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Sweeney Todd
That was...interesting. Some of you may have seen ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jethrien's post, but she and I and chuckro's mother and sister saw "Sweeney Todd" last Thursday. This is my favorite musical, so a full Broadway revival? I had to go to that. It was very ... unconventional. And I don't think in a good way.
There was no orchestra in this production. Or rather - the actors were the orchestra. Everyone was on stage the whole time, and whoever was not in the scene at the time was playing (and occasionally they played even when they were in the scene). The logistics boggle the mind.
This stripped the full orchestral sound of Sweeney down to a slightly off-key ensemble whose harsh harmonies emphasize the jarring nature of the story. Or something like that. It sounded a whole hell of a lot like "Threepenny Opera." I respect Brecht and Weill, I really do. But I don't like them. And it does a tremendous disservice to Sondheim's orchestrations to pare them down.
They also cut out a lot of little bits of scenes - things that aren't strictly necessary to the plot, no, but are what make Sweeney what it is. For example, they did not have a barber chair that tipped victims down a chute to the bakehouse. Therefore, they cut out a lot of "God That's Good!" Strangely, they kept the first exchange between Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney about the chair, but didn't continue it, ending the chorus a few minutes shy instead. Add to that that the only chorus was the other cast members, so much of the choral part was absent, and "God That's Good!", the second act opener, becomes incomprehensible and boring.
They trimmed the Barber contest as well. This section with Pirelli is often cut, but not to this extent. Again, with the lack of a full chorus, it wasn't clear at the beginning of the scene that Sweeney was insinuating himself into a crowd and calling Pirelli's Miracle Elixir "piss with ink" - and if you don't have that line from him, Pirelli later asking who called his elixir piss doesn't make sense.
The staging was sparse and static. This play normally has a complicated two level set (the barber shop and the meat shop). This time, they just had one small stage which was largely clogged by the other performers. Meaning that for numbers like "Worst Pies in London" or "By the Sea" Mrs. Lovett didn't move at all while singing. To me, that's boring. And without the set to contend with, they cut out all the musical transitions that allowed for stage hands to rearrange the set. Are these necessary? No, not strictly. But they provide buttons to scenes and allow for a less abrupt changing of venue. The most glaring ommission was between the opening set-piece (ending with Sweeney singing "There's a whole in the world like a great black pit and it's filled with people who are filled with shit and the vermin of the world inhabit it") and the arrival at Mrs. Lovett's pie shop. The transition music punctuates Sweeney's sentiment and allows the audience to applaud Mrs. Lovett's arrival (which they always do). With no transition, it's too abrupt.
At the climax of Sweeney, when Todd murders Lucy, that moment is supposed to be punctuated by a statement of Lucy's theme. In this version, that wasn't there. I've seen a lot of different versions of Sweeney that telegraphed the identity of the Beggar Woman in a lot of different ways; some make it explicitly clear to the audience early on, some right before Sweeney kills her, some wait until Sweeney makes the connection himself. But this one didn't try at all. What should be the most shocking moment of the play - when Sweeney kills the thing he wants most to be reunited with - was so detached from the drama of the moment as to be antiseptic.
Sweeney Todd is a play that has, like all of Sondheim's works, been performed by every high school from here to Timbuktu since it's debut in 1979. Local productions almost always map themselves on the Broadway staging and direction (especially when that version is available on video, as it is in this case). So Sweeney's been done largely the same way for a quarter century.
I understand there is tremendous pressure to reinvent a war horse like this when it is revived on Broadway. It has to be "new." And it seems to me that Sweeney is one of those works, like Shakespeare, that is so stuffed with layers and themes and meanings and metatext of every sort that people want to show off how artsy it is rather than playing it straight. Let's face it. Sweeney is over-the-top melodrama. It's hard to play it straight. But being deliberately symbolic with it undercuts the drama. It's like parsing the prose of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech and thereby completely missing the impact of that sentiment.
And let's face it - Sweeney is dramatic. When done right, the climax is exquisitely cathartic. A panel of Broadway actors that came to one of my English classes in college called "Epiphany" "the most shocking moment in musical theater." But here, all those deep thoughts that you should be thinking when you get home about the nature of Sweeney's insanity and his level of guilt in the events of the play, all those thoughts were presented as if they were the point of the play. The ascetism of the production made it impossible to engage on an emotional level.
