Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street reviews
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to Sweeney ToddComedy, horror collide in macabre musicalCitadel's Sweeney Todd a guilty pleasure, served with relish
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| EDMONTON JOURNAL By LIZ NICHOLLS February 13, 2010 |
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In the thrilling musical that opened on the Citadel's Maclab stage Thursday, you'll watch an enterprising retailer named Mrs. Lovett have the best and brightest idea of her life right before your very eyes.
Dawning realizations are a dime a dozen in theatre: the open mouth, the double take, the half-step backward. But this one is different: absolute inspiration and absolute practicality. And, bewitchingly, you'll get it at precisely the moment Mrs. Lovett's stage companion — a simmering, vengeance-bent barber who has just slit his first throat — gets it.
"Seems an awful waste," she says, briskly pondering the corpse. A business partnership is born in that moment: the serial killer and the industrious, upwardly mobile baker who turns the deceased into meat pies. Capitalism at its finest, celebrated in one of the most gruesomely funny, rhymed songs in the repertoire: "have a little priest. ..."
The scene comes hot on the heels of Sweeney Todd's Epiphany, in which, thwarted in his revenge against the judge who has stolen his wife and daughter, he turns, chillingly, to indiscriminate murder. And it says everything about the audacious juxtapositions of Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical reinvention of a Victorian revenge melodrama.
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| Nicole Robert and Réjean Cournoyer in the Citadel's production of Sweeney Todd photo: Ian Jackson, Epic Photography |
They get the full weight of black comedy and horror from the stars of Bob Baker's compelling production, served, like Mrs. Lovett's pies, with relish. Réjean Cournoyer's desperate gaiety is such a startling, and perfect, outgrowth of Sweeney's explosive rage and brooding sorrow. "What's the sound of the world out there? Those crunching noises pervading the air? It's man devouring man!" sings Cournoyer's Sweeney, savouring the ironies built into the pie shop. Nicole Robert, positively twitching with glee (as her red topknots amply convey), captures the chipper bustle and chin-up cheerful crudity of the music hall in her Grand Guignol double-portrait of ruthlessness and unrequited love that isn't without a soupcon of sadness.
As she says of her bestseller tourtieres, "it's all in the herbs." They're a riveting pair. And in Baker's vividly blood-streaked production, set boldly in a jagged, geometric world of black and pewter with slashings of red (designer: Mary Kerr) and gorgeously flamboyant costumes, they lead a cast that includes out-and-out grotesques, romantic ingenues, and a chorus that relishes every dark thought.
What they're working with, under the expert musical direction of Don Horsburgh (the best in the biz), is a score of infinite and fascinating variety, dramatic heft — and operatic difficulty. To call this production well-sung, then — occasional vagaries of accent notwithstanding — is to say a lot.
Cournoyer, an actor of intensity, has a powerful and soulful voice. And he uses it to create a dangerous figure — tense, passionate, furious — not a caricature with trimmings.
The smaller roles are juicily occupied. John Ullyatt is a riot as the smirky, vicious Beadle. Jeremy Baumung is hilariously outrageous as Sweeney's fake-Italian rival barber. Doug MacLeod's sinister Judge Turpin exercises another kind of obsession with tangible creepiness. And as Tobias, the little servant who knows too much, Andrew Stelmack, who has a lovely voice, makes something truly eye-watering of his lyrical duet with the disconcerted Mrs. Lovett, Not While I'm Around. He's a find.
It makes you realize that the young lovers — the golden-haired Johanna (Kaylee Harwood) and the sailor Anthony (Jeff Irving) — are a tad bland, neither striking enough to hint at a parody of Love's Young Dream or ardent enough to be the real thing.
Director Baker seems fully at home with the extravagant theatricality and dramatic urgency of this strange and wonderful piece. The staging is, er, razor sharp, from the Marat/Sade pageant of asylum escapees to the dislocation of the chorus under separate shafts of light.
