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A heart-pounding soundtrack to Sweeney Todd on Broadway

A heart-pounding soundtrack to Sweeney Todd on Broadway

 


There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Dwell in it, grumbles stone-faced Sweeney Todd, after enthusiastic sailor Anthony tells him about his return to London. Their conversation is the premiere of Sweeney Todd’s highly anticipated Broadway revival: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, at the Lunt-Fontanneet, especially with Times Square just outside, the most relevant. The large black pits nearby, but were all magpie-eyed Anthonys. There’s not enough scowl, not enough squirt of blood red enough to quell a theater full of people hungry for this new production of Stephen Sondheim’s beloved horror operetta, starring the pop-classic superstar Josh Groban as Sweeney and Tony Award winner Annaleigh Ashford as her owner, Mrs. Lovett. A twenty-six-person orchestra plays like mad under the stage, but the audience, on the verge of hysteria from the crowd, provides its own dynamic, screaming before Sweeney’s razor ever catches the light.

We sit looking down at the underside of a large bridge, a huge brick archway taking up most of the scene. Lighting designer, Natasha Katz, makes night in this realm of shadow deeper with mist and moonlight where the mud larks go, those who search the banks of the Thames, in search of wrecks for sale. The director, Thomas Kail, and his choreographer, Steven Hoggett, start the show by giving the impression that the whole materializes from darkness. Witness the story of Sweeney Todd, the company sings, pulling Sweeney himself off the ground and hurling him towards us. His white face and scruffy beard make him look like something the mud larks fished out of the river.

Sweeney is a nightmarish barber who slaughters his clients, sometimes for good reason, sometimes out of sheer murderous exuberance. Mrs. Lovett adores him, not least because he’s useful for her pie-making business: corpses slide off her barber chair, down a chute, and into her bakery. (Meat is expensive, she explains, and those pussies are fast.) The grim, uplifting, Tony Award-winning 1979 musical with music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler has was inspired by a 1970 play by Christopher Bond, which fleshed out an iconic figure in the Victorian penny-dreadful tradition. Each production contains the flexibility of raw material dough. You can tap it (John Doyles small cast, bedroom-sized iteration, from 2005); you can push it (the 2017 Tooting Arts Clubs production, which crammed audiences into a small, purpose-built pie shop); you can even score it with your script in hand (the 2014 New York Philharmonics concert version). It still works. That’s the thing with English music hall entertainment, isn’t it, my love? He will do with whatever you have.

The plot is a deliberately gamy melodrama. Sweeney Todd, having escaped from Australia after fifteen years of exile on a false accusation, wants revenge: the diabolical judge Turpin (Jamie Jackson) and his slobber Beadle (John Rapson, deliciously corrupt) deported him to join his beautiful wife, Lucy, whose sexual and mental destruction forms the tragic pivot of the story. Turpin has taken in and raised Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna (Maria Bilbao), and when our jolly sailor Anthony (Jordan Fisher) falls in love with the now-adult daughter, the plot begins to spiral. If you put the music aside (you can’t, but say you might), you might notice that director Kails’ directing is a bit erratic. There is some difficulty hearing spoken text over the underline, and the physical narration stumbles; for example, the choreography of Lucy’s assault elides detail to the point of being unreadable. Kail, best known for directing Hamilton, puts his own stamp on the material an elaborate letter delivery is a bit of apparent self-quotation but it only makes a small impression. Sondheim’s bittersweet music and lyrics are the things that stick in your mind. And listening to a Broadway orchestra playing Jonathan Tunicks’ original arrangements at full power is like being musically assaulted: wowyou wake up in an alley surrounded by piccolos.

He served a dark and vengeful god, the chorus sings Sweeney. He’s not the sad, lighthearted, broken man we meet in this production. Groban’s exquisite baritone is so angelic, so carefully placed, that it draws the curtains back from the gloom of the spectacle. It wouldn’t threaten a mouse either, so he hands over the primary energy of the show to Ashford’s hilarious version of Lovett, who’s ready to destroy their plans, the stage, the show as long as he serves up his chaotic shtick. Playing crackpot Ernie to neurotic Grobans Bert, she employs a combination of clown physique (she bows to the judge halfway down the stairs, a posture she maintains, bumpily, to the bottom of the flight) and of traveling madness; every time she pecks at the reluctant Groban, floating all over him, it looks like someone threw a chicken in her face.

But, then, hes at a theatrical disadvantage. In the Mimi Liens set, Grobans’ character is often upstairs, which puts him on a platform, behind a balustrade spoiling the line of sight, while Ashford can lurk on the lip of the stage . Up those dozens of stairs, he seems miles away. Knock it out of the limelight, though, with the company’s incredible sopranos howling their siren-heavy Sweeneys! Sweeney!, and he’s in business. (It’s a young and handsome cast, but only when Groban grabs Ashford by the jaw, dancing her backwards, do you get a sense of the couple’s eroticism and dread.) With Ashford’s light-hearted pickpocketing scenes instead of stealing them, the main emotional weight is carried by the deranged beggar (Ruthie Ann Miles), a character who is sidelined with increasing brutality, and the little Mrs. Lovetts’ boy, Tobias (Gaten Matarazzo), who happens to be the soul of the show. Miles and Matarazzo are both terrific, but, again, Kails’ directing takes their big moments and blurs them, he keeps losing characters to various peripheries.

Sweeney Todd captures our secret fear of our neighbours: it makes the crimes of the barbers horrific, so we don’t feel the closer, more subtle cuts of the city. But is it really scary? Sonically thrilling, yes, but a frolicking Lovett and his sad Sweeney couldn’t, in the end, chill my blood. For me, a downtown production at the Connelly Theatre, Bedlam Theater Company’s presentation of Talene Monahons surprising The Good John Proctor, managed to deliver a higher scare-per-minute ratio. The show is modest in comparison, with just four cast members (Sharlene Cruz, BrittanyK. Allen, Tavi Gevinson and Susannah Perkins), all of whom are excellent, for Sweeneys Twenty-Five. Each plays a familiar figure from Arthur Millers The Crucible—the innocent girl playing with poppets, the foreign woman with mysterious wisdom, the hysterical nun, and the teenager whose sexual relationship with John Proctor sparks the whole Salem trial mess— witch. The girls speak in modern slang, because, even though their job includes churning butter, there’s nothing old-fashioned about the way the invisible adult Proctor breaks an eleven-year-old’s confidence.

Salem’s Sarah Ruhls Becky Nurse also posted a tangy feminist fix to The Crucible, but Monahons’ game gets its hands on a deeper set of powers, evoking terrible tensions of the juxtaposition of youth and the abyss. Under the confident direction of Caitlin Sullivan, The Good John Proctor has a palpable sense of dread that Sweeney Toddso lacks in grandeur and often sensory delight. The girls talk a lot about going to The Woods, a source of forbidden knowledge, and there are certainly some spooky, single-lantern-lit scenes of them crawling through the brush. They think they are headed for something dangerous, but we know the lasting harm has already been done. I shook off Sweeney’s grimace just minutes after leaving the theater; I will buy the cast recording (there will surely be one), but I will listen to it happily. Monah’s poison, however, still failed to get out of my system. When she says the world is one big black abyss, I believe her.

Sources

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2/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/10/sweeney-todd-theatre-review-broadway

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