✭✭✭✩✩

by music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, directed by Morris Panych

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

March 27-April 19, 2003

During CanStage's production of Stephen Sondheim's great musical Sweeney Todd, a huge open-mouthed, mustachioed face of a man descends looking like a an old-fashioned funhouse entrance.  In a funhouse the scares are fake and soon forgotten--so, too, in this production.  Like the gore-dripping razor looming over Ken Macdonald's set, director Morris Panych has gone for the obvious and superficial.

The story, deriving from 19th-centruy melodramas, tells of a barber who seeks revenge for personal injustices done to him by a corrupt judge and for the general iniquities of society by slitting the throats of selected customers who then become the fillings of meat pies made by his partner in crime Mrs. Lovett.  The original 1979 production was a trenchant neo-Brechtian critique of capitalism and social injustice, mixing horror and comedy to cause deliberate unease.  Panych, however, has so emphasized the comedy he completely blunts the show's edge.  He has so stylized the action that the show's multiple murders are greeted with laughter.

In the title role George Masswohl is strong vocally, but he can't communicate the madness of Todd's "Epiphany" when his revenge widens to include all of society or Todd's full horror at the end.  As Lovett, Fiona Reid's detailed acting and precise diction put across the complex songs.  She's delightfully dotty but the note of malice is missing.  Tyley Ross and Regan Thiel do nothing to make the two lovers seem less bland.  Michael Fletcher's Judge Turpin is merely pompous not evil.

In contrast, Bruce Dow as the rival barber Pirelli and Damien Atkins as a skulking beadle know how to make exaggeration menacing.  Top honours go to Shaun Amyot as Pirelli's assistant Tobias and Mary Ann McDonald as the crazed, cadaverous Beggar Woman.  They more than anything give the show some humanity and sense of outrage.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-04-03.

Photo: George Masswohl and Fiona Reid. ©2003 Canadian Stage.