Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
In a Broadway season perhaps remembered for its beautiful stripped-down minimalism — the intriguing austerity of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain, the less-is-more-almost-concert-like presentations of Into the Woods and Parade — by director Thomas Kail Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will be distinguished, among many other attributes, by his full, undaunted ambition. This revival of Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler’s masterpiece is an amazing theatrical event that aspires to and achieves greatness. You should not miss this.
Featuring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford at the helm of an immaculate 25-piece cast that also includes Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo (who gets one of the most beautiful songs on the score in “Not While I’m Around” and nails it) , the revival, opening tonight at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, argues that Sweeney may be Sondheim’s greatest work (at least until the next production of Sunday in the Park comes along).
A top-flight Broadway creative team at the highest level is led by Hamilton’s Kail, who has perhaps never been so adept at combining grand theatrics with pinpoint attention to even the smallest character detail. He will be joined by choreographer Steven Hoggett, whose indelible work on Harry Potter and The Cursed Child is probably responsible for why so many mistakenly remember this play as a musical. Here, Hoggett imbues Sweeney with an unstoppable momentum through movement, with the vast ensemble of Victorian townspeople twitching and twitching in unison one moment and dissolving into a sort of synchronized chaos the next.
Nowhere is this confluence of direction, choreography, and ensemble performance more exciting than in the musical number that opens Act II: “God, that’s good!” has the townsfolk filling the newly popular cake shop at the center of this chilling tale, in “The Last Supper”— Seated in style at the counter of Mrs. Lovett’s eatery, her orgiastic expressions of delight mixed with fleeting, zombie-like convulsions – after all, they’re eating their Londoners, whether they know it or not.
A bit of Sweeney’s backstory: Based on a character popular in the penny dreadfuls of 19th-century London, the bloodthirsty, razor-wielding barber caught Sondheim’s attention while the composer was attending a 1973 theatrical adaptation of Christopher Bond. Sondheim teamed up with librettist Hugh Wheeler and director Harold Prince to present the 1979 musical, one of the composer’s most operatic, starring Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett, a production that would break into the Broadway lore was to assume an almost mythical status.
The company of “Sweeney Todd” (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
The musical has since been performed many times, both on Broadway and off, usually in stripped down versions that forestall any direct comparison to the big, fully orchestrated 1979 production.
Until now. Throwing caution to the wind, Kail, Groban and Ashford dare to face Sweeney on his own outsized, cake-baked terms and emerge bloody victors. Grammy magnet Groban, whose baritone was used even better than in his eye-opening 2016 Broadway debut as the star of 1812’s far-earned Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet, transforms into a full-fledged A blown and fully developed Broadway star, whose performance lives up to every yell and yell from the army of die-hard brutes who salute his entry into the Lunt fountain. His Sweeney is alternately likable and monstrous – mostly the latter as it should be: Sweeney Todd, once London’s finest barber, now its most diabolical, after 15 years of false imprisonment, his wife raped and left for dead, and his baby behind every calamity by the judge stolen and raised daughter.
Ashford (Sunday in the Park With George, TV series Smash) meets Groban at every turn, and shoulders most of the musical’s comedy elements beautifully – her timing is perfect, her Cockney accent a treasure – and her superb singing fits perfectly well with Groban’s that we’re hoping for an album of Show Tunes duets as a follow up to the inevitable Sweeney cast recording.
So the story goes on. Sweeney, who escaped prison by sea, arrives in London 15 years after his exile and returns to the house he once shared with his wife and daughter, his former hairdressing salon now run by a certain Mrs. Nellie Lovett was converted into a meat pie shop. With meat in short supply, the shop fails (as Lovett explains in the droll The Worst Pies in London), but soon Sweeney’s fantasies of revenge and Lovett’s dreams of financial security coalesce into a fantastical, cannibalistic scheme: the demonic barber becomes the barber slit the throats of his enemies (a list that grows to include all of humanity) and the baker will use the by-product to fill her confections.
Gaten Matarazzo (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
Soon, Sweeney and Lovett have an endless demand for their oddly delicious cakes, and they even hire an assistant, the orphan Tobias (Matarazzo), who wisely replaces the character’s usual and potentially obnoxious stupidity with a simple, sweet naivety that works extraordinary good).
A subplot involves Sweeney’s now nubile daughter Johanna (soprano Maria Bilbao making a fine Broadway debut) and her secret suitor Anthony (the appealing Jordan Fisher from Dear Evan Hansen and Rent: Live). Neither Johanna nor Sweeney’s sidekick Anthony know the girl’s true parentage, and they have their own concerns: Johanna, like Rapunzel, is being imprisoned by the protective – and lecherous – judge who raised her.
Here’s as good a place as any to focus on set designer Mimi Lien’s wondrous, multi-layered creation: Bilbao’s Joan is mostly seen imprisoned high above – sometimes very high above – the musical’s main plot, as is Sweeney’s barbarism (no pun intended) is usually kept in the second tier shop, centered on which is the famous trick barber chair, which sends the dead down a chute and delivers the bodies ready for grinding straight to Mrs. Lovett’s basement bakehouse. Victorian London was nothing but hierarchical.
Jordan Fisher, Maria Bilbao (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
As with her theatrical design for Great Comet, Lien uses every inch of space in the huge performance area of the huge and majestic Lunt fountain. Beneath a great, soot-smeared brick archway and metal bridge that serves a variety of purposes, Lien’s embodiment of Victorian gloom includes a giant, working crane that sways menacingly above the action and sometimes the audience, the very symbol of a new, crushing modernity, a mechanism that is as dehumanizing as it is functional.
The set is part of an impeccable creative effort that includes Emilio Sosa’s costumes, Natasha Katz’ chilling German Expressionist lighting design, J. Jared Janas’ spot on wig, hair and makeup designs, and some exciting special effects courtesy of Jeremy Chernick and Nevin embraces Steinberg’s sound design, which brings lively life and breadth to Jonathan Tunick’s full-bodied orchestrations.
Also in this creative environment and with musical numbers that are among Sondheim’s greatest – just an excerpt: “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”, “Poor Thing”, “Johanna”, “Pretty Women”, “Not While I’m Around” and comic gem A Little Priest – a cast could have countless opportunities to sit out. Sweeney Todd is a vocally challenging work to say the least, and its razor-sharp balance of brutality and comedy in score and book could steal the blood of all but the most able performers.
Ruthie Ann Miles (Photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
This production doesn’t have to worry about that. The large cast is without a weak link. Groban, Ashford and Matarazzo would do well to start thinking about what they’ll be wearing to this year’s Tony ceremony (although the competition in the musical categories will be fierce). Bilbao and Fisher are up to the challenge of maintaining our interest when Sweeney and Mrs Lovett aren’t around, and Jamie Jackson as Judge Turpin and John Rapson as Beadle Bamford are everything one could ask for in Victorian villainy and musical harmony. Ruthie Ann Miles, as a beggar with her own secrets, is as always a delight, whether she’s singing (“No Place Like London”) or like Cassandra before “Mischief! Nonsense! Nonsense!”
Much has been made over the years about Sondheim’s disagreements with Prince over the presentation and even the meaning of Sweeney Todd, with the composer always insisting that the story was a specific, personal tale of one man’s obsession with revenge while Prince was something bigger saw, more expansively, with Sweeney and his London compatriots caught in the mill of the history of industrialism. In this latest revival of the multifaceted work, Kail and his crew of actors and designers have managed to serve both masters, using all the efficiency of this multipurpose barber chair to deliver a Sweeney Todd that is as quirky as it is peppy. and as captivating to look at as magnificent to sound.