For fans of Sweeney Todd, and they are legion, the latest revival at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre will not disappoint, and not just because it stars Josh Groban as “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” although for the more than 1,500, full-house audience members at Saturday’s matinee he was definitely a big draw.
The attraction of this 1979 Tony-winning Stephen Sondheim musical, with a book by Hugh Wheeler, escapes me. I saw the original with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, the Broadway revival in 2005 with Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone and now I’ve sat through this nearly three-hour production. I still don’t see why a show about a vengeful, depraved murderer in Victorian England who slits people’s throats, drops them from a rigged barber chair into a hole in the floor and the oven below, where their flesh becomes filler for his partner-in-crime’s meat pies is so beloved. As the chorus sings “raise your razor high, Sweeney,” the audience cheers him on, delighting in each bloody body. It’s beyond creepy to me.
Yes, the Tony Award-winning music is mesmerizing, here with a 26-member orchestra, and it has some nice songs, like “Johanna,” beautifully sung by Jordan Fisher, and “Pretty Women” and “Not While I’m Around,” but people see Sweeney as a sort of justified anti-hero avenging the wrong done to him 15 years before when an evil judge had him transported to Australian because he coveted Sweeney’s wife. It’s operatic, and is often performed by opera companies, but it’s not for me.
And then there’s Sweeney’s partner, the inhuman Mrs. Lovett whose idea it is to bake the murder victims into meat pies, which then turn her failed bake shop into a booming business. She’s played in this revival by Annaleigh Ashford with exaggerated physical comedy that the audience loved but I had trouble understanding her cockney accent.
Under Thomas Kail’s (Hamilton) direction this revival is full scale, a sharp contrast to the paired down version in the 2005 revival from John Doyle. Mimi Lien’s sets, Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Steven Hoggett’s choreography are top notch, as is Natasha Katz’s lighting that evocatively creates the dark, brooding London underworld. Theatrically it meets the highest standards but I didn’t leave the theatre uplifted as I should have after seeing quality work. I can’t separate myself from the grotesque subject matter, and I don’t remember the other production being as bloody as this one.
One of the friends who saw the original with me has no memory of it at all. I can understand forgetting some of the intricacies of the plot but I don’t know how anyone could forget the gore and the horror of the crimes, enthusiastically approved of by audiences that find them funny. She thinks she must have been too traumatized to remember.
