Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Musical (1979)
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Hugh Wheeler

With Christopher Chew (Sweeney Todd), Amelia Broome (Mrs. Lovett), Sam Simahk (Anthony Hope), Meghan LaFlam (Johanna), Phil Tayler (Tobias Ragg), Paul C. Soper (Judge Turpin), Remo Airaldi (The Beadle), Lisa Yuen (Beggar Woman), Davron S. Monroe (Adolfo Pirelli), Rishi Basu (Jonas Fogg), Company: Teresa Winner Blume, Shonna Cirona, Serge Clivio, Christina English, Sarah Kornfeld, Aaron Michael Ray, Matt Spano

The story is Les Misérables-ish, with a particularly dire twist that makes it macabre-comic rather than tragically dramatic.

A barber, Sweeney Todd (Christpher Chew), has been wrongfully jailed to get him out of the way so an evil and corrupt judge, Judge Turpin (Paul C. Soper), can seduce his wife and assume governance of his daughter, Johanna (Meghan LaFlam). After a release years later, Sweeney returns to the scene of his former life, encounters Mrs. Lovett (Amelia Broome), a down and out pastry chef, with whom he forms a bizarre alliance. He returns to his former vocation as barber, but adds a new avocation, slaughtering deserving but unwitting clients, subsequently enabling Mrs. Lovett to add their muscular content to her pastries.

It’s a winning formula until it turns out not to be. Along the way, Sweeney Todd finds some sense of justice amid his prevailing sense of tragic loss. Meanwhile, his estranged daughter, now under the evil judge’s supervision, falls for a noble young sailor, Anthony Hope (Sam Simahk), and tries to escape the judge after the latter becomes unpleasantly forward.

The Lyric Stage manages to very effectively pull off energetic musicals with fairly sizable casts in its small space as it did last spring with Sondheim’s Into The Woods. An even more operatic musical than that fairy tale fest, Sweeney Todd makes even greater demands on a modestly scaled production, but the Lyric lives up to it quite well.

The music is intense. There are numbers – like the amazingly intricate Kiss Me, a syncopated interplay between the two young lovers – which is stirring and stirringly difficult. The very capable singing of Sam Simahk (Anthony Hope) and Meghan LaFlam (Johanna), especially in that involved duet, was notable. Simahk’s impressive persuasive tonality throughout the show was particularly appealing.

There are strange intentional tonalities throughout the show, completely germane to Sondheimland. Generally, things came together quite well, though, occasionally in this production, those tonalities did not quite gel. At the performance I attended, unfortunately as well, there was a malfunctioning speaker which created a lot of annoying static, and sometimes it was hard to hear what was supposed to be going on through the disruptive noise.

Vocally, Christopher Chew’s Sweeney Todd is in the greater tradition of dramatic Broadway speech-singers, à la Rex Harrison, who, in My Fair Lady, found a way to do something resembling a combination of singing and talking. Chew sings, but there is not always a robust tone to it. That may well be in keeping with the intent of the production which seems to focus on some of the rough edges. One doesn’t expect Sweeney Todd to be played by Robert Goulet; he’s a tough, grizzled character, and one need not hear a rich baritone to accompany that character. As a friend has pointed out to me, Len Cariou’s voice in the original production of Sweeney Todd is similarly speechified, which suggests that it is more endemic to the role than I might have thought.

Amelia Broome, as Mrs. Lovett, is really charming. She has a sexualized appeal that other Mrs. Lovetts I’ve seen do not have, and it works quite well. I saw her in Master Class at the New Rep a couple of seasons ago where she gave a commanding performance. Her role here is craggier and more comedic by far but she still forcefully carries along a sensuality within her corruptly downtrodden character. It’s an interesting combination.

Director Spiro Veloudos has colored the Sweeney Todd character with a particular brand of fatalism that frames vengeful behavior and self-destructiveness as intimately related. Sondheim embarked upon this species of destructive psychology in this show in the late 1970s. The soon to be seen Assassins (1990) (forthcoming at the New Repertory Theater, October 4- 26) followed a decade upon it with a related theme, an exploration of crazies who attempted and/or succeeded in killing public figures. And curiously, right in between those explicitly tragic shows in Sondheim’s oeuvre, with a not a totally unrelated theme though considered in a much lighter way, is Into The Woods (1986), where the dark side of fairy tale characters whose lives are not as fairy-tale-like as one might expect gets its due.

– BADMan