The fairy tale forest of “Into the Woods” has suddenly grown a lot thicker. This 1987 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, which stirs up the shadows of classic bedtime stories, was never what you’d call uncrowded. But Timothy Sheader’s overreaching revival, which opened on Thursday night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, has added a whole new bramble of interpretive undergrowth.

It’s not just Little Red Ridinghood and other wayward progeny of the Brothers Grimm who lose their way in the leafy, highly picturesque maze that has been assembled by the designers John Lee Beatty and Soutra Gilmour. Theatergoers too may find themselves courting blindness from trying to see the forest for the trees.

Whether reinventing a creepy Victorian horror story (“Sweeney Todd”) or considering the mating habits of swinging singles (“Company”), Mr. Sondheim has never been one for easy happy endings. And more than any of his other works, “Into the Woods” explores and debunks our hunger for such tidy, upbeat conclusions. Still, it breaks my heart to chalk up this production as another example of thwarted hopes.