Great shows are continually reborn. And Stephen Sondheim and James Laine's "Into the Woods" is a great musical, witty and wise, with the broad compassion and complexity of a Shakespearean comedy.

But it didn't necessarily follow I was eager to see it, even at Carnegie Mellon, because expectation can set you up for disappointment. At the last minute, I squeezed into one of the last available seats Saturday afternoon -- and I was enchanted, as would be Sondheim himself, or you, if you can still get a ticket.

One caveat: It's long, nearly three hours. If that's a problem, leave the seat free for someone with more stamina.

Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Lapine (book, with thanks to the Brothers Grimm) create a perfect Act 1 musical by wittily interweaving the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, plus Rapunzel and others, with their invented tale of a childless baker and his wife. Add Sondheim's clever, melodic score and you have an 85-minute musical comedy that's just about perfect.

But along the way there are dark elements. These come to the fore in Act 2, when the natural human inability to settle for contentment and the arrival of a justifiably anguished giant drive the story beyond "happy ever after" to a post-apocalyptic world of danger and struggle.

Forced beyond their classic stories, the characters have to adapt or die -- as some will do, anyway. This is the world of AIDS, terrorism, financial meltdown and nuclear threat, a post-narrative world where the survivors turn on their narrator and kill him, leaving them to invent their own story -- just as in real life.

If it sounds grim, it is, but it is also funny and most of all Grimm, which is to say, consistent with the deep truths that give the classic fairy tales the psychological depth of myth. There are places in Act 2 that drive me to tears, as when the Baker meets his dead father or Cinderella sings "Mother Cannot Guide You." As they all sing, "Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood," indeed.

And as the anatomically correct wolf, the sexual initiation in Red's adventures and the frank libido of the Princes all suggest, these fairy tales aren't for small children.

But along the way to its assertion of our mutual interdependence, it is endlessly inventive and fun.

Kudos to guest director Kent Gash, CMU '82, who treats this masterpiece with robust affection, unafraid to tweak it. In contrast to the Broadway original, he splits the Narrator from the mysterious Old Man, has an actor play Jack's cow, adds touches from Monty Python and even suggests something between Cinderella's Prince and his Steward.

Thomas Douglas leads a big, capable orchestra. Scott Tedmon-Jones' set makes clever use of projections, and Loren Shaw's costumes are elaborate. This is a big production.

I can single out only a few performers from this essentially ensemble creation. Jon-Michael Reese's Baker is a sweet Everyman and Steffi Garrard perfectly catches Cinderella's perplexity (itself very Shakespearean). Zachary Berger doubles vividly as Cinderella's Prince and that Wolf, Mathenee Stefan Treco's Old Man is amazingly physical, and Amanda Jane Cooper is deliciously droll as Red. The Witch, Baker's Wife, Jack, Jack's Mother ... this is a team without a weak spot.

And talk about prescience: Am I the only one to think Kyle Beltran's Narrator is more than a suggestion of our president-elect?