Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" is unlike anything you've seen at the Music Circus. But then, "Sweeney Todd" is unlike any other creation in American musical theater.
Similar to "Porgy and Bess" as more opera than musical, "Sweeney" takes a horror story and makes it, if not popular entertainment, then entertainment accessing popular sentiment.
Sondheim has said, "The piece is about being done an injustice and getting your revenge. I think everybody has feelings of revenge. Sweeney acted on them and audiences sense that, and they identify with him."
The ambitious, satisfying new Music Circus production, directed and choreographed by Glenn Casale, indulges itself in Sondheim's indictment of corrupt Victorian life. The squalor and poverty that much of London experienced at the time is translated through the actors' rough makeup and Franne Lee's evocative costumes originally created for the New York City Opera.
Based on Christopher Bond's adaptation of a bloody 19th century drama, the musical makes what had been a cartoonish monster into a man. In Bond's and then Sondheim's versions, Todd becomes a tragic symbol of the burgeoning Industrial Age. As we first meet him in the chilling opening "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and the subsequent "No Place Like London," we learn that Todd has returned home after being falsely imprisoned.
While he was gone, his wife was raped by the imperious Judge Turpin (the swaggering Michael G. Hawkins), and Turpin now keeps Todd's daughter, Johanna (Carolann M. Sanita), as his ward. The forceful actor-singer Mark Jacoby steadily embodies both Todd's disaffection and his sinister purposefulness.
While the setup is near melodrama, Sondheim's beautiful, complex melodies and intricate, telling lyrics transport the story into a darkly poignant tableau. Todd falls in with the "open-minded," opportunistic meat pie baker, Mrs. Lovett, and a great partnership is formed and sealed with their Act 1 closing duet, "A Little Priest." Mary Gordon Murray's cunning Lovett is as coolly single-minded as Todd. And Murray is a bright match to Jacoby's grim Todd.
Max Von Essen, though familiar to Music Circus audiences, makes a revelatory appearance here as the romantic sailor Anthony Hope. August Emerson gives a stunning turn as the drifting waif Tobias Ragg and Roland Rusinek is suitably magisterial as the The Beadle.
Director Casale doesn't shy from the audacity of this major work, and while there's not an overwhelming sense of tragedy, this "Sweeney Todd" is a triumph nevertheless.
Call Bee theater critic Marcus Crowder, (916) 321-1120. Read his blog postings at www.sacbee.com/21q.
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