Sweeney Todd on B'way

Sweeney Todd
by Stephen Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler
starring Michael Cerveris & Patti LuPone
on Broadway, at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre (in previews)

I've always felt that what's wrong with Sweeney Todd is that it fits just a bit too comfortably into the New York City Opera repertoire, where it has been given the ultimate stamp of prestige for a musical. But what's Stephen Sondheim doing writing a grand opera in Victorian garb? And what's a piece supposedly telling us "we all deserve to die" and we are victims of post-industrial alienation doing entertaining the Lincoln Center set in a huge glitzy opera house? (Yeah, what about Wozzeck, you'll say. Fine.) And while Sweeney always delivers some chills and some of Sondheim's grimmest music and lyrics, all the dress-up of it has struck me as not a little pretentious and disingenuous.

Well British director John Doyle has rectified many of these problems. His new production--originally for his own Watermill company in the UK, now restaged on Broadway with an American cast--certainly ain't your father's Sweeney Todd. Or Hal Prince's, at least. Performed by a cast of ten on a claustrophobic stage platform of wooden planks, under harsh white lights, there's nothing lavish about it. And, except for what seems to be the setting of an old apothecary shop, nothing Victorian. Nostalgic for Angela Lansbury's cute red pigtails? Well, gone are the traditional costumes, too, in favor of a wash of generically modern 20th century blacks-and-whites. Sweeney, in his mid-size black leather coat and black skinny tie here resembles a classic gangster or Gestapo agent more than George Hearn's vintage sideburn-twirling villain in a barber's apron. By stripping away the (automatically) comforting and familiar Victorian trappings, Doyle lets us see Sweeney for the 20th century--I dare say modernist--piece it is.

To call Doyle production "Brechtian" might be too facile. There is indeed a "frame" which provides layers of mediation and distance between us and the proceedings. (Basically, it's presented as the vision of the boy, Tobias, supervised by actors in white lab coats. Sweeney himself appears almost as the boogeyman of the boy's fantasies.) Doyle is actually reclaiming the show's roots in Brecht, believe it or not. I was always under the general impression Sweeney was based on an authentic melodrama by this "Christopher Bond," some forgotten 19th century hack, I assumed. But not so fast. Look at what his program bio reveals:

Article Author: Playgoer

Garrett Eisler started the blog, The Playgoer, in May 2005. He has also reviewed theatre for the Village Voice and Time Out New York, and written articles for American Theatre magazine, Stage Directions, and the Best Plays Theater Yearbook series.

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