The effect is marred only occasionally by a design that works better in some scenes than in others. The subterranean bake shop, for example, seems oddly anticlimactic, spread out like the back end of something more interesting.
But these are cavils. It's an exuberant evening of theatre. Fabled though it is, Sweeney Todd is rarely produced. It would be mad to miss the chance.
Colin MacLean review | Graham Hicks review
Citadel production of Sweeney Todd focuses on the tragedy
| EDMONTON SUN By COLIN MacLEAN February 13, 2010 |
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FIVE SUNS OUT OF FIVE
In the original New York production of Steven Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a tale used to scare kids for 150 years, Todd was an animated gargoyle with deep-set eyes and lit from below like a Universal Pictures monster.
Bob Baker, the director of the Citadel's luminous new production, has a different concept. Sweeney Todd is really a tragic love story and, if we are to have any feelings for him when madness turns his barber's razor into an implement of death, then we must see that he was profoundly wronged.
Once he was a loving husband and father turned to the dark side by a corrupt magistrate who coveted his beautiful wife and sent him off in chains to Australia on trumped up charges.
Consequently, Sweeney, as played by Réjean Cournoyer, is certainly intense and driven but accessible.
Despite all that, it doesn't take long for Hugh Wheeler's book, and Sondheim's razor sharp words and dissonant music, to send the chills creeping down your spine. This is the closest Sondheim ever came to writing an opera and songs such as Johanna and No One's Going to Hurt You are as lyrical as anything he's ever written.
Mary Kerr's set helps. Dark and forbidding, with twisted angles and expressionist lighting, it's as if she has sliced up the architecture of pre-Dickensian London and hung its essence in space.
Baker has cast the singing voices as skillfully as he has assembled just the right actors for the roles. Cournoyer is a commanding presence and goes spectacularly mad. He is matched in this gruesome twosome by Nicole Robert as his partner-in-crime, Mrs. Lovett. In his deranged mind, all of mankind is responsible for the destruction of his life and he is bent on revenge -- one throat at a time.
He slices up his customers and then his barber's chair dumps them into the basement where Mrs. Lovett bakes them into "the best pies in London."
Cournoyer also has some effective scenes as Doug MacLeod, who is properly evil as the plotting Judge Turpin. In a cast of equals, John Ullyatt brings some needed humour, slyly stealing every scene as Beadle Bamford.
Sweeney Todd is not for everyone as some will find the gruesome story off-putting, but for those who share a macabre sense of humour, the Citadel has come up with a bloody good show.
Review of Sweeney Todd by Graham Hicks
| EDMONTON SUN By GRAHAM HICKS February 22, 2010 |
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PETA would applaud the Citadel's version of Stephen Sondheim's rapidly-approaching-classic-status Sweeney Todd the demon barber of Fleet Street.
How many people have left the Citadel's Maclab Theatre these past weeks, feeling a little queasy about eating meat, for at least a few days? Especially meat pies!
For Sweeney Todd is all about meat pies, made from Sweeney Todd the barber's freshly killed victims by his accomplice Mrs. Lovatt, the secret being to grind the meat three times to bring out its sweetness ...
This show will go down as a very good Citadel production, but not one of the greats.
Correction, it'll go down as great musically — the orchestra under music director Don Horsburgh was an unseen star, simply brilliant at interpreting Sondheim's dizzyingly complex score, capturing its very essence. The singing was a very close second.
But theatre-wise there were problems. I suspect that might have had more to do with a slight squeezing on production budgets this season (because of the recession) than anything else. Plus the lead character's tendency to plod.
I caught the show two weeks into its run, due to being out of town. Yet it still seemed not quite firing on all cylinders. The "subtext," the mysterious underlying chemistry that makes live theatre so compelling, still seemed loose when it ought to have been rock solid tight.
