I know I said I would put my review/recap/musings on the new Broadway transfer of the British production of Sweeney Todd up once the show opened. Well, better late than never, I guess. It has been running (to pretty much glowing reviews by professional reviewers) for a while now, and here is my take on John Doyle's production.
[Originally written on: 2005-10-07 21:14:00]
I know you aren't supposed to review shows before they open.
So this isn't a review, as I am not a reviewer. It is my reflections on the choices made in the new production (transfered from England) of Sweeney Todd that I saw last night.
If you plan on seeing the production and want to be surprised by the changes, stop reading now.
Ok. Still there? Then here is where I have to decide how to break down my thoughts.
First stage is easy. Things that didn't work:
1. Size of the house.
This is a small production. An intimate production. Only 10 actors, who must, between the 10 of them, be principles, chorus and orchestra. When it works (which is most of the time) it is European meta-theatricality at its best. When it doesn't, the grandiose nature of some of Sondheim's score is lost. This is not a grand American opera anymore, it is now a darkly psychological chamber opera. Unfortunately, there are some places in the score that still demand the sound of a full chorus and orchestra. But not as many as you would think.
2. Sforzandoes.
This is kind of related to #1. The 10 could not make the same internal organ shaking fortissimoes of the original score. Sometimes this was accounted for by changing the orchestrations to pull in the audience, rather than pull out all the stops on the pipe organ. But the first full chorus entry in the Prologue on "Went to their maker impeccably shaved" through "Swing your razor wide, Sweeney" and the "At last my right arm is complete again/Lift your razor high, Sweeney" transitions are two places that just did not work for me.
3. Missing pieces.
Pretty much anything that could be cut, was. "Unimportant" dialogue. Verses of songs. No full songs were cut, but anything not sung by Sweeney or Lovett was up for shortening. But I can understand that without a full chorus, some of the songs would have seemed exceptionally weak anyway ("Miracle Elixir", I'm looking at you). Although it changes the nuance of some of the interactions, it is understandable.
(and on a personal note, I didn't like a woman playing Pirelli, but I understand that for the rest of the show, they needed more female voices than Lovett, Johanna and the Beggar Woman, to balance the overwhelmingly male cast)
Now, on to the far longer list. Things that were amazing and made me shiver with dramatic joy.
This is just a smattering of the wonderful things about the show.
Toby.
This is Toby's story. Ok. Yes, it really still is Sweeney's show (they didn't retitle it or change the plot that much). But after Sweeney, this production is Toby's story. Which is strange, since they scaled back his character. But what they left of him was important. As one of the only surviving characters, he is the one left to tell the Tale of Sweeney Todd.
The curtain rises. We are presented with the stage: A bare boarded empty space lined by chairs. A curiously tall (disappearing into the fly space) set of shelves, filled with all kinds of props and antiques. A black wooden coffin stage center. And that's it. No one leaved, no one enters, no big oven, no rotating set, everything we are going to get is already on stage. And all of the cast in the chairs. Most notably, Toby - in straight jacket and gag. He is untied, ungagged, and he begins the Tale.
The end? Well, the end was pretty straight forward. Except that after his last line, Toby was returned to the chair, straight jacketed and gagged. To await the next Telling.
Johanna. I never thought I would like Johanna. She seemed too boringly innocent. Her song, pointless (or bash you over the head with its over-symbolism disguised as art song). But this production made me enjoy "Green Finch and Linnet Bird". I'm not sure why, but I love it. And as I was coming to this realization, they kicked it up a notch. As Johanna was accompanying herself on the cello for this song, she had a bow in her hand. Between the lyrics "Are you crowing?" and "Are you screaming?" she transformed from the wistful escapist and maniacally took her bow and stabbed into the heart of an invisible bird, twisting the poor unseen nightingale's flapping body on the spit of her instrument/weapon. Then just as quickly, she returned to the next verse of the song.
I almost yelled and jumped out of my seat from the brilliance of that interpretive choice.
Later, the only other time Johanna lets her sadistic side (no doubt inherited from her father and foster father) shine through was in the asylum scene. Throughout the scene, as Anthony is listening to Fogg, a pair of rusty one-piece farm shears are used to keep a rhythmical undercurrent. At the point in the script where Anthony fails to fire and Johanna is supposed to pick up the dropped gun and shoot her captor, a much more fitting end befalls Fogg. Rather than grabbing Anthony's gun, Johanna grabs the rusty shears and impales Fogg with his own implement, a more cruel and immediate (in the corporeal sense, not the temporal sense) death. With the same stabbing motion that set her unseen bird free in the first act.
I was disappointed when looking through the Playbill and only saw two songs called "Johanna". The Judge's "Johanna" wasn't listed. So when I heard the familiar ominous wave-like cello notes while the Judge took his chair and started his prayer, I was giddy. Well, giddy and then immediately disturbed, since it is a creepy song. But the whole thing was done with very small movements. No flagellation. But more and more intense grasping of the silver rosary in his hand. Creepy.
But not the creepiest moment in the show. That distinction goes to the character usually reserved for the comic relief. The Beadle.
The Beadle was the creepiest of all the characters. His every line delivered with a sneering deadpan, but without the physical sneer, just a vocal quality associated with humorless weariness and disgust at everything and everyone surrounding him.
The parlor songs being the crowning moment of this vile ennui. Rather than an affable annoying playing of Mrs. Lovett's harmonium, we were treated to a dark and foreboding in creepy slightly under tempo and almost a capella children's songs. The plight of poor Polly Plunkett transformed from a tongue trippingly sprite number into an Irish folksong-like tale of loss. And the Bells of Bray became the tolling dirge driving Lovett further to madness and counting down to something horrible (the discovery of her secret? the Beadle's death? the moment in the show when all hell breaks loose and even the set begins to no longer seem logical?)
Mrs. Lovett. It is very hard to do anything different with Mrs. Lovett. But Patti Lupone tried. And for the most part succeeded. Instead of the caked on makeup and fancy airs of a Victorian Lovett from the original production, we are given the short skirt, torn fishnets and jet black bobbed cut of a jazz age Lovett. Less over the top affability, and more insidious sensuality, this Lovett is the black widow to the creepy clown of Lovetts past.
And Sweeney. The character with the least change, because he really is in his own mind most of the show anyway. But if there were one thing that defines him, ok... two things. #1 would be his razors, but the second thing is his chair, right? Well, that was taken away from him and replaced with a small white coffin. This small white coffin acted as his special killing chair, but when not in use as the chair, he would carry it around like an infant. Disconnecting from the rest of the characters and only focusing on it. The Beggar Woman's obsession with a doll had been transferred to Sweeney and replaced with this small white coffin. And the deaths were all staged symbolically. Sweeney would slash in the air, the dying character would put on a bloody lab coat, and another actor would pour a pail of blood into another white pail. As the show went on, the amount of blood poured into the buckets increased. Until the Judge's blood took two pails and continued in silence for what seemed like an eternity. (Mrs. Lovett's blood was shaken out of the bucket down to the very last drop, appropriate for the show's parsimonious spendthrift). Sweeney, however, did not get a bucket. On his death, we hear a long, relieved, exhalation. The final breath? The escaping spirit? The sound made when cutting into a throat that had no blood to drain?
Putting into words my impressions of this very visual show is difficult. I don't think someone who didn't know the show would understand it. But as a person who knows the show in and out, word for word, as some opera fans know their Wagner, Verdi or Puccini, I loved this fresh take on my favorite musical.
Posted by silsby at November 19, 2005 03:03 PM