The story of Sweeney Todd, which dates back to a penny-dreadful of the nineteenth century, was known to me growing up but I first became intimately acquainted with the demon barber of Fleet Street when I saw the Broadway revival of the musical at the Circle in the Square Theater in the fall of 1989. Unlike in the original 1979 production, directed by Harold Prince, which occupied the enormous Uris Theater (now the Gershwin) and kept the audience at a safe distance from the blood and gore by means of the proscenium, we, the audience, weren’t at a safe distance from the bloodthirsty barber, portrayed by Bob Gunton, and his pie-baking accomplice, Mrs. Lovett (Beth Fowler).
The current revival, which opened last week at the Lunt-Fontaine Theatre with Jonathan Kail as director, puts us at a reasonably safe distance from the murderous pair, although sitting in an aisle seat in Row D, I felt dangerously close to the executioner’s, excuse me, barber chair.
Todd (Josh Groban), per Sondheim’s words, “[H]is skin was pale and his eye was odd,” who spent 15 years in exile in Australia on a trumped-up prison charge, returns to Victorian England, after surviving a shipwreck, determined to seek revenge against the judge who raped his wife and took his daughter as a ward. Groban, reunited with his “old friends” – the razors of his trade that Mrs. Lovett (Annaleigh Ashford) has held onto, sings an aria to his razors and raises one to the sky, the shiny edge glinting in the laser-sharp spotlight. “At last, my right arm is complete again!” he sings both manically and ecstatically, ready to shave and strike again.
The cast of the new revival of “Sweeney Todd”
Indeed, one of the most thrilling things about “Sweeney Todd” is that over 80% of the production is set to music, whether sung or spoken, which causes myself to think of this more as an operetta or even an opera than a musical. Music is extensively and successfully used to further the purposes of the drama and each note is more thrilling than the previous one. With a cast of 25 accompanied by an orchestra of 26 (!), there’s little doubt why it’s billed as a “musical thriller.”
The show goes on to examine the emotional and psychological depths of the main characters, and the cast also includes Jordan Fisher as Anthony, Gaten Matazzo as Tobias, Maria Bilbao as Johanna, Ruthie Ann Miles as the Beggar Woman, and Nicholas Christopher as Pirelli. Jamie Jackson reprises his off-Broadway role of Judge Turpin and John Rapso reprises his as Beadle Bamford.
Ashford’s Lovett, complete with an Angela Lansbury-style wig, makes us believe in Mrs. Lovett’s maternal heart, even as she grinds up Todd’s clients for her meat pies. She is hopelessly in love with him, but he loves his razors more than the psychopath Mrs. Lovett, while his heart longs for his presumed lost wife and the daughter taken by Judge Turpin. Only at the end does he reach a tearful catharsis, in a sobbing embrace of his wife’s limp body.
Groban’s soaring baritone, combined with his mounting anger, grabs us early in the show and grips us as tightly as Todd holds onto some of his clients-cum-victims, while Steven Hoggett’s choreography is deliberately disorienting, filled with strange motions and gestures, odd leaning, and body movements that conjure up all sorts of gruesome thoughts.
Is “Sweeney Todd” just the story of a man’s mental collapse and a rather unusual rescue plan for a dying meat-pie business or is it one of the most demented and nightmarish musicals ever seen? One thing is certain in the mind of this critic: This is not your father’s “Sweeney Todd, with apologies to Joel Machek.
THE DETAILS
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West 46 Street
New York, N.Y. 10036
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes
www.sweeneytoddbroadway.com
(Photos: Accura Media Group)
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