"Sweeney Todd" a dark and intimate musical opera filled with revenge

HARTFORD - Revenge is a dish that is best served cold, unless it comes in a tasty meat pie.

Those unconventional pies along with some powerful music, are served with zest in the Bushnell Memorial Theater’s unplugged version of "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

This production features 10 vocalists who also play all the instruments in a musical operatic tour-de-force performance that is darkly ironic and about as bleak as it gets.

The show is set in 19th Century London where grime and filth, death and cholera ran rampant during the infant stages of industrial age.

It is based on a legend of a vengeful, psychotic barber who is wrongfully sent to jail by an amoral judge who commanders the barber’s wife and infant daughter.

Todd returns years later to seek his revenge, with razor in hand. Mrs. Lovett, Todd’s landlord and pastry shop owner is short on meat. Todd begins his killing spree and Lovett comes up with the ingenious though gruesome plan to use the accumulating bodies created by Todd’s vengeance against humanity as the pie’s meat filling. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The musical opera was made into a 2005 movie starring Johnny Depp, and directed by Tim Burton, and would be a fine film to see as a precursor to this show - sort of like cliff notes.

The movie was much more realistically explicit and visual, while this stage production thankfully has more symbolism and conceptually wrought violence.
When the barber Todd slits his victim’s throats, for example, it is done with a broad gesture, a flash of red lights, with the "blood" poured from one bucket into another.

The original Stephen Sondheim production first premiered on Broadway in 1979 with a 27-piece symphonic orchestra and a 30-member cast, directed by legendary director Harold Prince.

This more intimate, pared down version of "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" with the actors doubling as the chamber orchestra, was first produced by John Doyle in 2005, primarily because his regional theater couldn’t afford a huge production.

The vocalists/musicians at Mortensen Hall were all professional and capable, with the grim Sweeney Todd played commandingly by Merritt David Janes, and the terrific Carrie Cimma playing the zealous and industrious entrepreneur meat pie baker Mrs. Lovett.

Judge Turpin, played by Connecticut native David Alan Marshall, has a stunning bass voice, but he is far too young and good looking to play a creepy evil judge old enough to be the father of a teen-age daughter, Johanna, played by Wendy Muir.

Muir has a gorgeous soprano voice and plays the cello like nobody’s business, but she is a brunette, and the musical opera refers to her yellow hair repeatedly. A wig would have been a good idea.

The humor doesn’t get much blacker, such as when Mrs. Lovett and Todd sing in "A Little Priest" that eating actors isn’t so great, because they always arrive "overdone," while priests are the best, because they have lived a clean life.

When his victims die under Todd’s blade, the ensemble sings that "they went to their maker incredibly shaved."

Set in an insane asylum, this interpretation seems to pose the question - do the real crazy people reside inside or outside the nuthouse?

The strong cast sang the complicated, sophisticated, dissonant music clearly and well, beautifully illuminating the subtle harmonics in Stephen Sondheim’s eccentric and ironic score.


SWEENEY TODD - THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

3 1/2 stars
Theater: The Bushnell
Location: Mortensen Hall, 166 Capitol Ave. Hartford
Production: Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Hugh Wheeler. Direction recreated by Adam John Hunter. Sound designed by Shannon Slayton. Lighting designed by Paul Miller.
Running time: 2 ½ hours, plus one 15-minute intermission.
Show Times: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. through Oct. 19.
Tickets: $16.50 - $65. Call 860-987-5900 or visit their website at www.bushnell.org.

ACTOR...CHARACTER
Merritt David Janes ... Sweeney Todd
Carrie Cimma ... Mrs. Lovett
Matt Cusack ... John Fogg
Chris Marchant ... Tobias
David Alan Marshall ... Judge Turpin
Patty Lohr ... Beggar Woman
Bob Bohon ... The Beadle
Duke Anderson ... Anthony
Wendy Muir ... Johanna
Ruthie Ann Miles ... Pirelli