The show was mounted on the Maclab's thrust stage — i.e. the stage pushed out in a U shape with the audience banked around three of its sides. But it looked like (due to budget restraints?) more had to be borrowed from the annual Christmas Carol set than director Bob Baker might have liked — the riser in the middle, moving stairs, revolving sets, swirling set changes.
With the setting basically in the same time period in the same country, there were times when one wondered if one wasn't watching a darker version of the Citadel's Christmas classic.
Part of the challenge was the performance by Réjean Cournoyer himself.
Cournoyer's brooding presence worked brilliantly in his Citadel debut as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, slowly revealing his true self as that play progressed. His imposing physicality — tall, strong, muscular — was just fine for the role he'll reprise later this season, as the Beast in Beauty and the Beast.
But as Sweeney Todd, he was always a half-step slow. No matter how much the marvellous Nicole Robert as Mrs. Lovett tried to hurry him along, Cournoyer's speech seemed ponderous, always a half-second behind.
He couldn't quite nail the character in the first half, and, with a three-hour show, the first half did at times become perilously slow.
The good news is it didn't really hurt the show, because so much else is going on. The ideas — the exploration of evil, fuelled by passion, revenge, greed and self-interest can run so amuck; the singing, the stage moods, the orchestra, the textures. The hits never stopped coming, but they just seemed a tad slow.
Sweeney Todd, by the second half, becomes mesmerizing as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett slip deeper and deeper into the darkness, as other key characters join the horrifying into all-consuming evil, save for the two gentle lovers spared the hideous fate of all others.
Baker's also got the circus in his genes, and can't help but make the execution scenes horrifically fun ... Sweeney does the ol'throat slit, the victim's eyes bulge, the tongue sticks out, the ketchup squirts down the victim's front and down the hatch he goes to Mrs. Lovatt's Hell-inspired cauldron ... to be ground three times for maximum sweetness.
Had the show been a little more fleet of foot, had Baker had a little more budget to support his always fertile imagination, Sweeney Todd could have been a 10.
As is, we'll settle for an 8. And by the way, it's a box office hit.
Everybody loves the macabre, even if it puts them off meat for days.
Meat pie, anyone?
Citadel’s Sweeney Todd Is Razor Sharp
Citadel theatre does justice to the tune-filled Sondheim romp about murder most foul
| SEE MAGAZINE By MICHAEL HINGSTON February 18, 2010 |
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There’s an astonishing total of 34 songs in Bob Baker’s production of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 musical-noir about a blood-thirsty English barber who fights injustice by giving his enemies the closest shave of their lives.
And yeah, that total includes reprises of earlier numbers, but it’s a staggering amount of music any way you slice it.
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| Sweeney: the man with the silver shears, on now at the Citadel |
What’s even more impressive, however, is that the show still manages to be an utter plot machine. There are no musical interludes taken for their own sake; the primary function of every song in Sweeney Todd is to advance the story, either by unpacking a character’s motivation, or simultaneous twisting and raising the stakes, or providing a crucial misdirection for the scenes to come.
Sondheim has a world-class reputation for imbibing his scores with black humour and tongue-twisting vocabulary, but here he deserves credit simply for how fast he can get from Point A to Point B.
The music spills out of every corner, and the story moves at a non-stop sprint — there’s not much to do but get swept gamely up in the torrent.
When the man who calls himself Sweeney Todd first appears onstage, scraggy and wild-eyed, it’s with a palpable cloud of mystery surrounding him.
He’s just arrived back in Victorian London after being rescued at sea by a fresh-faced young sailor. But the fog soon begins to lift: we discover that Todd was unjustly exiled to Australia for 15 years because a crooked judge had eyes for Todd’s wife.
He returns to his former home, above a decrepit bake shop, where the owner, Mrs. Lovett, informs Todd that his wife has since poisoned herself, and that his then-infant daughter was adopted by none other than the nefarious judge himself.
