Ortiz, 38, grew up in Dallas and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the playful mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, given the season what it was, filling in for three performances. as that show’s main puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” featuring a cow in the shape of a statue.
Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to Washington, DC when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the videotape of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow – then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it by watch it so many times.”
More recently, in the 2014 film version of Rob Marshall (starring James Corden as the baker, Emily Blunt as the baker’s wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the witch), a real cow played the cow—not a casting decision likely to be mimicked. through many stage productions.
Long before that, however, an idea was seeping into Hollywood that could permanently change the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a great guy.” But Henson died in 1990.
Five years later, the idea went through with Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the film are said to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a few reads with a few frenzied star casts (one had Robin Williams as the baker, Cher as the witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters), Sondheim writes, the project was killed off in a studio shake-up.
It’s easy to imagine a surfeit of puppet Milky Whites, the worth of an entire generation, who would have blossomed on stage if that movie had taken place. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for and that Ortiz designed and that operates Kanagawa will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.
Lean forward and look into her eyes. There’s no doubt about it: she’s real.
