Musical Theater Heritage’s Sweeney Todd leaves rough edges on a bloodless Sondheim staging
Photo by Tim Scott
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not singular in its arc of rediscovery and reinvention in the auteur’s repertoire. First staged on Broadway in 1979, the grotesque and maudlin deep dive into nihilism finds regular resurgence with each new generation. Unlike much of Sondheim’s other works—especially noticeable locally in White Theater’s Into the Woods at this time last year—the focus here is not on the difficult branching choices between condemnation and redemption. Todd, rather, delights in a dour dedication to single-minded downward detours toward inescapable dead-ends.
Sweeney Todd follows the story of Benjamin Barker (Zachary Ford), a wrongfully imprisoned barber who returns to Victorian London after 15 years to find his wife dead and his daughter, Johanna (Catherine Rae), in the clutches of the corrupt Judge Turpin (Drew Duncan). Taking on the alias Sweeney Todd, he partners with Mrs. Lovett (Katie Kalahurka), a pie shop owner, who proposes a grim business idea: he can use the bodies of his victims to make meat pies. As Todd embarks on a bloody quest for revenge against Judge Turpin, his thirst for vengeance consumes him, leading to a series of tragic and violent events. Johanna, unaware of her father’s true identity, becomes entangled with a young suitor, Anthony, complicating the already dark narrative.
Sondheim’s approach to an industrial dissonance of clamoring, broken harmonies tackled across weaving narratives of murderous longing opposite purity and young love offer up a disconnect that feels as disquieting as its own motivations. Rather than go for the full-on overwhelming performance that most stagings employ, especially heavy use of pipe organs, a three-piece of musicians directly on stage offers a stripped-back delivery that allows these songs to live in the chorus’ limelight.
Photo by Tim Scott
Similar to the restricted accompaniment, the show makes a creative choice in keeping the meat and gore off the stage, settling instead on a bloodless take that allows the violence to be sold via frozen performances and sudden lighting shifts. Calling it a bloodless affair means almost entirely technical, as this adaptation certainly leaves the cruelty and horror front and center—all while adapting the cartoonish arterial spray for a more audience-friendly approach. We found it a surprising decision but one that, along with other sequences based entirely on shadowplay or pantomime, allowed this tale to exist more in the imagination of the beholder. It all comes together in a more intimate way, and again allows the actors to remain the main, oft only focal point.
Photo by Tim Scott
Ford’s decisions on how to portray Todd eschew nuance or clever plotting and instead delights in making him a singular, zombie-like shadow of a man—a tethered shadow with singular dedication to his daughter’s protection and no will to live outside the bounds of his fixation. At points, Ford allows his singing to deliberately break from the arrangement to dangle as if each setback causes him to surrender even further into his inescapable abyss. Kalahurka’s Mrs. Lovett flings hard in the opposite direction, as her manic energy and demented deliveries provide a stunning opposition to our lead character’s hypnotic slow march to the end.
Musical Theater Heritage’s staging, running throughout October, ignores the trappings that another ensemble would consider top priorities to make an evening far more human and equally inhuman. We’ve never seen a version quite like this, and we highly recommend that you attend the tale of Sweeney Todd while you can.
Sweeney Todd runs through Oct. 27, 2024 at Musical Theater Heritage [2450 Grand Blvd, Suite 301] and tickets are available here.
Photo by Tim Scott
