Let's eat! Main Street Productions challenges appetites with 'Sweeney Todd'
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| Returned to his home base, Sweeney Todd celebrates the tools of his trade. |
Main Street Productions has mounted a suitably thrilling production of the show at its home in Westfield to open the 2023-24 season. On opening night, the prerecorded accompaniment found the singers well-matched in music that is intricately put together with Sondheim's witty lyrics; musical director Laura Hicks deserves kudos. Andrea Odle's stage direction is trim, forceful and vivid, realizing Sondheim's vision, which is established and sustained by Hugh Wheeler's book and an adaptation of the Sweeney Todd legend by Christopher Bond.
From Bond came the emphasis on social injustice that generates the title character's insanity. The oppressive nature of society in 19th-century London had been visited upon an expert barber in the form of his young family's destruction. Benjamin Barker was unjustly sent away to Australia, the judicial practice called "transportation," which substantiated British colonization of that huge island on the other side of the world.
"Sweeney Todd" the musical, while it draws well upon the appetite for lurid stories that has fed popular culture for centuries, is rife with social criticism. As he resumes business as the renamed Sweeney Todd, the barber's desire for revenge expands to include all humankind, and a business liaison with a pie-shop proprietor takes on a macabre form of supply and demand: Todd applies his razor lethally to customers' throats, and the fresh corpses, dropped through a trapdoor to the bakehouse below, furnish the amoral Mrs. Lovett with fresh ingredients. In Todd's words, the succinct issue, reversing the social order, is "who gets eaten and who gets to eat." In less literal terms, it's how all societies are organized.
The results in this case are delicious; the cannibalism, surreptitious. The sign out front, touting "the best pies in London," finally lives up to what it promotes. Given the need for a unit set, the sign struck me as somewhat too large, always drawing the attention even when some scenes were laid elsewhere. (I question whether shop signs in a metropolitan neighborhood with mostly pedestrian traffic were typically that large, but I hesitate to stray into realism here.)
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| The look of "Sweeney Todd" in Westfield |
Yet the sturdiness, dark heaviness, and efficiency of Jay Ganz's set are remarkable. A few concessions to limited space were inevitable: I missed the unnerving waltz Todd launches into with the unsuspecting Mrs. Lovett that sweeps her at length into the oven. Her demise is in clever contrast to the barber's usual death-dealing, but that needs to be resorted to because of the Basile Westfield Playhouse's spatial confines.
On the other hand, I was relieved that the vertical "assembly line" for the partnership's product is retained here, in contrast to one professional production I saw that could only manage a horizontal arrangement of barbershop and pie shop. It was like seeing the falling chandelier in "Phantom of the Opera" float in from the wings. In this show, the repeated drop of a closely shaved patron through the trap door provided a marvelous chill every time it happened.
A successful "Sweeney Todd" depends largely on two performances: that of the title character and of Mrs. Lovett. Main Street Productions enjoys the first-rate duo of Mike Lipphardt and Claire Slaven. Lipphardt's haunted expressions and menacing outbursts struck home, yet he varied the representation to speak tenderly of the wife and child he lost long ago to Judge Turpin's predatory behavior. This recessive side of Todd's nature made his scene of recognition cradling his dead wife quite moving and believable.
Slaven lent her effusive vocal variety to the rough and the wheedling sides of Mrs. Lovett equally well. The rapport of the two — divided in motivation but united in crime — was intact throughout. The dialogue in which she implants her business scheme in the barber's head was delightfully brought off, to be succeeded by the uproarious first-act finale, "A Little Priest."
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| Balcony scene: The young lovers make connection. |
Nate Moore (Anthony Hope) and Lizzie Schultz (Johanna Barker) were suitably ardent and calculating as the show's love interest, and vocally represented the show's pinnacle. Moore's sustained high note at the end of Anthony's paean to Johanna went on so long I was about to check my watch to see if it was still Thursday, when he let go of it to a deafening ovation.
Alex Bast put poignancy into the role of Tobias, but a touch more of temperamental instability, perhaps conveying that the character is "on the spectrum," would have made his victimhood even more heart-wrenching. As for the evil Judge Turpin, John Parks Whitaker put across the requisite upper-class sense of entitlement and control. I missed the episode where he punishes himself for his lack of restraint in his desire for Johanna. Resorting to self-flagellation, as called for in the original, would have pointed up the character's hypocrisy, while usefully evoking "the English vice" of mixing pleasure and pain under the whip.
The ensemble was dressed and made up with Goth gloom (except for the delightful fantasy tableau staged to accompany Mrs. Lovett's "By the Sea") and sang the recurrent choral numbers with zest and clarity. They made credible lunatics toward the end, where the general spread of madness is suggested due to Victorian social conditions of entrenched class warfare. Notable precedents in theatrical history are "Marat/Sade" and "The Threepenny Opera." On two occasions a trio and a quintet carried off such Greek-chorus duties, with harmonies approximate but maybe usefully distorted.
The production laudably never shies away from its duty to appall as well as entertain, and Sondheim's genius carries the day.
[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]
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