Revenge — courtesy of Todd’s gleaming silver razors — is swiftly declared. Mrs. Lovett even offers to help: she’ll dispose of the bodies by baking them into meat pies.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what genre Sondheim and Wheeler are working in, and that’s not by accident. There’s a cynical wit to much of the material, but also broad swaths of bare tragedy; it’s a musical and an anti-musical at the same time; and it’s completely barbaric, though, curiously, never crude.
The line it walks in terms of tone is thrilling but extremely delicate, and to Baker’s credit, the Citadel production hardly wavers.
For starters, they’ve got two formidable talents in the starring roles. With his piercing eyes and rumbling baritone, Réjean Cournoyer makes a captivating and darkly charismatic Todd.
And he’s more than met his match with Nicole Robert, who positively shines as the street-sassy Mrs. Lovett and is about as brilliant in this role as I can imagine is possible.
Both leads are also capable singers; their shared mini-suite that circles the intermission (from Todd’s snarling Epiphany to Mrs. Lovett’s winningly campy By the Sea) is enough to leave you breathless.
Baker’s production gives the story some added atmospherics and Mary Kerr’s set design spins and twirls, revealing the dark hidden depths lurking just behind every storefront.
In short, it’s an all-around winner. Sondheim’s score is as sharp as one of the barber’s razors, and Baker and company — like Todd himself — know how to use it.
Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: bring on the blood
Sweeney Todd's sharpest when there's buckets of the red stuff
| VUE WEEKLY By DAVID BERRY February 18, 2010 |
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Stephen Sondheim has justified Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street as a musical about the dangers of revenge and obsession, but that seems like a less accurate description than simply a chance to have some gory fun. Whatever subtleties that are in the original tale of Todd that have him go from thirsting for vengeance on the miserable judge that exiled him to exacting his razored revenge on the unsuspecting citizens of London are largely glossed over, or I guess more accurately compressed into one sequence and a catchy tune (A Little Priest!). But, you know, if you're a cynical barber who can carry a melody, be careful, I guess.
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The Citadel's production definitely focuses a little more on the fun side of that equation: what blood there is here trickles down the aprons of Sweeney's victims before it is quickly hidden away, and the menace never leaves the stage area, as evidenced by Todd's (Réjean Cournoyer) invitations to come in for a shave, predatorily huffed out from a 10-foot platform, well away from the paying customers. What could be frightening is instead merely macabre, and there are no feelings of discomfort to get in the way of all that singing.
This isn't necessarily a bad choice. Sweeney Todd is full of tricky little ditties that are both technically demanding — there are singing sequences here that actually seem unnecessarily showy, although to be fair I don't know that the concept actually exists when you're talking about Broadway musicals — and eminently catchy, and most of the songs are punctuated with a humour that, if not exactly black, is at least refreshingly darker than musicals tend to be. The result is a half-dozen genuine ear worms, performed with aplomb by the Citadel cast (Cournoyer's booming growl is a particularly suited choice for the lead), the kind of things that can affect your cadence for hours afterward.
The story itself, or at least how it's played out, isn't quite as neatly gripping. Barber Benjamin Barker returns to London seeking out Judge Turpin (Douglas MacLeod), the man who exiled him for want of his beautiful wife. Taking on the alias Sweeney Todd, Barker's initial straight-line revenge scheme is derailed, but he makes up for it by slicing his way through the city's not-likely-to-be-missed, depositing the bodies into the waiting grinder of pie shop proprietress Mrs. Lovett (Nicole Robert), who is as glad for the fresh meat as for Todd's company. The B plot has Anthony (Jeff Irving), a friend Todd made on his voyage back to the city, romancing Todd's daughter Johanna (Kaylee Harwood), kept under lock and key by Turpin.
