‘Moments in the Woods’: Gay cruising, Into the Woods and AIDS

Abstract

Using drag performance as a tool to recuperate the meaning of queer subtext and readings, this article explores thematic intersections between staging coded queerness and the offstage queer practice of cruising in James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical Into the Woods. Though the temporal correlation of the musical’s 1987 Broadway production and the AIDS crisis raises the stakes of comparisons between cruising practices and the setting of the musical, this article does not aim to argue a subjectification of Into the Woods as AIDS parable; rather it asserts the necessity of performances that deliberately queer the canon.