Bloody good Sweeney Todd a first-rate farewell
Anyone up for a night of music, murder and mayhem?
Then head for Sweeney Todd, where the body count is exceeded only by the number of brilliant performances in Stephen Sondheim’s macabre masterpiece.
It was a memorable night for the sellout crowd on hand at the Vertigo Thursday for the opening of Sweeney Todd, the final show of the season, and also, of artistic director Mark Bellamy’s eight-year run as the boss.
That much was obvious right from the top of the show when Bellamy, dressed in black tie, stepped out to introduce the show, and was greeted with a long standing ovation from the crowd, bringing him to tears.
For his grand finale, Bel- lamy directed his dream show, a musical about a broken-hearted London barber (unforgettably played by Kevin Aichele) with a strap razor who goes on a killing spree among 19th-century London’s elite.
And as dark as the subject matter might seem, there’s also, in Sweeney Todd, an undercurrent of black hu- mour to it all which transforms the show into one of the more unlikely can-do musicals about a sadistic killer ever written.
Probably the only one, actually.
Right from the moment you arrive in the theatre to discover Nora Mccarroll’s set, a chilling combination of Dickens and Silence of the Lambs, you sense that you’re in for a more than one of those nights with the martini shaker, a bunch of half-baked British accents and pages of exposition.
You’re right. There’s a barber back in town, looking for the wife and daughter he lost 15 years earlier, when he was sent to prison. His old barber shop is still empty over top of a pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (a wonderful Elizabeth Stepkowski Tarhan), a workingclass widow who saved the barber’s set of elegant strap razors when he got sent up the river the last time.
The barber takes back his razors, sorts out his grudges, sets up shop and the killing begins.
Before he wrote Sweeney Todd, Sondheim wrote lyrics on shows such as West Side Story and Gypsy, and one could enjoy a memorable night just listening to a single actor sit on a bar stool and recite his lyrics.
They’re smart, funny, melodic show tunes that serve as a wonderful showcase for a bunch of beautiful voices, including Aichele’s Todd, Stepkowski Tarhan’s Mrs. Lovett, Scott Shpeley’s Anthony, Hal Kerbe’s Beadle, Elinor Holt’s Beggar Woman and a bunch of others.
Aichele, tall and lean and brandishing imposing looking mutton chop sideburns, makes for a superb Sweeney Todd.
The performer possesses a blazing look in his eyes, a voice like Barry White, and his every moment onstage is consumed with a purposeful rage.
His perfect foil is found in Stepkowski Tarhan’s Mrs. Lovett, who not only goes along with Sweeney’s kill- ing spree but comes up with her own innovative, and profitable way of disposing of the human remains it creates.
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade!
There’s also something else coursing through this particular night with Sweeney Todd besides buckets of blood, and that’s a certain giddy, energized joy on the part of the Sweeney Todd cast, who appear to have the time of their life performing it — witness, for example, Holt’s Beggar Woman, where she plays a social outcast with a wicked glee. It works for a while. However, like inflated housing bubbles and playoff runs by eight seeds, all good things eventually must come to end, particularly when there’s killing involved.
By the moment, late in the evening, when the body count begins to pile up, you sense things may not work out too hot for the barber in question.
Not so for the audience, however, which gets every delicious note of Sweeney Todd wrapped and delivered in one of Vertigo Theatre’s most memorable productions.