Two themes dominate Stephen Sondheim’s recorded memories of the genesis of his masterpiece Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Running into Christopher Bond’s pocket-sized Grand Guignol treatment of Victorian serial murder in London, the composer-lyricist saw a chance to pay homage to the lush cinema scoring of Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) and others of his movie-mad youth. At the same time, according to the memoir Finishing the Hat, he hoped to “keep the audience in suspense and maybe even scare the hell out of them.”
Many fine productions, large-scale or intimate, have sauntered their way up and down Fleet Street since Hugh Wheeler’s book and Sondheim’s score premiered in 1979 in Harold Prince’s acclaimed staging. But the current revival at the Lunt-Fontanne is a thing apart. Thomas Kail, director of that latter-day groundbreaker Hamilton, has assembled all the pieces needed for what Sondheim himself finally summed up as “a movie for the stage.” The result is something both sumptuous and terrifying, truly a Sweeney Todd for the ages.
A cinematic motif is established from the very first cues. Out of smoky blackness come stinging rays of white light from stage left, as if waiting to entrap Peter Lorre scuttling in from Fritz Lang’s M. The prodigious lighting designer Natasha Katz knows just when and how to capture a character in overhead spots for maximum drama, as when the lighting elevates Anthony’s (Jordan Fisher) impassioned promise of liberation, “Johanna,” into an act one showstopper.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Katz and scenic designer Mimi Lien prove ideal accomplices in bringing film noir to life. Employing a two-tiered set — a bridge hovering high above the main playing area — Lien situates scenes in tight spaces that Katz starkly outlines, often in counterpoint to each other. Kail’s is a bold choice, to put so much action (ingenue Johanna’s prison by her evil guardian Judge Turpin, and a stunning silhouetted flashback) at such a remove. But Lien and Katz conspire to ensure that what’s crucial is always within our line of sight. And certainly having Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor up there permits his victims to take a fantastic slalom down to the baking cellar (kudos to FX master Jeremy Chernick for that amazing barber chair).
Dazzling as this physical production is (you can practically feel the heat emanating from the pie oven, thanks again to Lien and Katz), it’s those who enact the tale who make the difference. Josh Groban, his acting chops demonstrated in Broadway’s Great Comet of 1812, unsurprisingly sings the bejeezus out of this score. Groban takes us from Heaven back to Hell again in Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, which are blessedly featured in their full complement of 26 pieces under Hamilton conductor Alex Lacamoire’s vigorous direction. But Groban’s got something else going for him in this role, cf. scene one, when Todd reminisces about his old self Benjamin Barker and Lucy, his “beautiful…virtuous” wife. As for the barber himself? “He was — naїve.”
Hard as it is to imagine Len Cariou (the original) or Johnny Depp (in the movie version) ever the victim of naїveté, there’s a purity to Groban that no heavy beard can mask. That innocent affect renders instantly believable his long-ago betrayal by judicial authority, the part of his backstory we don’t see enacted. Essential groundwork is thus laid for his ultimate arc from human being to madman to monster.
As for his partner in appalling crime, pie shop owner manqué Mrs. Lovett, it’s not enough to say that Annaleigh Ashford is a hilarious grotesque. Hers is, in fact, a uniquely comic creation right up there with Born Yesterday‘s Billie Dawn or Guys and Dolls‘ Miss Adelaide. Younger than springtime and spry as a cricket, Lovett is both her name and her goal, insistent on seducing the erstwhile Barker into her bed long before unveiling her cannibalistic scheme. “A Little Priest” garners even more laughs than usual through Groban and Ashford’s seeming impromptu in topping each other with punnery. (Ashford tosses in a little salute to Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain along the way.) I daresay no other Mrs. L., not even the glorious Angela Lansbury, has ever played her intention with such physical and vocal abandon, nor underplayed her greed so sinisterly.
Underplaying is, in fact, the order of the day. Kail insists that character choices be revealed clearly but unpunctuated, from Beadle Bamford (a truly scary John Rapson) strangling a caged bird with one effortless hand, to Tobias (charming young Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things) swaying beatifically to the ground while touting Lovett’s meat pies in “God, That’s Good.” Swaying, along with aborted, strangled movements, are highlights of Steven Hoggett’s choreography, during which the outstanding ensemble participates in the emotions on which they’re commenting. This production has no patience for black-clad, supercilious, quasi-Brechtian fist-shaking (“The world is shit and it’s your fault, audience” — possibly the least persuasive of staging choices back in ’79). Instead, they and we are all seen as Sweeney’s victims, complicit, as brilliantly costumed by Emilio Sosa, in visions of human pageantry worthy of a Bruegel, and riotously played against a full-moon backdrop. And you know how crazy folks get during a full moon.
With Kail and company as his right arm, Sweeney‘s complete again.
Sweeney Todd opened March 26, 2023, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Tickets and information: sweeneytoddbroadway.com
