Shave and a haircut, good fit
The lunatics are running the asylum and they’re doing one hell of a job. The new production of Sweeney Todd
that’s currently the toast of Broadway is a daring piece of work on several levels.
In the first place, British director John Doyle has set Stephen Sondheim’s Grand Guignolstyle musical about “ the demon barber of Fleet Street” in some sort of unspecified mental institution. A straitjacketed young man sits gagged and bound in a catatonic state until he’s freed to sing the chilling opening lines:
“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,
His skin was pale and his eye was odd. He shaved the faces of gentlemen Who never thereafter were heard of again.”
His fellow inmates range from the mildly twitchy to the deeply disturbed, but it’s obvious at a glance this isn’t your run-ofthemill operatic society.
While the clothing the patients wear nods towards the contemporary, with long leather coats and thrift shop funk, the actual atmosphere is a bit closer to the eerie and oppressive ambiance of the old London asylum known as Bedlam. And as if all this wasn’t disconcerting enough, Doyle plays his trump card: there is no orchestra; the cast will handle all the musical instruments.
This is a stylistic device Doyle has been using with great success in England’s Watermill Theatre, where he is artistic director. But despite the positive buzz from across the Atlantic, a certain amount of understandable skepticism greeted the decision to mount Sweeney Todd this way on Broadway with a top ticket price of $ 101.25 ( U. S.).
After all, this complex work is generally accepted as Sondheim’s masterpiece. Its original 1979 production was staged by Hal Prince, starring Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. The cast and orchestra totalled 54, and the physical setting was anchored on an actual iron foundry brought intact from Rhode Island.
There have been smaller stagings since then ( including one 1989 version referred to as “ Teeny Todd”) but generally the motto with this show has been “ Go big or go home.” And that’s as it should be for this saga of a man ( Sweeney) falsely imprisoned for 15 years so that a lustful magistrate could rape his wife. On his return, he seeks vengeance and finds dementia. The horror of it all is compounded when his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, grinds up the corpses of his victims and turns them into filling for the meat pies she sells for a living. In the end, the world has gone mad, and Sweeney accuses the audience of being no better than him.
There were two questions this production generated in advance of its opening last month. First, could this sweeping study of revenge and cannibalism work on such a minimalist scale?
And, more importantly, could Sondheim’s deeply textured score be fully realized by 10 actormusicians? From my own perspective, the answers are a qualified ‘ yes’ to the first and an emphatic vote of support for the second. The astonishing thing about this production is how superb it sounds. Under the hand of Sarah Travis, who provided the reorchestration and the musical direction, the acid melodies emerge with more bite than ever; the haunting inner harmonies of the score emerge with more icy clarity.
Another bonus is that those brain-teasing lyrics of Sondheim’s become highly accessible, allowing us to savour their demonic cleverness with greater ease.
Doyle and Travis haven’t just cast the show with musicians and hoped for the best. No, there is even a great deal of skill behind the choice of which character plays which instrument. The young lovers, Anthony and Johanna, both saw away rapturously on a pair of cellos, while the hateful Judge Turpin and his evil Beadle accompany their malicious deeds with a duo of muted trumpets.
There’s also not a single complaint to be registered about the talent of the cast. Michael Cerveris, gleaming bald and hauntingly hollow- eyed, is an appropriately satanic Sweeney and when he strums a gentle guitar accompaniment to the soothing “ Nothing’s Going to Harm You,” the mordant irony of Doyle’s staging reaches perfection. Broadway diva Patti LuPone is also in fine form as the greedy, grasping Mrs. Lovett. With her raven- black hair, scarlet slash of a mouth and tackily tight miniskirt, LuPone summons up everything that is tawdry yet compelling in the character. Benjamin Magnuson’s Anthony and Lauren Molina’s Johanna are a
heart-tugging pair of
lovers, with Mark Jacoby’s Judge and Alexander Gemignani’s
Beadle their remorseless adversaries.
There’s only one quibble about the proceedings: since the action is set in an asylum and everyone is mad from the beginning, there is no opportunity for growth. What you see at the start is excellent, but it’s all you ever get.
This is where Prince succeeded brilliantly. As the tragic arc of the piece inexorably swooped down on everyone, we watched in horror as first Sweeney — and then the whole world — went mad.
In Doyle’s version, we’re always in R.D. Laing country, where insanity is the norm and the final effect is less shattering than it was in the original.
However, while this new Sweeney Todd
may play too consistently on one note, it’s a note that will haunt your dreams and one that deserves to be heard.