Reimagined ‘Sweeney’ Still Serves a Dark and Hungry God

In December of 1784, a London newspaper reported an unusually grisly crime:

“A most remarkable murder was perpetrated in the following manner, by a journeyman barber…who had been for a long time jealous of his wife. A young gentleman by chance coming into his master’s shop to be shaved…mentioned his having seen a fine girl home to Hamilton street, from whom he had certain favours the night before…the barber, concluding it to be his wife, in the height of his frenzy cut the gentleman’s throat from ear to ear and absconded.”

Some would describe such an offense as horrific, heartless or cold-blooded.

But Cary P. McClelland ’02, director of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, produced by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC), would instead have his audience believe that it is actually a “pathological exercise in love.”

With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney premiered to a warm critical reception in 1979. Winner of eight Tony Awards (including best musical), Sweeney is considered Sondheim’s masterpiece. Obscuring the line between musical theater and opera, Sweeney has been performed worldwide by both theaters and opera companies.

The story centers around the brooding title character and the complex network of relationships that cause his macabre exploits. At the outset of the musical, Sweeney emerges from a 15-year exile imposed by the corrupt Judge Turpin, who lusted after his wife. Sweeney returns to London only to be greeted with news from Mrs. Lovett, a baker of unsavory meat pies, that the judge has raped his wife (leading her to poison herself) and taken their daughter Johanna as his ward. While Sweeney slaved “in a living hell,” Johanna has grown into a beautiful young woman, the object of affection of both the licentious judge and the young sailor, Anthony Hope, who aided Sweeney in making it back home to London.

As the plot moves towards an inevitably tragic conclusion, strange alliances form, as between Sweeney and Lovett—who realize a gruesomely efficient way to capitalize on the barber’s growing bloodlust and Lovett’s need to add “something special” to her failing pie business.

Unlike previous retellings of Todd’s macabre ventures, Sondheim and Wheeler’s musical defies the temptation to sensationalize the tortured barber or his counterparts. With an impeccable balance of vulnerability, humor and melancholy, each character becomes uniquely sympathetic.

Therein lies the true horror of Sweeney Todd. Though the play’s tragic ending is itself disturbing, the fact that the audience sympathizes with the perpetrators of such bloodshed is exponentially more disturbing.

Perhaps as unlikely as the show’s subject matter, though, is its course to the Harvard stage. Ordinarily, to put up a show in the Loeb, students assemble a staff and make a detailed proposal that the HRDC Board weighs against other similar proposals in selecting the productions to fill out its season. This semester, however, the process yielded no options that the board deemed viable. Consequently, in accord with the HRDC constitution, the board produced its own production, enlisting former HRDC President McClelland as director and Kathleen A. Stetson ’03 as musical director.

Though McClelland is an established theatrical force at Harvard, previously starring on the mainstage and directing productions both in the Experimental Theater and for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he has never before directed a musical. Yet McClelland respects the art form. “Musicals are really interesting because sometimes they get a bum rap for being sort of undercomplicated and simple in aspirations. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Particularly, this show is not that,” he said.

McClelland also has no insecurities about taking on such a mammoth assignment for his first foray into musical theater. “I just don’t get scared by it. I just focus on my job,” he said

The same is true of Stetson, a music concentrator, who is making her debut as music director. She attributes much of the staff’s success to the division of talent and labor. “Cary knows about musicals, but not about music, and that’s why we’ve worked so well together.”

Both Stetson and McClelland contend that the richness of Sondheim’s score, while supplying the greatest challenge of the production, also aids the execution of the show. McClelland notes that “the music takes care of a lot aspects that would otherwise consume me…it’s actually kind of liberating.”

That’s not to say, though, that McClelland has not put great thought into his conception of the show. Regarding McClelland’s approach to the production, Sweeney himself (Benjamin D. Margo ’04) said, “He’s not treating the play as if it’s too precious, not like something that he has to do the way other people have done it.”

For the production’s setting, McClelland has jettisoned the traditional accoutrements of mid-19th century London and instead adopted an often post-apocalyptic look that pulls on a wide variety of time periods.

Extensive efforts have also been taken to deal with the audience-addressing chorus that presents Sweeney’s story. In order to clarify the viewpoint, the story now emanates from the mind of one of the central characters, the oft stepped-upon Tobias.

Stetson explains that this tactic is meant to make the show “more accessible, easier to understand and relate to,” as well as to more clearly define the role of the chorus. “The chorus represents what’s in his mind, rather than just being like a Greek chorus,” she said.

Yet despite a massive physical production that sets scenes in a person-sized birdcage and a surreal infomercial, McClelland denies that his approach to the play is about uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness.

“There’s the idea that somehow because certain choices were made, they were made for a certain uniqueness as opposed to for a kind of legitimacy or solution,” McClelland says. “I think the choices bring out the best parts of the script or the tale or the people.”

theater

Sweeney Todd

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by Hugh Wheeler

Directed by Cary P. McClelland ’02

Music Directed by Kathleen A. Stetson ’03

Produced by Jeremy W. Blocker ’04, Julian O. Breece ’03, Naomi R. Krakow ’03, Philip W. Michaelsen ’02

Loeb Mainstage

April 26-May 4