It wouldn't be right to call that secondary plot padding, but it is kind of unnecessarily distracting from the, uh, meatier bits of the play, and is used mostly as a kind of convenient device for moving the plot forward, as when Anthony bursts into Todd's barber shop just when it looks like he'll get his early revenge on Turpin. Can't have a musical with one act, can we? Though that in general is indicative of a play that has extended stretches of exposition followed by a flurry of meaningful action, where bodies pile up at an incredible clip. The cast and songs do their part to get you through these bits, but Sweeney Todd works best at its bloodiest, and there could be more of that all around.
A devilishly good demon barber
Edmonton’s Citadel finds the balance between the giggles and the gruesome
| THE GLOBE AND MAIL By J. KELLY NESTRUCK February 22, 2010 |
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Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical about the legendary “demon barber of Fleet Street,” has been given a number of buzz cuts lately.
In the recent Broadway revival and subsequent tour, the actors doubled up as the musicians and Hugh Wheeler's book was pruned extensively.
And while Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation starring Johnny Depp certainly didn't skimp on production values, it did shave things down to a hair under two hours.
The Citadel Theatre’s new revival of Sweeney Todd on the Maclab thrust stage offers the opportunity to see the 1979 musical as it was originally conceived, without anything cut. Except the throats of Todd’s customers, of course.
Bob Baker's droll production runs almost three hours, has a big cast (that looks bigger thanks to doubling), and gives pride of place to one most outrageous props of all time: Todd’s barbershop chair.
Designed by Mary Kerr along with the rest of the funhouse Victorian London production, this chair hangs above the stage in a cage as the audience enters. It’s in that seat that Todd will soon give his notoriously close shaves, after which he pulls a lever that sends the corpses sliding down to the cellar to be ground up into Mrs. Lovett's meat pies.
There are few moments in theatre as simultaneously comic and chilling as the moment where Todd sings a yearning melody about his lost daughter as he nonchalantly shoots customer after customer down the chute.
Sweeney Todd can be taken too seriously or get lost in the Grand Guignol gruesomeness, but Baker’s production finds a nice balance between the fun and frightening, while bringing out the play’s investigation of the folly of revenge.
With his deep, rumbling voice, Réjean Cournoyer is a fine addition to Canada's long line of strong Todds, which began with Len Cariou originating the role on Broadway. He’s truly mesmerizing in the crucial epiphany scene, where the target of his revenge moves from Judge Turpin – who exiled Todd from London on a trumped-up charge 15 years before, then raped his wife and stole his daughter, Johanna – to the entire human race, and our sympathy for him slips away down the chute. “We all deserve to die,” he sings, in surely one of the more nihilistic lines to ever grace a musical.
Tall and twiggy, Nicole Robert gets the laughs and our pity as the chatty, delusional Mrs. Lovett, who has her own twin, darkly comic epiphany a few minutes after Todd’s. That's when she realizes that it would be a shame for his victims to go to waste when her pie shop is lacking in supplies.
The two excellent leads, the rest of the cast and the orchestra do full justice to the near operatic score; it’s musically solid from the opening line of The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.
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| Nicole Robert and Réjean Cournoyer give excellent lead performances |
But there are a couple of missteps in the supporting performances. Andrew Stelmack is a bizarre choice for Tobias, the Dickensian orphan Mrs. Lovett takes under her wing. Though he has a fine voice, Stelmack is pretty old for the part of this “boy,” and his clubfooted, tic-filled performance never stops feeling somehow out of place. It doesn't help that he looks distractingly like stand-up comedian Ron James, which I suppose I can't really fault him for.
As Beadle Bamford, Judge Turpin’s oily henchman, John Ullyatt goes to the bad side of broad, robbing a couple crucial scenes of tension, while Elizabeth Beeler seems too sprightly as the beggar woman.
But the young lovers Anthony and Johanna, Jeff Irving and Kaylee Harwood have the requisite sweetness to balance out the darker corners of the story. And Jeremy Baumung’s punchy Pirelli is good comic relief, though the extreme form-fitting pants Kerr has dressed him in belie Mrs. Lovett's description of his “nice plump frame.”
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