Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Broadway Review: Josh Groban & Annaleigh Ashford triumph in the Sondheim masterpiece

In a Broadway season that may be remembered for a beautiful, understated minimalism – the intriguing austerity of A dollhouse with Jessica Chastain, the less-is-more almost concert-like presentations of In the forest And march – by director Thomas Kail Sweeney Todd: Fleet Street’s demonic barber will be distinguished by his full, fearless ambition, among many other qualities. This revival of Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler’s masterpiece is a wonderful theatrical event that strives for and achieves greatness.

With Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford leading an impeccable cast of 25 members, incl strange thingsGaten Matarazzo (one of the best numbers on the score on Not While I’m Around, and on a roll), the revival, which opens tonight at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, says Sweeney is probably Sondheim’s best work (at least until the next production of Sunday in the park come over).

A world-class Broadway creative team at its peak is led by Hamiltonsays Kail, who has perhaps never been more adept at combining grandiose theatricality with meticulous attention to even the smallest character detail. He is accompanied by choreographer Steven Hoggett, whose indelible work on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is probably responsible for so many mistakenly remembering this play as a musical. Here is Hoggett Sweeney an unstoppable dynamic through movement, with the large ensemble of Victorian townspeople quivering and twitching one moment at a time, only to dissolve into a kind of synchronized chaos the next.

Nowhere is this meeting of direction, choreography and ensemble performance more exciting than in the musical number that opens the second act: “God, it’s good!” Let the townspeople fill the new popular cake shop at the center of this gruesome tale, sit “Lord’s Supper” style at the counter of Mrs. Lovett’s diner, their orgiastic expressions of delight mixed with fleeting, zombie-like convulsions – they are, after all, eating their fellow-Londoners whether they know it or not.

A little up SweeneyBackground: Based on a character popular in 19th-century London’s Penny Dreadfuls, the bloodthirsty, razor-sharp barber caught Sondheim’s attention when the composer attended a 1973 stage adaptation of Christopher Bond. Sondheim teamed with librettist Hugh Wheeler and director Harold Prince to present the 1979 musical, one of the composer’s most operatic, starring Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Mythical Status. .

The musical has since been performed many times, both on Broadway and off screen, mostly in scaled-down versions that avoid direct comparison to the grand, fully orchestrated 1979 production.

Until now. Kail, Groban and Ashford throw all precautions overboard and venture into a meeting Sweeney on its own extravagant cake-baked terms and emerges as a bloody victory. Grammy magnet Groban uses his baritone even better than he did in his stunning 2016 Broadway debut as the star of Road-Much-Too-Fast Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, makes himself a full-fledged Broadway star whose performance lives up to every honk and holler from the army of hardened thugs who welcome his entry into the Lunt Fountain. His Sweeney is alternately handsome and monstrous – usually the latter, as it should be: Sweeney Todd, once London’s greatest barber, now the most diabolical, after being falsely imprisoned for 15 years, raping his wife and killing her left behind, and his baby daughter stolen and charged by the judge behind every accident.

Ashford meets Groban’s performance at every turn (Sunday in the park with GeorgeTV shredder), who beautifully supports most of the musical’s comedic elements – her timing is spot on with the beat, her Cockney accent a favorite – and her excellent singing matches Grobans so well that on an album of Show Tunes we -duets count next. to the inevitable Sweeney cast recording.

This is how the story goes. Escaping prison by sea, Sweeney arrives in London 15 years after his exile and returns to the home he once shared with his wife and daughter, his former barber’s shop now turned into a meat pie by a mrs. Nellie Lovett was converted. A shortage of meat causes the shop to fail (as Lovett explains in the hilarious “The Worst Pies in London”), but soon Sweeney’s fantasies of revenge and Lovett’s dreams of financial security merge into a fantastic, cannibalistic plan: the demonic barber will slit the throats of his enemies (a list that will grow to include all of humanity) and the baker will use the byproduct to fill her delicacies.

Soon enough, Sweeney and Lovett have endless demand for their peculiarly delicious cakes, and they even hire an assistant, the orphan Tobias (Matarazzo), who deliberately replaces the character’s usual and potentially obnoxious stupidity with a simple, sweet naivete that works exceptionally well. Therefore).

A subplot involves Sweeney’s now infant daughter Johanna (soprano Maria Bilbao making a lovely Broadway debut) and her secret boyfriend Anthony (handsome Jordan Fisher of Dear Evan Hansen and television Rent: housing). Neither Johanna nor Sweeney’s boyfriend Anthony knows the girl’s true parentage, and they have their own concerns: Johanna, like Rapunzel, is held captive by the protective – and lustful – judge who raised her.

Here’s the best place to focus on set designer Mimi Lien’s wonderful, multi-layered creation: Bilbao’s Joan is mostly seen high — sometimes very high — above the main plot of the musical, as Sweeney’s barbarism (no pun intended) is usually held. inside a second-rate shop with the famous barber’s chair in the middle, which sends the dead down a chute and the corpses straight to mrs. Lovett’s bakery in the basement. Victorian London was anything but hierarchical.

Just like her with her theater design for big cometHere, Lien uses every inch of space in the vast playing surface of the large and majestic Lunt fountain. Beneath a large, soot-stained brick arch and multipurpose metal bridge, Lien’s personification of Victorian gloom features a gigantic, working crane that looms menacingly over the scene and sometimes the audience, the symbol of a new, unsettling modernism, a mechanism that so dehumanizing than it is functional.

The set is part of an impeccable creative work that includes Emilio Sosa’s costumes, Natasha Katz’s haunting German Expressionist lighting design, J. Jared Janas’s on-point wig, hair and makeup designs, and some exciting special effects by Jeremy Chernick and include Nevin. Steinberg’s sound design brings vitality and breadth to Jonathan Tunick’s powerful orchestrations.

Even in this creative environment and with musical numbers that are among Sondheim’s best – just a sample of: “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”, “Poor Thing”, “Johanna”, “Pretty Women”, “Not While I’m “. m Around” and the comedy gem “A Little Priest” – a cast can have countless chances to fail. Sweeney Todd is a vocally challenging work, to say the least, and the razor-sharp balance of brutality and comedy in the score and book can make all but the most skilled performers bleed.

This production does not have to worry about that. The large cast has no weak link. Groban, Ashford and Matarazzo would do well to think about what they’ll wear to this year’s Tony ceremony (though the competition in the musical categories will be fierce). Bilbao and Fisher face the challenge of keeping our interest alive when Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett is absent, and Jamie Jackson as Judge Turpin and John Rapson as Beadle Bamford are all one could ask for in Victorian villainy and musical harmony. Ruthie Ann Miles, as the beggar’s wife with her own secrets, is a delight as always, whether she’s (“No Place Like London”) or Cassandra-like in front of “Mischief! Wanton! Wanton!”

Much has been said over the years about Sondheim’s disagreements with Prince over presentation and even the meaning of Sweeney Todd, with the composer always insisting that the story was a specific, personal tale of one man’s obsession with revenge, while Prince envisioned something bigger, more expansive, with Sweeney and his fellow Londoners caught up in the mill of history’s industrialism. In this latest revival of the multifaceted work, Kail and his team of actors and designers managed to serve both masters by uniting them with all the efficiency of this multifunctional barber chair Sweeney Todd it is as extraordinary as it is overwhelming and as captivating to watch as it is beautiful to hear.