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[fancycwabs]

Stage review: 'Sweeney Todd' supplies gore galore, musical mayhem
By Christopher Blank

A few years back, Theatre Memphis caught on to what audiences wanted in their fall theatricals: Dying leaves, shorter days and chilly nights put folks in a funereal mood. Since then we've had a bloody good time chasing vampires in "Dracula" and getting swallowed whole by man-eating plants in "Little Shop of Horrors."

This season, the Lohrey Stage notches up an impressive body count in Stephen Sondheim's gory musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

If the fountains of blood in Tim Burton's big-screen adaptation last year made you woozy, the comparatively subtler slaughter in this stage version will only make you cringe, though it's still impressively graphic.

The payoff is in the modern twist concocted by director Pam Hurley, scenic designer Christopher McCollum and costume designers Andre Bruce Ward and John Luke Hall.

Looking like a cross between Charles Dickens' "Bleak House" and the horror flick "Saw," the production design updates the nearly 200-year-old popular myth about a razor-wielding barber exacting revenge on a cruel world by cutting men's throats and grinding the corpses into scrumptious meat pies.

With its dirty white tiles, iron beams and plastic curtains, McCollum's set is suggestive of a subway stop, lunatic asylum and slaughterhouse rolled into one.

Victorian costumes are spattered in paint, the hairdos are spiked, and the chief antagonist (played by Barclay Roberts) -- a sinister judge salivating over his adopted daughter -- wears a dark frock and sports the tattooed scalp of a Sith lord.

If the aim is a kind of goth-punk Sondheim, then Theatre Memphis delivers, in all but the music.

The composer is a notorious buzzkill for talented actors who aren't great vocalists. Sondheim writes rangy, tongue-twisting music and lyrics for his villains, and elegant ballads for his lovers. You can't act your way around the notes, though at Friday's opening there were attempts to escape them, efforts about as successful as those of half-naked co-eds in heels fleeing an ax murderer.

George Dudley, in the title role, casts an imposing shadow, towering over his fellow cast members with a Burton-esque mop of hair and encased in a ghostly gray coat. But his Sweeney is a peculiarly gentle giant, going about his business with a mortician's demeanor. There's little thrill in the kill; instead, the show finds the macabre humor in bodies dropping through the trapdoor beneath his barber chair.

Charismatic Kim Justis as Mrs. Lovett, peddler of human-flesh pies, easily takes charge of the plot. She brings the comedy to this black comedy, and without her, the two hours and 45 minutes of "Sweeney Todd" would drag. Justis channels Angela Lansbury's famous interpretation of the role in her physicality, cockney accent and pointy red hairdo. But she also adds her own slice of ham.

When Todd describes the taste of actors as "overdone," he points to Justis, and she, flashing a grin out of character, rightfully accepts the audience's applause.

Hurley's strongest directorial moments are the macabre choral sequences. Helped by Ken Friedhoff's grim lighting, she creates images out of Dante, a groping purgatory of living dead. The chorus' shrill cry -- "Swing your razor wide, Sweeney.... Freely flows the blood of those who moralize" -- raises those sought-after goosebumps on an October night.

I guess Chris didn't like the Shatnering of Sondheim's music any more than I did, but he's pretty much dead-on. Our Sweeney isn't particularly manic or menacing, although he does a fine job, our Lovett is the centerpiece of the show (although Lovett's kinda always been the showpiece role), the chorus rocks, the set's informed by torture porn. Had he not been led by the production designers toward a more thorough analysis of the set, there might have been more discussion of the actors, but we're all part of the whole.

Comments

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

Tile, pipe fixtures and fabric are a nightmare to procure; actors you can get anywhere. :) One thing film and theater reviews seem to share in common is that the acting, good or bad, seems to be discussed less and less anymore. Part of that is the endless effects race in American movies. But I think it's also because most writers have a monkey's sense of what colors and shapes might portend but are uncomfortable with describing anything humanly complicated. Which is why they write 700 words at a time for newspapers. Luckily for them movies oblige and theater is mimicking better every day.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

In Blank's defense, he DID have an interview with the director and set designer before the show opened where they talked exclusively about the production design, so he's just taking the path of least journalistic resistance.

Unfortunately, most folks who actually READ stage reviews are somehow related to the actors onstage, and a barber's chair or a source-4 don't got a mama.