Impressive ‘Sweeney Todd’ features former Rep intern
Sudia shines in Illinois staging
AURORA, Ill. - All the world’s a cage in the thrilling rendition of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” that opened over the weekend in the Paramount Theatre, a 1931 art-deco palace with nearly 2,000 seats.
A three-storied jungle gym with connecting stairs that conjures images of Dickensian London, Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s scenic design solves the problem of how to fill the Paramount’s huge stage — nearly 50 feet wide and 30 feet high.
It also rings true to a story in which characters’ physical imprisonment within dungeons, towers and asylums reflects their frequently self-imposed solitary confinement within constricting views of the self. That “hole in the world like a great black pit” isn’t just Sweeney’s description of a corrupt London. It’s also a telling self-portrait, of a man driven mad by his thirst for vengeance.
Sweeney has his reasons, of course; Judge Turpin (a wolfish Larry Adams) banished Sweeney to Australia and then drugged and raped Sweeney’s beloved Lucy (a harrowing Emily Rohm) before kidnapping Lucy’s daughter and raising her as his own.
Haunted by all he’s lost, Paul-Jordan Jansen gives hints of the gentler man Sweeney might once have been. But he also never lets us forget that Sweeney is now a single-minded killing machine. If that means taking innocents down while awaiting his shot at the Judge, he’ll do it. When the house lights come up and Jansen directly threatens the audience, we believe him.
Director Jim Corti hasn’t shied away from the consequent violence. Sondheim once said that his dark operetta “is a movie for the stage,” and it’s Tim Burton’s gothic and gory horror film version of “Sweeney” that comes to mind here.
Blood doesn’t ooze from this Sweeney’s victims; it gurgles and gushes. Nick Belley and Jesse Klug’s striking lighting design makes liberal use of garish reds.
Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations capitalize on the Paramount’s splendid organ — big and bad enough to make the seats vibrate; a full, 19-piece pit adds the foreboding brass that “Sweeney” deserves. The drop from Sweeney’s death chair into a dramatically blazing charnel house suggests a descent into hell.
It’s that charnel house which bakes Sweeney’s victims into meat pies sold by Mrs. Lovett. Sondheim rightly calls Mrs. Lovett the true villain of this piece, but she’s also a lot of fun — particularly when she’s played by someone as good as Bri Sudia, a 2012’13 Milwaukee Repertory Theater intern who has since made a meteoric rise in Chicago theater.
Sudia can sing, and she handles Mrs. Lovett’s sometimes complex meter with aplomb. Sudia also has impeccable comic instincts and knows how to work a crowd; she had a Sunday evening audience in stitches when channeling the flighty twists and turns of Mrs. Lovett’s byzantine mind.
Sudia’s Mrs. Lovett can be both sentimental and ruthless; what can seem flexible and random in her character is usually pragmatic and focused. Funny as she is, Sudia can also suggest Mother Courage, similarly recognizing much too late that in keeping her eye on the next chance, she’s lost sight of the big picture.
Young lovers Johanna and Anthony are the only ones who see clear of the dystopia all around them, itself driven home by an unnerving ensemble embodying various forms of insanity — including vanity, gluttony and true madness — in this world turned upside down.
Cecilia Iole (as fiercely determined a Johanna as I’ve seen) and Patrick Rooney not only have the required vocal chops to nail their ballads, they also have good chemistry, holding forth the possibility that love stories need not end as Sweeney’s did — even if we never doubt that he himself will serve his dark and vengeful god until the end.