Swooning—Once Again—For "Sweeney Todd"

People always ask people like me—people who've been blessed with the opportunity to see lots and lots of shows—what our favorites are. I tend to hem and haw when it comes to plays (sometimes it’s How I Learned to Drive; sometimes it’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; other times it’s Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night). But there’s no question when it comes to my favorite musical: it’s Sweeney Todd. 

Before its latest revival opened last week, I’d seen five major productions of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s masterful retelling of the tale of the barber who goes on a throat-slitting spree while seeking revenge on the judge who destroyed his life when he sentenced the barber to a penal colony on falsified charges, ravaged his wife and virtually imprisoned their young daughter Johanna under the guise of making her the judge’s ward. It’s melodrama at its best and the score is arguably (or at least I would argue) Sondheim’s greatest. Which, of course, is saying something.

Knowing of my deep love for the show, my dear husband K worried that I might be let down by this new production that stars Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. So I’m both delighted and relieved to be able to say that this Sweeney lived up to, and maybe even surpassed, my expectations.

Now I wasn’t the only one who had worried. Some skeptics had predicted that Groban, an émigré from the pop world who has sold over 25 million records, wouldn’t be up to the challenge of playing such a demanding stage role. But a truly great role—and Sweeny Todd is a great role—can be interpreted in many ways (click here to read about how some have done it). 

Groban, who studied theater before becoming a pop star (click here to learn more about him) doesn’t try to be as wild-eyed or scary as some of his predecessors have played the part. Instead he leans into the disorienting, almost numbing, grief that all the tragic things that have happened might trigger in Sweeney. And for me, it was easier to feel the pain of this more human-sized man. 

Plus, there’s Groban’s glorious baritone. He sings the hell out of Sondheim’s almost operatic arias, including "Epiphany," which rivals the famous "Soliloquy" that Sondheim's mentor Oscar Hammerstein and his partner Richard Rodgers wrote for their bad boy Billy Bigelow in Carousel.

On the other hand, almost no one doubted that Annaleigh Ashford would be right for Sweeney’s loony landlady and partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett, who not only tolerates his butchery of the men who climb into his barber’s chair but comes up with the idea of baking their remains into the pies that she sells in her shop downstairs. 

Ashford has been working her way through some of the best comedic roles in the Broadway canon over the past decade and a half and picked up a Tony award along the way. Here she crafts a Mrs. Lovett who is earthier and more antic than the iconic character that Angela Lansbury created in the original 1979 production but one who is just as endearing. 

Together, Ashford and Groban make such a symbiotic and sexy pair that you’re almost rooting for them to make it. Which, in turn, makes the end of their relationship all the more poignant. 

In fact almost all the principal actors in the cast play the emotions of their characters, rather than broadly portraying them as the stock figures in the cheap 19th century penny dreadfuls in which Sweeney’s story was first told. 

In her Broadway debut, Maria Bilbao uses her soaring soprano to underscore the captive Johanna’s yearning to escape the cage in which the judge has entrapped her. Meanwhile Gaten Matarazzo mines every bit of pathos from the vain promise that Tobias, the boy who works in the pie shop, makes to Mrs. Lovett that nothing will harm her while he’s around. And Ruthie Ann Miles turns the neighborhood Beggar Woman into the haunting presence she was always meant to be.

But when you get right down to it, the score has always been the true star of Sweeney Todd.  And here, it’s performed by a 26-member orchestra, playing the magnificent original orchestrations of Jonathan Tunick (who, in full disclosure, is a family friend but who is also the indisputable dean of Broadway orchestrators). This is a show you could enjoy with your eyes closed.

Of course, you don’t have to and for that I’m going to give props to director Thomas Kail. At a time when so many directors seem hell bent on showing that they're auteurs who can put their distinctive stamp on any show, Kail, whose inventive staging for Hamilton proves that he can stamp with the best of them, has taken an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach here: he isn’t copying Hal Prince’s original concept but he isn’t wiggling away from it either. 

Kail roots his Sweeney firmly in Victorian London and he’s brought in Natasha Katz to supply the moody lighting for Mimi Lien’s deceptively simple set and movement master Steven Hoggett to devise some smart choreography for the large ensemble, which has been handsomely dressed by Emilio Sosa. 

