Strong musical direction grounds a ghastly tale
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
K (out of 4) Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, music directed by Jackie Maxwell. Until Oct. 19 at the Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. shawfest.com or 800-511-7429
As the last production in its 55th season — and the final one in Jackie Maxwell’s tenure as artistic director — the Shaw Festival goes grandiose and gory in musical thriller Sweeney Todd, the story of a barber-turnedmurderer originally set in Victorian London.
The production features fabulous musical direction and ensemble singing, and some fine performances in featured roles, but the central characterizations and voices are not sufficiently strong, and the conceptualization and staging can be unclear.
The show contains some of the most beautiful songs in the musical theatre canon and some of the deftest, funniest lyrics, but its subject matter is revenge, obsession, murder and eventually cannibalism.
Maxwell sets it in what seems like the present day, inside an abandoned London warehouse; when some taggers break into the building, the company emerges to perform the story, “a Victorian penny dreadful that erupts when it needs to be told, again and again and again,” as she writes in a program note.
Maxwell makes further brief mention in the program of class inequality and a corrupt justice system, but what she’s trying to say never comes into focus.
Maxwell’s concept ends up serving largely as the context for Judith Bowden’s set design, an explosion of ruins porn rivalling that of the Hearn Generating Station.
For a Sweeney to fully succeed, it requires world-class singer-actors in its two main roles, the vengeful barber Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett, the crafty pie shop owner who becomes his partner in crime.
While Benedict Campbell and especially Corrine Koslo are skilled character actors, they don’t have the vocal power and range to sing these parts. Campbell works so hard to deliver Sweeney’s hugely challenging musical numbers that his acted performance does not effectively communicate the character’s journey through anger and grief to madness.
Koslo’s comic timing is excellent but, particularly in the first act, we do not get much sense of the material challenges and anxiety that underlie her continuous quipping.
In the second half, Koslo’s performance grows richer and her delivery of “By the Sea” captures brilliantly the character’s combination of cunning, survival instincts and increas- ingly desperate love for him.
Marcus Nance gives the standout performance as the corrupt Judge Turpin: with his stunning singing voice and commanding physical presence, he is horribly convincing as a man who aborts justice and tramples morality in lustful pursuit of Sweeney’s wife and then his daughter Johanna (Kristi Frank).
Andrew Broderick has another of the show’s strongest voices but seems at sea in terms of characterization: his portrayal of Tobias Ragg, the street lad who naively latches onto Mrs. Lovett, is so caricatured and physically eccentric as to seem beamed in from a Christmas pantomime.
And in a year that has seen some progress ( The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, Master Harold . . . and the Boys) in the thoughtful presentation of ethnic difference at Shaw, this production is a step in the wrong direction. It’s impossible to ignore that the two major roles played by black actors either embody evil (Turpin) or mental challenges (Tobias).
The strongest aspect of this production and its great pleasure is musical director Paul Sportelli’s excellent handling of the score, played by an orchestra of16 and sung beautifully by the 22-person ensemble. The company’s younger members, including Jeff Irving as the romancehungry sailor Anthony, Frank as his love interest Johanna and Kyle Blair as the comically venal Pirelli, shine in smaller, character roles.
This is not, in the end, a Sweeney for the ages, but it provides the joy of hearing a great Sondheim score played and sung (by and large) at a very high level.