HGO’s ‘Sweeney Todd’ makes a bloody mess on the stage
Pay no attention to the blood stains on the carpet. Or the tub of meaty red glop — emitting an odd, potatoey smell — on a nearby cart. Or the large plastic jug labeled “gutter blood.”
When the Houston Grand Opera stages Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” it is a bloody, bawdy affair and a creative challenge for the props professionals charged with filling blood bags and inventing recipes for ground human flesh.
“Sweeney Todd” spins a dark tale about the pursuit of vengeance. Like other leading opera houses, HGO is staging the popular musical on a grand scale. Sweeney, the barber of Fleet Street, returns to London after 15 years in prison, sent away for life by a judge who coveted the barber’s wife. Sondheim’s soaring score is considered genius, while the devastating final scene — a bloody one – is virtually unmatched in musicals. HGO’s props office,
a high-ceilinged room
on the sixth floor of the Wortham Theater Center, is blood central.
“We have three different types of blood onstage,” explains props design director Megan, who uses only her first name professionally. “Zesty mint, for the tooth-pulling scene — that’s fake blood you can put in your mouth — by Ben Nye. The blood that gets poured in the gutter, called ‘Bad Blood,’ is made by Cutthroat Studio. And the ‘kill blood’ is made by Pigs Might Fly.”
The out-of-town manufacturers don’t share their secret blood recipes. But the “kill blood” cleans up beautifully, which is a good thing because it saturates several white shirts over the course of the opera.
It is “kill blood” that oozes from the necks of the seven poor sods whose throats are cut by Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. Mrs. Lovett, Todd’s partner in crime and a baker by trade, has the enterprising idea to bake the human flesh into small pies and then sell the pies them to the unsuspecting citizens of 19thcentury London.
Onstage, each singer who falls victim to Sweeney wears a “blood bladder,” a sandwich-sized bag filled with stage blood. Hidden in a shirt or vest pocket specially sewn by the wardrobe department, the bag is outfitted with a tube that threads up to the neck and a valve that controls the flow of liquid. As soon as Sweeney’s knife swipes, the victim releases the valve and the gooey red liquid starts to spurt and drip.
“Basically, the stage set is shades of black, white and gray,” Megan explains. “Lee Blakeley, the director, really wanted the impact of that red color. He wanted a lot of blood.”
With the exception of Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” which featured a tank of blood beneath a mattress to facilitate a particularly gruesome death scene — “Sweeney Todd” is the bloodiest opera Houston Grand Opera has ever staged, says Megan, who has worked at the opera for nearly 30 years.
Megan and props associate Andrew Cloud load the blood bladders — purchased locally from Safeway Medical Supply — before each performance. They also make sure the show has plenty of pies. The small cherry pies used onstage come straight from Kroger. The traditional British “meat” pies — though they’re stuffed with sweet potato hash — are made especially for the opera by Oh my! Pocket Pies of Houston.
During the 2½-hour performance, a small crew oversees all the props onstage. Supposedly, it took a 12-person crew in Paris to do what it takes four people in Houston to do.
“It’s such a busy show — I mean, nonstop,” says Zoltan Fabry, Houston Grand Opera’s propmaster.
“The worst part is the pre-show preparation. It
takes two hours for the four of us. Not just furniture, but all these small items. Preparing food. Mashed potatoes for the grinder. Blood. All the little items have to be in a certain place all the time so performers can find them and use them.
“Also, a lot of people are coming offstage with things. A birdcage or a bucket of water. We have to be there when they hand it to us.”
And about mashed potatoes.
One scene calls for human meat to be cranked through a large meat grinder onstage. It fell to
those
Cloud, who doesn’t eat meat, to create a recipe for something that could pass for ground human flesh.
“It’s instant potatoes, water and stage blood,” he says, nonplussed.
This production of “Sweeney Todd” premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, which means the sets and props were shipped to Houston. The French props crew sent word that small pasta
shells worked beautifully as ground human flesh when mixed with stage blood and water, but that recipe never did work for Cloud. He tweaked and fiddled and it wasn’t until opening night that his red mash looked and handled like ground meat.
“We had to soften it up and add a lot more water,” he said.