I could go on and on but I'm going to give the final words to Sondheim himself and if you're a theater lover, you'll heed them: Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

Losing My Head Over "Sweeney Todd"

The Oscar nominations were announced last week and despite winning the Golden Globe award for Best Musical or Comedy, Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd didn’t make the cut as one of the five nominees for Best Movie. Johnny Depp, however, did get a Best Actor nod for his portrayal of Sweeney.

There was so much to do over the holidays and so many stage shows to see, that I only recently caught up with the film even though Sweeney Todd is my all-time favorite musical. And now having seen it, I think the Oscar folks got it right. Depp’s characteristically idiosyncratic intensity is a perfect match for Sweeney and deserves to be recognized. But while Burton’s trademark creepy aesthetic also fits the show’s macabre subject matter, it lacks the humor that stage versions have used to leaven the horror of a vengeful man who slits people’s throats and an opportunistic woman who bakes their remains into savory meat pies. It’s a good, even spellbinding, movie. But it has been a great, truly sublime, show.

In fact, the best time I ever had in the theater was back in 1979 when I saw the original production just before Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, as Sweeney and his cheerfully ghoulish companion Mrs. Lovett, were about to leave the cast. I had never seen or heard a show like it before. And I have never since felt anything like the almost sexual energy that coursed through the entire theater that night. The actors apparently felt it too and began channeling the emotion into their performance. That electrified the audience and its excitement seemed to goad the cast on to even greater intensity. Near frenzy mounted on both sides of the stage lights as the evening went on. I don't know if this happened at every performance but when the final note of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the song that begins and ends the show, was sung that night, the cast, visibly dripping with sweat, broke into applause for the audience and, at that same moment, the entire audience leapt to its feet and literally roared its gratitude. I was enraptured. And I have remained so about what is certainly Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece.

When The Kennedy Center presented its Sondheim Celebration in 2002, my husband K and I jumped on the Metroliner and went down to Washington for a weekend-long orgy of three of the Celebration’s six shows. Sondheim happened to be sitting in the same car, right across from us, and K, a pit musician who has played several Sondheim shows, went over and and said hello and they chatted briefly about the Kennedy Center festival. Sondheim said it was going well. That proved to be a total understatement. We saw Company, Merrily We Roll Along and, of course, Sweeney Todd and we had a magnificent time. Brian Stokes Mitchell made a powerful Sweeney and Christine Baranski was terrifically amusing and even touching as Mrs. Lovett. It was a wonderful production and I hoped it would come to New York so that I could see it again. Instead, in 2005, we got the John Doyle production with Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone and a tiny cast of eight other actors, who also doubled as the orchestra. The Doyle production was widely praised for its innovative approach but although I liked Cerveris and LuPone, I missed the sound of a real orchestra and a full-throated chorus.

The movie cuts some of the songs but the music that remains is full-strength (Sondheim’s frequent Broadway collaborators Jonathan Tunick did the orchestrations and Paul Gemignani conducted the orchestra) but while Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett are terrific actors, they are only so-so singers. So I was delighted when I discovered that the Masterworks Broadway series had released a digitally re-mastered 2-disc set of the 1979 original cast album. It’s done up with over a dozen photos from that production, liner notes that include recollections from Victor Garber who played the young sailor Anthony who befriends Sweeney and later falls in love with his daughter Johanna, and two bonus tracks from the one-night Sondheim celebration at Carnegie Hall in 1992 (click here to learn more about it). It’s the kind of stuff that theater geeks love. But you don’t have to be a geek to love this CD. For the music is thrilling, amusing, intoxicating and damn near addictive. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since the CD arrived four days ago. Even when I unplug my iPod, I can’t get the songs out of my head. Nor do I really want to.

And so although, there are new shows I’ve seen—a nice revival of Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Altered Stages, a disappointing retelling of The Trojan Women by the Classical Theatre of Harlem —and that I should be writing about, I simply had to share the passion that this theater lover has for Sweeney Todd with those of you who love theater too.