Brilliant Gestures
By Caridad Svich
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of
Fleet Street
By Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler
Eugene O'Neill Theatre
230 W. 49th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
The new Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim
and Hugh Wheeler's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
directed and designed by John Doyle, bristles with imaginative energy
and supple strength. Stripped down to a ten-member singer-actor-musician
ensemble led by Michael Cerveris and Patti Lupone, the cast makes even
a longtime fan of the show feel she is hearing the score for the first
time. Sondheim's score (with lyrics by Sarah Waters) is indeed the life-blood
of this bitterly macabre and strangely tender 1979 musical. What mainly
engages the eye and ear this time, however, are Doyle's choices, the
intricate, imaginative dance he asks of his audience.
This is a ritualized, madhouse re-telling of
the Sweeney story on a stage flanked by a cross-like formation of coffins
on a wall of used and unused props and relics. Doyle dresses the musical
down to the bone, demanding that the audience fill in the "scene," as
it were, and at the same time look closely at it. This act of visual
doubling--the real stage set against imagined scenes forged from the
re-enacted story--is further complicated by having actors playing their
own instruments. The young, doomed lovers Johanna (Lauren Molina) and
Anthony (Benjamin Magnuson) play their love duets accompanied by their
cellos. Judge Turpin (Mark Jacoby) shares trumpet phrasing with The
Beadle (Alexander Gemignani) as they scheme. And young, crazed, initially
straight-jacketed Tobias (Manoel Felciano) plays the violin as if the
strings were extensions of his feverish, tormented mind. The multiple
tasks of the actor-singer-musicians invite complex responses from the
audience and the cast. Characters who die in one scene pick up their
instruments in the next, suggesting that the telling of this story is
never-ending, and that the murdered are haunted by their killers even
in "death."
The multi-layeredness awakens the audience to
listen sharply, imagine intently, and witness the acting and musicianship
with a measure of attention that is unusual for standard Broadway fare.
While not robbing the piece of its penny dreadful origins, and the requisite
thrills of a story that depicts revenge with relentless obsession, Doyle's
exacting, highly stylized vision demands much of the audience. There's
no seduction by the beauty of the score or the romance of the performances.
The story of the murderous barber lives, here, in the audience as much
as on the stage.
That is not to say that there is nothing without
the audience, for the recently released cast recording of this production
affirms the magnetic grace and delicate musicality of the ensemble.
Cerveris's Sweeney sits in his lower vocal register, intoning his loss
and vengeance as if from a great un-located depth. Clad in black leather
and heavy boots, shadowed in sculptural light (evocatively designed
by Richard G. Jones), he exudes blank-eyed, chilly menace: a figure
lost to himself, forever exacting loss from everyone around him. LuPone's
Mrs. Lovett is a jazzy contralto, casually, cold-heartedly scheming
for adventure while egging her alienated but compliant servant-lover
to kill. Decked out in a tight-fitting black mini-skirt and corseted
top, she is a feral mistress cast in the Wedekind mold. Cerveris and
Lupone's deadly dance of Eros and madness, equally brutish and intimate,
continually captivates even when they are not ostensibly in a "scene."
Felciano's Tobias, from whose point of view Doyle chooses to tell the
tale, is a guileless, childish creature with the voice of an ardent
angel and the stare of a wayward son. His reading of the ballad "Not
While I'm Around," sung to Lupone's unashamed mother/lover embrace,
is so full-hearted that it almost threatens to break the spell of this
relentlessly revisionist, cold-lit Sweeney and thrust it into the brooding,
soulful mood of a later Sondheim piece like Passion.
The rush of positive, powerful feeling from Tobias,
however, is ultimately in keeping with the go-for-broke take on the
score from the rest of the performers, whether they are in romantic
counterpoint (in Sweeney and the Judge's duet "Pretty Women"), in rock
n'rollish mania (in Sweeney's "Epiphany"), or in flirtatiously wistful
dreaming (in Mrs. Lovett's "By the Sea"). Indeed, the power of Felciano's
fervor in "Not While I'm Around" is an effective reminder of Sondheim's
ability to place the beating heart of his scores often in secondary,
less showy roles. Very likely, Doyle's decision to conceptualize this
Sweeney from Tobias's point of view was cued from the score
itself--as director-choreographer Matthew Bourne took his carnal, surreal
approach to Swan Lake from the pulse and swoon of Tchaikovsky's
score. Tobias has pledged his loyalty to Mrs. Lovett and vowed to protect
her from all harm (not knowing that she is complicit in Sweeney's crimes).
He surrenders to her in song, and his vow becomes the axis from which
the rest of the show pivots. As Sweeney's murderer, innocent, troubled
Tobias is the one most haunted by this lurid story, for it is Sweeney's
eyes in death that will forever follow him as he lives on in the asylum
that offers no true mental sanctuary.
The design is Expressionist throughout, with
an especially compelling and macabre use of a child's white coffin cradled
by Sweeney in the second act. Doyle may have been influenced by Peter
Brook's asylum-set in Marat/Sade but, again, he seems primarily
emboldened by the source material itself. Radically reducing the mise-en-scene
and the orchestrations from the operatic and brazenly flamboyant stagings
of Sweeneys past (including Harold Prince's remarkable original
production), Doyle seeks to relocate the core of this burning tale of
mad passion and rage, and give it classical meaning and proportion.
Starkly presented, with its violence staged through symbolic gestures
enhanced by flashes of red light and buckets of blood, it references
the lurid thrills of Grand Guignol. Yet in our age of reproduction and
replication, when images of violence and horror (fictive and real) are
all too common, the excitement of this Sweeney Todd is not
in the depiction of violence but in the knowledge that these figures,
however startlingly fashioned by pulp conventions, are part of our moral
order. Their gestures, full and empty at the same time, re-told yet
fresh, are inescapably human. And the more we listen to Sondheim's score,
with its passages of brilliance, vaudevillian flourishes and mournful
cadences, the more its human-ness, its outrage and wonder at what individuals
are capable of, transforms the cheap thrills into a penetrating examination
of the dangerous aspects of the human heart.