HIGH NOTES & CUT THROATS
★★★★
Avery Fisher Hall | New York City
Sondheim imagined his 1979 gothic shocker Sweeney Todd as a chamber piece – and a filthy chamber at that. Much of the action takes place in the cramped room above Mrs Lovatt’s pie shop, from whence he carves up his victims with a barber’s razor. But Sondheim’s music is built along more spacious lines, which the New York Philharmonic fleshes out in this expansive, semi-staged production inhabited by the sizeable talents ofBryn Terfel and Emma Thompson.
Under Alan Gilbert’s baton, it is the thrill of a full orchestra charging through the score that hits you first, colouring its bright and varied moods – the swarming buzz of brass as the eponymous Demon Barber of Fleet Street’s torment grows, or the magic of surrounding his wistful soliloquies, ugly only in the violence of their intention, in a wall of beautiful warm sound. But around the formality of these massed ranks of instruments this staging has a loose, light-hearted feel. The cast dutifully file on, solemnly clutching laminated-cover copies of the score. Bryn Terfel casts his to the floor with devil-may-care abandon, Emma Thompson throws hers with a gulp of mock-fear, and everyone else follows suit – then they overturn the piano to make a makeshift platform, tear their concert dress into artfully-planned disarray, mess up their hairdos and arrange themselves in a fist-raised parody of a Broadway cast in full throttle. There’s always something slightly awkward about a semi-staged approach. Lonny Price’s direction overcomes the enforced Brechtianism of having the orchestra visible on stage with tongue-in-cheek touches – Mrs Lovatt kneads the dough for her pies on the surface of a vast timpani drum, and steals a violinist’s chin rest cloth to clean up with.
Charging among an orchestra that cowers in fear like so many cumbersome cattle, Terfel is a an immaculate Todd, his saturnine power an enjoyable contrast to Johnny Depp’s nervy edge in the 2007 film of the musical. His voice is the real star of the show – wonderfully resonant and rich, it brings a smooth fluency to Sweeney Todd’s complex, octave-spanning musical soliloquies that, in performance, are more often the jagged, cracked outpourings of a man in torment. He’s a cipher, another Peter Grimes whose motives are obscure to the last. Thompson as Mrs Lovatt is more transparent; she’s having a ball, playing the role as the type of gal to end up being thrown out of any party with free booze. She focuses in tightly on the humorous side of the character – where Helena Bonham Carter played the part with sepulcral whimsy, Thompson has all the vigour of a tipsy aunt, her expansive arm movements barely encompassing her glee.
The evening’s starry feel is supplemented by the unannounced appearance of multi-Tony Award winning Audra McDonald, who doesn’t hide her light under her tattered shawl as the Beggar Woman. Full of charisma, she heightens the contrast between her heartbreakingly sweet, rich lament of “Alms! Alms!” and her bawdy propositioning to its brightest and sharpest degree. Christian Borle swoops about as hack-barber Pirelli in a vast cape, full of musical precision and luxuriously trimmed glee in equal measure. Inevitably, some of the supporting cast are left in the shade. Antony Hope is never the easiest of parts – all priggish impetuousness – and Jay Armstrong Johnson’s relative inexperience shows as he struggles with accent and role alike. Neither is Jeff Blumenkrantz fully inflated with The Beadle’s necessary, overswelling pomposity. But the chorus’ ripe, histrionic voices have all the tremulous power needed to stand up to the orchestral big guns.
It’s a joy hearing Sondheim’s score swelling out from a full orchestra and vast chorus, its operatic tinges finding fulfilment in the hands and voices of such talented musicians. Still, it’s hard not to miss Sondheim’s desolate seriousness and gruesome horror in amongst this production’s rushing energy. The story is scurrilous, lifted from an 1846-7 Penny Dreadful that mined the wildest fancies of Victorian London’s streets, which, after a few quick reads, would tread it underfoot again. The idea of baking people in pies is patently ludicrous, and it’s surrounded by plenty of the more colourful trappings of its setting; patent medicine, transported convicts, lunatic asylums. Yet although Sondheim’s lyrics have plenty of witty nods to the humorous side of things, the piece is at heart a revenge tragedy with all the brutality of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as its androgenic pies.
Although here his glistening “friends” are plentiful silvery instruments rather than razor blades, Sweeney Todd is fundamentally a lone, broken man in his squalid attic, consumed by revenge. It’s wonderful to hear the music of his story done justice; how wonderful it would be to see its stars letting rip in a smaller, bloodier chamber.
First published on Auditorium
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