A Cut Above

Sweeney Todd

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by Hugh Wheeler

Directed by Brenda Walker

At the Kirkland House JCR

Through this weekend

MANY OF the performers and producers behind last spring's stellar production of Ain't Misbehavin' are also behind this production of Sweeney Todd. It's a big jump from the easy-going, cabaret-like, no-frills intimacy of the former to the moody, sprawling spectacle of the latter, but Director Brenda Walker and company pull it off.

Sweeney Todd is, as the many reprises of the opening number tirelessly remind us, the infamous nineteenth century "demon barber of Fleet Street." Back in London after serving 15 years of a life sentence in Australia for a crime he did not commit, Sweeney (Jonathan Tolins) seeks revenge on corrupt Judge Turpin (Adam Wolman), who framed him in order to steal away Sweeney's wife. He starts up his barbershop again above the pie shop of his old landlady, Mrs. Lovett (Rhonda Edwards), who tells him that shortly after his exile, Sweeney's wife poisoned herself, and his infant daughter Joanna became Turpin's ward.

Sweeney hopes to exact his revenge on Turpin and his henchman, Beadle Bamford (Wayne Johnson), by luring them to his barber chair, then slitting their throats. In fact, he decides to kill everyone, rich or poor, who sits in his chair--the rich because they are evil and the poor because they are miserable. Mrs. Lovett thinks this is a fine plan, since the pie business has been slow, and meat is scarce... Karl Marx, meet the Leatherface family.

Of course, there are complications. Mainly, Anthony (Pier Carlo Talenti), Sweeney's sailor friend, and the now-grown Joanna (Ginna Carter) have fallen in love with each other. But Turpin, responding to his own semiincestuous feelings for Joanna, decides to marry her himself and shut her away from the outside world.

Sweeney is surely a difficult show to put on. Stephen Sondheim's often dissonant, virtually non-stop score, is hard enough to sing, but Music Director David Gregg increases his singers' burden by backing them with only a piano and a synthesizer. Fortunately, the actors and the large chorus are up to the task, though Talenti and Carter occasionally fall flat on Sondheim's melodically meandering ballads.

A greater challenge, though, is that the actors have to sustain for nearly three hours the audience's interest in the story of an embittered, vengeful killer whose philosophy is "we all deserve to die." But if such a character can be engaging, then Tolins' Sweeney is engaging. Edwards' Mrs. Lovett is hilarious, as are Johnson's lascivious, foppish beadle and Arthur Fuscaldo's Pirelli, a mountebank rival barber. Wolman's judge is surprisingly sympathetic, and Michael Starr is strong as Tobias, Mrs. Lovett's fiercely devoted young shill.

With all its blood and dismembered appendages, Sweeney is not for the squeamish. Only slightly easier to stomach is the play's moralistic, class-conscious, intellectual baggage--Sweeney is probably the only musical that doesn't allow its singers to smile. Still Sweeney Todd is worth seeing for the shear power of its performances.