Review: Sweeney Todd at the Paramount

This is a modernist Sweeney Todd that has shed all that is baroque in the staging and music, leaving only the melodrama of the story. It's framed as a flashback: as the curtain rises, we see a boy who we later come to know as Tobias, Mrs Lovett's erstwhile assistant and witness to the horrors that transpire in the story. Straitjacketed and gagged, he's clearly in an asylum of the Bedlam sort. The jacket and gag are removed, and, in a conceit not unlike Peter Weiss's Marat-Sade, the story is played out as if by Tobias and his fellow inmates.

Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, Sweeney's barber shop, Judge Turpin's house, and other locations are all represented by means of an enormous black coffin on saw-horse supports, a few chairs, and a ladder. There is also, in the second act, a small white coffin that serves as Sweeney's barber chair and, in the final scene, a representation of the corpse of one of the characters. (The little white coffin clearly operates on some symbolic level, but it seems to have induced a lot of confusion among almost everyone who's seen it. The "Teeny Todd" spoof created by the original cast—Google it, it should be out there somewhere—pokes fun at it by singing, "We don't understand the coffin / Any more than all of you!")

At times, the Doyle staging has more in common with a staged concert performance, with actors singing out to the audience rather than directly interacting with one another, although this element of staging adds extra weight to the times when the actors do engage each other directly. The arrangements of the music, rendered minimal for the actor-orchestra, benefit the score in the way that they emphasize the modernist angularity of Sondheim's music, with its overtones of Sergei Prokofiev and Bernard Hermann. Admittedly, viewers accustomed to Paul Gemignani's rich orchestral arrangements, heard in the original cast recording and in the Burton film, might find the sound a little thin at first. But ultimately the innate emotional power of the music and spot-on delivery of the actors carries the day. If there's any flaw to this production, it's that a number of interstitial pieces of dialogue have been trimmed, and the stylized staging sometimes makes it difficult to follow the exact geography of the action. Those who know the show well (or have at least seen the movie) shouldn't have problems, but complete newcomers may find themselves disoriented.

The touring company is very fine both as actors and musicians, and Carrie Cimma's Mrs. Lovett was especially notable, whether shaking her bum in time to her tuba-playing during "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir," gleefully swapping puns and bad jokes with Sweeney in "A Little Priest," or breaking down at last in the unrelenting finale. This isn't Angela Lansbury's blowsy music-hall turn; this performance, based on Patti LuPone's, is more Weimar cabaret with a touch of Goth style in her ripped fishnet stockings. She was well-matched by Merritt David James's Sweeney, whose singing voice has some of the tenor qualities of Johnny Depp's voice bolstered with theatrical firepower like that which Michael Cerveris brought to the role on Broadway. The only tenuous link in the company in terms of presence and performance is David Alan Marshall's turn as the villainous Judge Turpin; his voice and musicianship are good, but he isn't quite imposing enough, and is all too easily overwhelmed by Sweeney.

This production of Sweeney Todd is a deceptively simple staging, reading at first almost like an experimental black-box theatre piece. The simplicity is in fact the result of a well-oiled machine, and the actors don't miss a beat in the transitions from scene to scene and from acting to music and back again. And in the end, the minimal elegance of the staging allows the audience to focus on the beauty, discords, and humor of the music, and on the emotional heft of the story. It's not a museum piece; it's a living work of art.