A figure dressed in a tan suit scrawled with storybook quotes saunters onto a dark stage. The student pit orchestra gives them a thumbs up, and Claire Carducci, our narrator, takes their cue to begin. After all, this story is not about them.
The Narrator opens their book and begins their story as all good storytellers do: “Once upon a time…”
Away from the far-off kingdom, in our own Eldred Theater, worked a first-time stage manager, an intrepid director, a mischievous narrator, two Prop Siblings and, of course, a cow as white as milk—Milky White.
Footlighters set out to put on their 2026 spring semester musical “Into the Woods.” Stephen Sondheim’s musical blends “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Jack and the Beanstalk,” to a new story about, well, stories. After a cursed witch (Katie Frick) places a curse on the home of a baker (Austin Kennedy) and his wife (Natalia Stojkovic) to be barren, the couple are thrust into the land of stories to write their own supposed happy ending. They must find “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold,” to be blessed with a child. Along the path, they meet Cinderella (Shareen Chahal), Little Red Riding Hood (Maya Sumagin), Rapunzel (Evie Oehlers) and Jack (Henry Senra), each on their way to follow their own wishes.
Director Cora Donoghue had one true wish. “I wanted a really good Milky White,” she said about the cow. It is a running joke around theater spaces that one of the weirdest aspects of “Into the Woods” to nail is Milky White. Sondheim is notorious for having difficult timing, pushing the limits of vocal ranges and having huge overlapping ensemble numbers—all elements which are present within “Into the Woods”—and yet, it is the cow that makes internet listicles. At best, these low budget Milky Whites are a person in a cow onesie, and at worst, they are hardly cow-shaped at all. Imagine a box, with a too long neck and too round face, covered in a white sheet. Worse still, there is the nightmare fuel that is a person painted white, balancing on short stilts and hardly managing to crawl on all fours. It is not hard to see why Donoghue wanted to get this right. “There’s so many hilarious images of bad Milky Whites, but I wanted to not have Milky White be the butt of a joke in that oh, look bad cow,” Donoghue said. “It’s a funny show, but I wanted that to be a little more serious.”
Often, a bad Milky White is shorthand for saying a production of “Into the Woods” was low-budget or otherwise low-effort. It is a hard task to pull off, but when a production can get it right, it lends real legitimacy to their story. Only dedicated artists would aim to perfect the cow. No one is expecting a real cow to walk across the stage, but a good Milky White should feel magical. Footlighter’s puppet, articulate and played as a real character, feels straight out of a story book. The final Milky White was heavily inspired by the 2022 Broadway run’s puppet. White papier-mâché ribs strung together on wire make the puppet fluid, while doubling to give the cow her emaciated look. The plastic rodeo cow head is poseable and reacts with the puppeteer, but the tail hangs limp, keeping her sad.
Cora Donoghue got her wish: “Everything still turned out very magical how I had hoped it would with the limited resources that we have as a student club.”
Echoing Donoghue’s desire to have a good cow, Prop Master Phoenix Hammond saw the now defunct tumblr account @lowbudgetmilkywhites and said their goal was “…don’t end up on that.” Prop Masters Hammond and Kennedy Wolf, aka the second-year “Prop Siblings,” have worked on every Footlighters’ show together, amounting to four shows. For nine hours every week, the pair worked on props for the show, with about 50% of their time going to the one Milky White prop. Wolf graciously gave up the calculations to ensure the parts actually fit to Hammond, and the pair worked together to cut, glue and papier-mâché to no end.
Though the Prop Siblings toiled away in their workshop in the Eldred basement, the puppet was not ready until a week before the show. Still, rehearsals must go on. Hammond would give notes on how to imagine the cow, while Su did his best spatial approximation.
Once the Baker and his wife retrieve their four colorful items, the witch instructs them to feed them to the cow. Which is, admittedly, difficult to do without a prop cow. Of the situation, Su said, “On stage, people kept getting confused and tried to feed her from the wrong end.” He would tell his fellow cast members, “No, she’s here. She’s facing here. You can’t do that.” This too was straightened out, due in large part to being able to sparingly rehearse with the cow.
A week before the show, Connor Su met the Milky White puppet he would bring to life on stage. “I was ecstatic,” Su said, and who wouldn’t be when meeting the prodigal cow? However, with a real (fake) cow in his hands, new doubts rolled in.
“Am I gonna have to change everything completely? Is it gonna be good at all? Is it gonna end up being terrible and I’ll have to scrap it?” thought Su, “But it ended up being really, really great.” Milky White was here in all her bright white, emaciated, weak-legged glory.
She then immediately broke. Heavy prop cow in hand, Hammond made the treacherous walk from Eldred Hall to Haydn Hall through a windstorm. Milky White suffered a devastating loss along the way. “We were able to get Milky White for one rehearsal, and then whenever they were bringing Milky White over, the butt of the cow flew off in the wind,” Stage Manager Peyton Scheeler said. She describes the rest of the scene with the intensity of a thriller. Panicked cast members, heartbroken crew and, of course, a crumbling cow. “Milky White could not leave the building,” Scheeler deadpanned. Footlighters takes this cow extremely seriously.
The cow breaking did, however, have one benefit. Milky White had a weight problem. I’ll let the narrator narrate the scene, “There was one rehearsal where poor Connor had to hold her with no legs, and his little arms were shaking.” For those uninitiated, the opening for “Into the Woods” is almost 14 minutes long. That is 14 minutes of Su holding up a cow with little to no support. Milky White was in need of improvement. However, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and you certainly can’t make a working prop cow without losing a few body parts. By opening night, Milky White was back with new and improved legs.
A good puppeteer does not feel like a separate character, they feel like an extension of their role. Su disappears into it. Keeping with Donoghue’s quest to have a solid Milky White, he dedicated a lot of time to the cow. Carducci recalled her notes as follows. “Connor, can you react as Milky White to these things? You are the cow,” Donoghue said. This general guidance over direct instruction led to such beautiful moments as Su dancing through the song “It Takes Two.” “He just was on stage and was bored and started bopping along.” Carducci said, “And then Cora was like, Yes, I love that. That’s so funny. Please keep doing that.”
These improvisational bits are funny, but more importantly, they feel natural. When Jack has to sell Milky White, she may not be able to fully comprehend the stakes, but she does understand something. Su mirrors the prop cow’s morose head tilt, showing mock concern. In a further sad moment, when Milky White passes, Su simply walks off stage, and the audience sits with the harrowing loss. Milky White is more than just a quippy character. “You’re here to help tell the story,” said Su. “You can’t do that if you’re treating this role as a throwaway gag.” Every papier-mâché bone of Milky White is full of intention.
As the show went on, Milky White became quite unstable. “She was very accordion-like,” Wolf said. By the end of the show’s run, she was held together by zip ties and a prayer, literally. “The props people were fixing the puppet really frantically,” Carducci said, “and a bunch of us were standing at the puppet, and we had our hands on it.” Though the efficacy of the crowd prayer is dubious at best, the zip ties were absolutely essential. By Hammond’s estimate, Milky White was “roughly 50% zip ties.” To be blunt, the fate of Milky White was brutal. “Hammer,” Wolf said, with a sinister grin. I’ll let Donoghue elaborate, “[The cast] destroyed Milky White as soon as the last show was over, because this thing has caused us so much pain.”
The End.