The actors did fantastic jobs. Patti LuPone has won acclaim for her Mrs. Lovett before; I have a recording of her 2000 performance with the NY Phil that I hardly ever listen to because it costars the accursed George Hearn. But they were acting in a vacuum. The set, the staging, the orchestration - all were working to distance everyone involved from the emotional content of the play.
There is a tendency with great works of art to try and analyze them, package them, make them antiseptic - make sure that only those who can appreciate the subtleties at work be allowed to partake. But by playing up the subtexts of Sweeney, they lost what made it a Tony winner in the first place: its mere shock value. Its totally low class, unsubtle, uncultured ability to grab the audience by the gut and make them feel.
That being said, I'm glad I saw it. Courtesy of Ben Beckley, Princeton's Sweeney, I have a tape collection of half-a-dozen bootleg recordings of major Sweeney productions. It's amazing to me how many different ways people approach this work, so I'm glad I got to see another, totally novel, approach. But for me, Sweeney will always be Len Cariou. I'm sorry, but I'm completely loyal to the original.
jethrien's post, but she and I and chuckro's mother and sister saw "Sweeney Todd" last Thursday. This is my favorite musical, so a full Broadway revival? I had to go to that. It was very ... unconventional. And I don't think in a good way.There was no orchestra in this production. Or rather - the actors were the orchestra. Everyone was on stage the whole time, and whoever was not in the scene at the time was playing (and occasionally they played even when they were in the scene). The logistics boggle the mind.
This stripped the full orchestral sound of Sweeney down to a slightly off-key ensemble whose harsh harmonies emphasize the jarring nature of the story. Or something like that. It sounded a whole hell of a lot like "Threepenny Opera." I respect Brecht and Weill, I really do. But I don't like them. And it does a tremendous disservice to Sondheim's orchestrations to pare them down.
They also cut out a lot of little bits of scenes - things that aren't strictly necessary to the plot, no, but are what make Sweeney what it is. For example, they did not have a barber chair that tipped victims down a chute to the bakehouse. Therefore, they cut out a lot of "God That's Good!" Strangely, they kept the first exchange between Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney about the chair, but didn't continue it, ending the chorus a few minutes shy instead. Add to that that the only chorus was the other cast members, so much of the choral part was absent, and "God That's Good!", the second act opener, becomes incomprehensible and boring.
They trimmed the Barber contest as well. This section with Pirelli is often cut, but not to this extent. Again, with the lack of a full chorus, it wasn't clear at the beginning of the scene that Sweeney was insinuating himself into a crowd and calling Pirelli's Miracle Elixir "piss with ink" - and if you don't have that line from him, Pirelli later asking who called his elixir piss doesn't make sense.
The staging was sparse and static. This play normally has a complicated two level set (the barber shop and the meat shop). This time, they just had one small stage which was largely clogged by the other performers. Meaning that for numbers like "Worst Pies in London" or "By the Sea" Mrs. Lovett didn't move at all while singing. To me, that's boring. And without the set to contend with, they cut out all the musical transitions that allowed for stage hands to rearrange the set. Are these necessary? No, not strictly. But they provide buttons to scenes and allow for a less abrupt changing of venue. The most glaring ommission was between the opening set-piece (ending with Sweeney singing "There's a whole in the world like a great black pit and it's filled with people who are filled with shit and the vermin of the world inhabit it") and the arrival at Mrs. Lovett's pie shop. The transition music punctuates Sweeney's sentiment and allows the audience to applaud Mrs. Lovett's arrival (which they always do). With no transition, it's too abrupt.
At the climax of Sweeney, when Todd murders Lucy, that moment is supposed to be punctuated by a statement of Lucy's theme. In this version, that wasn't there. I've seen a lot of different versions of Sweeney that telegraphed the identity of the Beggar Woman in a lot of different ways; some make it explicitly clear to the audience early on, some right before Sweeney kills her, some wait until Sweeney makes the connection himself. But this one didn't try at all. What should be the most shocking moment of the play - when Sweeney kills the thing he wants most to be reunited with - was so detached from the drama of the moment as to be antiseptic.
Sweeney Todd is a play that has, like all of Sondheim's works, been performed by every high school from here to Timbuktu since it's debut in 1979. Local productions almost always map themselves on the Broadway staging and direction (especially when that version is available on video, as it is in this case). So Sweeney's been done largely the same way for a quarter century.
