“Scary is exciting” sings Little Red Riding Hood early in the first act of Into the Woods,just after she’s been rescued from the belly of a lascivious wolf. She then adds a little pearl of wisdom just acquired: “Nice is different than good.”

It is indeed, which everyone will learn in Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and book-writer James Lapine’s ferociously complicated, funny-sad morality tale for our age, or indeed any era. Will people ever stop wanting more and more and more? Probably not.

Into the Woods: Amy Lehpamer, Justin Smith and Carla Beard. Photo © David Kelly Photography

Into the Woods takes a journey into the messy reaches of desire and consequences, gathering up Cinderella, beanstalk-boy Jack, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and a Witch as cautionary examples. Their stories expand and twist around one another like tropical vines until there’s a Gordian knot of narrative with, at its centre, a baker, his wife and a witch.

That everyday couple greatly wishes to have a child but the Witch, who has an agenda of her own, has made the Baker barren (cue merry zaps to the gonads). Quests collide, at first with delightful results  and then disastrously. Act I ends on an exultant note, although cracks have started to appear. Happily ever after? Not really.

The contrast between the fortunes achieved in the first half and the hard-won enlightenment of the second is immense as death and disillusion stalk the dwindling band of characters. “Humans are expendable bugs,” says Ali McGregor’s take-no-prisoners Witch. It’s a view today’s environmentalists could agree with.

Into the Woods: Ali McGregor. Photo © David Kelly Photography

McGregor, in soaring voice, is at first a sly old termagant with the air of a decaying aristocrat, imperious and quite mad. Next she is a touching supplicant pleading with Rapunzel not to leave her and then a defiant woman who has lost her magic gifts, damaged but still standing. It’s a riveting performance.

Director (and Opera Queensland artistic director) Patrick Nolan’s large cast isn’t operating uniformly at this level but is powerful where it really counts. Justin Smith as Baker and Amy Lepahmer as Baker Wife infuse Into the Woods with flawed humanity. They want, they argue, they make questionable choices, they love, they suffer.

Deep into the second act Smith sings No More with a man he now knows to be his father (Kanen Breen) and asks how one manages to keep surviving and hoping in the face of disaster. Separately, Lepahmer’s Moments in the Woods tries to make sense of life’s curveballs. The songs are less well known than the climactic No One is Alone and Children Will Listen but their emotional punch is devastating.

Into the Woods: Carla Beard and Darcy Brown. Photo © David Kelly Photography

Also offering life lessons, Carla Beard is a vastly entertaining, disturbingly forward Little Red Riding Hood and the intelligent, forthright Cinderella is in the safest of hands with Nina Korbe, one of the glowing gems of Australian opera and in possession of serene stage presence. Tom Oliver is silly and sweet as the hapless Jack, a boy who needs a friend as settles on the cow Milky White for that role. Darcy Brown, also Cinderella’s Prince (“I was raised to be charming, not sincere”), is creepy as all get-out as the Wolf.

The production has managed, mostly, to combine operatic and music theatre voices successfully and it doesn’t hurt that McGregor and the multi-faceted Kanen Breen (a dryly witty Narrator and Mysterious Man) have for many moons worked with distinction on both sides of the divide.

Into the Woods: Kanen Breen. Photo © David Kelly Photography

This clutch of well-shaped performances carried Into the Woods through on opening night but the show bore traces of a bumpy and possibly too short path to the stage, particularly in terms of sound quality. Microphone mishaps, imbalance too often between pit and stage and some singers’ blurring when it came to Sondheim’s more fiendish flourishes took the shine off. On the plus side, musical director James Dobinson had at his disposal 29 players under the banner of Queensland Symphony Orchestra; a highly luxurious number.

One could wish Nolan had opted for a more harrowing push into the dark side in Act II. The extreme dichotomy between the halves of the show is somewhat softened by co-designers Elizabeth Gadsby and Charles Davis, whose elegant forest of hanging green tendrils has an inviting, mossy quality even when in a dilapidated state.

Gadsby and David also have a taste for glitter that rains frequently on the action. It looks gorgeous in the embrace of Alexander Berlage’s expert lighting, which creates a wonder of different hues that sparkle, enchant and keep the shivers too much at bay.

True, Into the Woods ends on the brink of optimism but it’s provisional, I think. Cinderella gets the last say and it’s with the phrase she first utters. “I wish.” Is she now sadder and wiser or is this a warning?

Sondheim is a unicorn of musical theatre whose works sit well in the repertoires of opera and theatre companies alike. Earlier this year State Opera South Australia staged its own new Into the Woods. In July next year OQ and Queensland Theatre Company reverse the roles they took on Into the Woods when QTC takes the lead on Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd – a firm fixture with opera companies – with OQ as co-producer. QTC’s artistic director Daniel Evans will direct.

Queensland Opera presents Into the Woods at the Glasshouse Theatre, QPAC until 21 November and at the Empire Theatre, Toowoomba, 3-4 December.