effect of an action, just as how consequences are inherited. That then leads Baker into interweaving his fate with the other characters in a quest that will set the human characteristic agog: desire, morality, and, at last, understanding of happiness and fulfillment.

"The Witch's Entrance" is really more than a monologue by a character—it serves as a storytelling device: It threads the basis of it all through Into the Woods. It leads on to the audience through questions about human desires and the price that humans more often pay for said desires, plus the many nuances through which one can understand humankind's many diverse emotions and reasons. Sondheim created such a song that describes the beautiful multifaceted world in which fairy tales are no easy object of children's stories but tender, intricate explorations of humankind's many and sundry emotions, and reasons.