I understand there is tremendous pressure to reinvent a war horse like this when it is revived on Broadway. It has to be "new." And it seems to me that Sweeney is one of those works, like Shakespeare, that is so stuffed with layers and themes and meanings and metatext of every sort that people want to show off how artsy it is rather than playing it straight. Let's face it. Sweeney is over-the-top melodrama. It's hard to play it straight. But being deliberately symbolic with it undercuts the drama. It's like parsing the prose of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech and thereby completely missing the impact of that sentiment.
And let's face it - Sweeney is dramatic. When done right, the climax is exquisitely cathartic. A panel of Broadway actors that came to one of my English classes in college called "Epiphany" "the most shocking moment in musical theater." But here, all those deep thoughts that you should be thinking when you get home about the nature of Sweeney's insanity and his level of guilt in the events of the play, all those thoughts were presented as if they were the point of the play. The ascetism of the production made it impossible to engage on an emotional level.
The actors did fantastic jobs. Patti LuPone has won acclaim for her Mrs. Lovett before; I have a recording of her 2000 performance with the NY Phil that I hardly ever listen to because it costars the accursed George Hearn. But they were acting in a vacuum. The set, the staging, the orchestration - all were working to distance everyone involved from the emotional content of the play.
There is a tendency with great works of art to try and analyze them, package them, make them antiseptic - make sure that only those who can appreciate the subtleties at work be allowed to partake. But by playing up the subtexts of Sweeney, they lost what made it a Tony winner in the first place: its mere shock value. Its totally low class, unsubtle, uncultured ability to grab the audience by the gut and make them feel.
That being said, I'm glad I saw it. Courtesy of Ben Beckley, Princeton's Sweeney, I have a tape collection of half-a-dozen bootleg recordings of major Sweeney productions. It's amazing to me how many different ways people approach this work, so I'm glad I got to see another, totally novel, approach. But for me, Sweeney will always be Len Cariou. I'm sorry, but I'm completely loyal to the original.
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no subject
Sweeney did deliver the "piss with ink". Or someone did, at least, because I remember the line and I'd never seen it before, so I can't be remembering it from a different production.
I thought keeping Lucy's identity secret until Sweeney realized himself actually worked well - I thought it increased the shock value. Because it keeps her death the way he saw it - convenient and not worth mentioning. Since at this point, you're pretty used to people dying at random, it doesn't register too much. When you realize who she actually was, it brings into focus the fact that everyone's become blase about the killing. You're horrified that he killed someone he loved, horrified that he wasn't bothered by it until now, and horrified that you weren't horrified by it until now.
But in general - too artsy for me. Most of it totally lost the emotional impact it should have had.
no subject
TODD (Loudly to MRS. LOVETT): Pardon me, ma'am, what's that awful stench?
MRS. LOVETT: Are we standing in an open trench?
TODD: Must be standing near an open trench!
TOBIAS continues his jingle.
TODD: What is this?
MRS. LOVETT: What is this?
TODD: Smells like piss.
MRS. LOVETT: Smells like — phew!
CROWD: He says it smells like piss.
TODD: Looks like piss.
MRS. LOVETT: Wouldn't touch it if I was you, dear!
TODD: This is piss. Piss with ink.
CROWD: Says it smells like piss or something.
TOBIAS:
Penny for a bottle ...
Have you ever smelled a cleaner smell?
How about a sample? . ..
How about a sample, mister? ...
CROWD: Give us back our money!
…
TOBIAS: Never mind that madman, mister .. .
Never mind the madman . . .
TODD and MRS. LOVETT: Where is this PIRELLI?
CROWD: Where is this PIRELLI?
…
TOBIAS: Let PIRELLI's Activate your roots, sir —
TODD: Keep it off your boots, sir — Eats right through.
CROWD: Go and get PIRELLI!
TOBIAS:
Yes, get PIRELLI's!
Use a bottle of it!
Ladies seem to love it —
MRS. LOVETT:
Flies do, too!
(Crowd laughs uproariously)
CROWD:
Hand the bloody money over!
etc.
That's greatly abbreviated, but you get the idea. This was greatly, greatly cut down in what you saw. I've even cut out a lot of the crowd's dialogue - it has about ten people singing all over each other.
I first heard Sweeney on record, so I had no cues that the Beggar Woman was Lucy. In fact, as I recall, I was trying to write a paper at the time. But I've seen it done where she sings a lullaby when she returns to the barber shop and mimics holding Johanna (in the original staging of "Poor Thing" there was a mime show of what happened, so reiterating that in the finale makes the identity explicit). It's an interesting dramatic point to debate - whether you want to go with having the audience literally in Sweeney's shows or have them know more than Sweeney.
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