‘Sweeney Todd’ A Sadistic Pleasure

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”—Stephen Sondheim’s big, bloody masterpiece of a musical—thrashes around on the stage with such furious glee that the idea of critique starts to look silly. Who has time to worry about little slip-ups when there’s so much murder to be done?

So I mostly don’t care that Friday’s opening performance on the Loeb Mainstage, directed by Jesse A. Wiener ’08 and Jason M. Lazarcheck ’08, teetered on the brink of collapse for nearly three hours. When the production, which will run through May 3, managed to harness the tremendous energy of Sondheim’s devilishly tricky score rather than struggle against it, the results were viscerally thrilling. This show is an embarrassment of riches. It’s just that some of those gems need serious polishing.

Above all, it’s the two brilliantly realized central roles (partners in crime Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett) that make this musical melodrama go. Arlo D. Hill ’09 is fully at home in the title role. Handsome, brooding, and gaunt, his Sweeney strikes a perfect balance between seething rage and frighteningly easy charm. The audience is enchanted and seduced right up until the moment when Sweeney slits the first of many throats, and even then he retains a large share of his psychotic appeal.

And Sweeney, after all, has his reasons. He’s after the lecherous Judge Turpin (Jonathan M. Roberts ’09), who, Sweeney learns, raped his wife Lucy and then adopted his young daughter Johanna (Christine K. L. Bendorf ’10).

This, of course, is only the beginning of the show’s crazed perverseness. When Sweeney returns to London after spending 15 years in exile on a trumped-up charge, the former barber re-opens his “tonsorial parlour” on Fleet Street, one floor up from the meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (Rachel E. Flynn ’09). Business is bad, naturally, and the price of meat is outrageous. Sweeney needs a way to dispose of his impeccably shaved victims. The two enter into a kind of, ahem, professional partnership. Dee-licious!

At the core of Mrs. Lovett’s character is the desire to enter into an emotional partnership as well. She remembers Sweeney from the old days, and she is hopelessly in love with him. The things she will do for love, like the things Sweeney will do for vengeance, pile up invisibly around them and drive the show to its merciless conclusion.

The audience sees it coming, and yet Flynn’s performance is so textured and so alive that you could almost trick yourself into thinking that everything will be OK. She’s funny, libidinous, and caring; when the accumulated weight of her own delusions finally becomes too much to ignore, her response is heartbreaking. “By the Sea,” Lovett’s sung fantasy of future domestic bliss with Sweeney, is one of the show’s most poignant moments.

Sondheim develops these two central impulses—toward love and companionship on the one hand, revenge and destruction on the other—into the vast network of scenes and characters that comprise his vision of 19th-century London. The show’s skeletal set, designed by Grace C. Laubacher ’09, changes from a courtroom to a city street with ease. Its many wooden posts also have the irritating habit, however, of obscuring faces at key moments.

The show’s truly excellent chorus helps to keep Sondheim’s increasingly weighty narrative snowballing along, in spite of a few lengthy scene changes which throw off the show’s momentum. The chorus also gets to sink its teeth into the show’s many variations on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” a jittering, melodic, gothic theme that drives what is surely one of the best opening scenes of any musical.

One of these variations, in particular, sticks in my mind. Three tenors, in spot-on close harmony, stretch the theme’s muscular second half into a single, eerie legato line, singing, “See your razor gleam, Sweeney / See how well it fits / As it floats across the throats of hypocrites.”

What a line! How perfectly matched are all those sliding consonants to Sondheim’s music. Many have said that “Sweeney Todd” is more an opera than a musical, and they’re not far off. Sondheim does not write songs that recapitulate a preceding scene in musical form. His songs move the plot along, they reveal crucial things about different characters, and they draw the audience ever deeper into the show’s own twisted charisma.

The Mainstage production, however, still has a lot of musical work to do. Friday’s performance was consistently marred by sound problems as well as sloppy renditions of the show’s most difficult musical numbers. I got the impression, watching “Kiss Me (Quartet),” that the sheet music had simply defeated the musicians and singers. When the microphones aren’t loud enough, the performers have to shout. And when the performers have to shout, they can’t articulate like they need to. I know “Sweeney Todd” nearly by heart, but I’m pretty sure that for first-timers, Friday’s performance was sometimes very difficult to follow.

This is an especially pressing concern, as “Sweeney Todd” takes great pleasure in manipulating its audience’s desire to know what happens next. In the second act, everything stops for nearly ten, excruciatingly funny minutes as Mrs. Lovett and the Beadle (Evan Ross of the Boston Conservatory), sing ballads and traditional songs at a harmonium. And for every audacious plot twist (and there are dozens), there is an almost-revelation or not-quite-coincidence that dissolves at the last possible moment.

These little moments of narrative sadism are not without their own kind of generosity. “Sweeney Todd” is a ferociously angry work of art that imagines the world as a place where, as Sweeney sings, “We all deserve to die.” What’s so wonderful is that the play wants to open up your senses before doing you in.

—Reviewer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.