Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✭✭
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim,
book by Hugh Wheeler, directed by John Doyle
Mirvish Productions, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
November 7-December 9, 2007
John Doyle’s brilliant re-imagining of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is a must-see not only for fans of this specific musical but for anyone who wants to experience a totally new way of presenting musicals in general. Doyle has taken the work apart and put it back together again in ways that make its themes clearer and its world more alien and frightening.
The most obvious change is to require the ten singers also become an on-stage orchestra, with some cast members playing up to three different instruments. In the first place this extends immeasurably the built-in alienation effect created by the choral narration of the wicked deeds of murderous barber Sweeney Todd (David Garry) and the maker of human-flesh pies, Mrs. Lovett (Judy Kaye). Second, it makes the world on stage even more fantastic where the instruments the singers play become extensions of their personalities. One thinks especially of the skitterings on the cello of the nervous Johanna (Lauren Molina), the ardent violin playing of the frightened Tobias (Edmund Bagnell) and the hilarious but ominous blurtings on the tuba of Mrs. Lovett. Musicals were always an unusual world where characters would sing to express themselves. To have them also play instruments takes this to another stranger dimension.
Doyle’s second change is to enhance the expressionist nature of the work by presenting it from the point of view of a single character. This technique often used in avant-garde opera productions is new to musicals. The works opens with Tobias in a mental institution, being released from a straitjacket and gag. If you know the story you realize immediately that his awareness of the horrifying events in the barber- and pie-shop must have driven him insane. He seems to imagine the other inmates of the asylum acting out the story that constantly replays in his mind with whatever furniture comes to hand--a few chairs, trestles, a ladder and a large coffin and props from the huge back wall of Victorian bric-a-brac. Doyle has the singers act out the story as if it were a ritual, symbolically circling the coffin, singing forward rather to each other and pouring water into a pail at each bloodletting. The completely non-naturalistic acting has the effect of heightening the horrors on stage.
The performances of the cast, both as singers and musicians, are all outstanding. In fact, this is musically and dramatically the best Sweeney Todd I’ve ever seen. A wonderfully expressive singer, Kaye delightfully makes the role of Mrs. Lovett her own. She may be hilariously talkative but Doyle makes clear that she is the epitome of evil as she blithely cleans her dismembering instruments while singing a ditty about the seaside. Garry shows Todd as a man fatally blinded by his obsession of seeking vengeance to the world around him. He’s a ruined man who wants to ruin the world in return. Bagnell as an innocent driven mad makes Tobias a character not unlike Poor Tom in King Lear. The young lovers, Molina and Benjamin Magnuson as Anthony both come off as people obsessed, Anthony with Johanna and she with freedom at any price.
By de-emphasizing the Grand Guignol that has dominated previous productions, Doyle reveals the musical as a savage critique of capitalism and the supporting belief in social Darwinism. It’s a man eat man world out there. Thanks to Doyle this nightmare has never been more musically seductive or more psychologically unnerving.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-11-08.
Photo: Cast of Sweeney Todd with David Hess as Sweeney. ©David Allen.
2007-11-08
Sweeney Todd