Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 30-October 19, 2016
Sweeney Todd: “The history of the world, my sweet ...
Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat”
The musical at this Shaw Festival is Stephen Sondheim’s classic from 1979, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sondheim subtitles the work “a musical thriller”, but the Shaw Festival production hardly lives up to that designation. A large part of the problem is the awkwardness and the confusion of ideas in the design. Where, when or why the action is occurring is not clear at all. Another problem is the distinctly unmenacing nature of Ben Campbell in the title role, certainly the most docile Sweeney Todd I’ve seen. While the music-making of the ensemble and the orchestra is excellent, the action refuses to grab one by the throat, so to speak.
Hugh Wheeler’s book for the musical is based on a play on the same subject by Christopher Bond from 1973, which in turn is based on the anonymous Victorian penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846-47). All three concern a murderous barber who slits the throats of his customers, whose bodies are then used by a local pie-maker, Mrs. Lovett, as fillings for her meat pies. Bond’s play supplied Wheeler for with a motive for Todd’s actions. The corrupt Judge Turpin and his accomplice Beadle Bamford had kidnapped and raped Todd’s wife and left her for dead. Turpin had Todd transported to Australia on false charges and then confined Todd’s daughter in his house as his ward. Todd thus longs for revenge against the Judge and the Beadle, but Mrs. Lovett persuades him to expand his revenge against society in general (which will help supply her with more free meat).
Director Jackie Maxwell and designer Judith Bowden seem to have conflicting notions of what their concept for the production is. Bowden’s set is an incredibly detailed, deliberately unattractive recreation of the inside of a modern derelict building. The I-beam construction and curtain glass windows suggest it had been built in the the International style. The programme gives the location of the action as Fleet Street. During the brief overture we see two youths sneak into the building and begin to spray graffiti on a wall when the chorus sings its first line, “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” and they run off.
This attack is apparently responsible for the appearance of the chorus. On the one hand, they might be a chorus of ghosts anxious to tell us the story of the events that took place at the combined barber shop and pie shop at 186 Fleet Street, now demolished. On the other, they are merely the chorus of the play. Why the graffiti artists should awake them, however, is then a mystery and so is why they are dressed in all styles from the 1840s to the present. Bowden has costumed Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett as if they lived in the 1940s, not the 1840s. Usually this sort of multi-period costuming is meant to emphasize the universality of the story, but what aspect other than the most general one of revenge is universal in the story of a murderous barber and a cannibalistic pie-maker?
So, if the set represents some location in the present, what then are we seeing – a flashback or a re-enactment? If it is either one the costuming is wrong. The cast is not made up as ghosts nor does the direction emphasize that they are actors. In either case the multi-period costumes don’t work. Since a tale told by a chorus is an alienation device anyway, Maxwell would have been better off deciding to go for the cast as actors in the present playing out the story and to forget the notion of the action re-occurring in the same place.
The set also makes staging the action quite awkward. At one point Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford walk past Todd’s barber chair and down the stairs to find Todd’s shop which is, of course, just up the stairs. Todd’s special barber chair is extremely awkward to use requiring five fussy moves before it can deposit the murder victim through a trap door into the shop below instead of just one startling movement as in all previous productions. Second, according to the confused geography of the set, Todd’s victims appear to slide directly into Mrs. Lovett’s oven below when, of course, they should fall elsewhere for preparation. Bowden has also not defined exactly where the oven doors are, which makes Todd’s disposal of Mrs. Lovett rather too abstract.
The main difficulty with the casting is Benedict Campbell in the title role. He has a fine resonant singing voice, with “Epiphany” as his greatest success. The problem is that neither Maxwell nor Campbell has very well defined Todd’s character arc. Under Maxwell, Campbell’s Todd starts out as a rather sympathetic character. He seems to thirst for vengeance more in the abstract instead of being totally obsessed as the role is more effectively played. This Todd may be troubled but fundamentally he always appears sane. He may flicker in and out of anger or depression but never comes across as terrifyingly out of control. This is completely the opposite approach to John Doyle’s famous production seen in Toronto in 2007, where Sweeney Todd seemed on the brink of madness from the ever first only to be pushed over the edge by his failure to kill Turpin. The massacre of his subsequent clients appeared like a maniac over-compensation for having missed his mark when he had the chance. In Maxwell’s production Campbell is hardly the “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and more like Mrs. Lovett’s contented fresh meat supplier.
Jeff Irving is in fine voice as the idealistic Anthony Hope in love with Johanna and seems to represent the possibility for goodness in the musical’s dark world. As Johanna, Kristi Frank displays a operetta-like soprano in “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” but seems to run out of breath in her duet with Irving, “Kiss Me”. Marcus Nance, as familiar from opera as musicals, uses his huge baritone to make Judge Turpin a terrifying and troubled character. Meanwhile, Jay Turvey’s Beadle is as smarmy as the Judge is anguished. Patti Jamieson, unrecognizable as The Beggar Woman, has patterned her character more after actual street-people than after Victorian clichés of the poor and is all the more effective for doing so.
Two especially fine performance come from Kyle Blair as Pirelli and Andrew Broderick as Tobias. Pirelli’s operatic shaving contest commentary is high lying and extremely difficult but Blair polishes it off with panache. He makes Pirelli’s private confrontation with Todd especially memorable when Pirelli drops his superior faux-Italian accent to reveal his true nature as an ordinary Irish thug. Blair effects such a complete change in accent and manner you have to blink to see if the same actor is really playing both. Broderick is comic enough as Pirelli’s assistant singing “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir”, but only when he sings “Not While I’m Around” do we hear how rich and lovely his voice really is. Broderick also uses a light touch in conveying Tobias’s mental disability so that it appears much more natural that is sometimes the case.
Musical director Paul Sportelli leads the 16-member orchestra in an exciting account of the score. It is a pity therefore that the sound engineers amp up the volume at the start and close of the musical which give some of the voices an unpleasant edge that they don’t naturally possess.
Anyone who happened to see the touring production with Len Cariou and June Havoc in 1982 or the radical re-imagining of the work by John Doyle in 2007 will find the current production strangely uninvolving. While the music itself is full of anxiety and forward movement the staging fails to thrill despite the efforts of most of the cast. Doyle’s production was particularly disquieting because he depicted all of the characters, even Johanna and Anthony, as mad in some way. The present production is an unusual case at the Shaw where the design and directorial conception work against, not with, the effectiveness of the piece. It’s rather too bad that it is Jackie Maxwell’s final work for the Shaw as Artistic Director, but given her brilliant Uncle Vanya this season let’s hope the next Artistic Director invites her back, as she did Christopher Newton, to help keep the spirit of continuity alive in the best work the Festival produces.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Benedict Campbell as Sweeney Todd and Corrine Koslo as Mrs Lovett, ©2016 David Cooper; Kyle Blair as Adolfo Pirelli and Benedict Campbell as Sweeney Todd with the cast of Sweeney Todd; Andrew Broderick as Tobias Ragg and Corrine Koslo as Mrs Lovett, ©2016 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2016-08-13
Sweeney Todd