Sweeney for Pitch

For Winter 2008 issue of Pitch

VADE RETRO, SONDHEIM!
John Doyle kidnaps Broadway and does it a few favors

In mid-nineteenth century London, a series of ‘penny dreadfuls’—proto-pulp fiction serials targeting working-class teenagers—introduced the macabre story of Sweeney Todd, a barber cum serial killer who grinds up victims’ bodies and peddles them to the public in meat pies baked by his landlady and accomplice, Mrs. Lovett. After its adaptation into a gothic melodrama by George Dibdin Pitt, the story worked its way into the realm of urban legend, gaining traction as a parable of cold-blooded profiteering and industrial alienation.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street, itself closely based on Christopher Bond’s play of the same name, is the legend’s most spectacular and widely known manifestation (though Tim Burton’s film version may have bested it, with droves of introspective types in eye shadow mobbing the box office since it opened in December). Crucially, the Bond-Sondheim interpretation of the legend reshaped Sweeney from a one-dimensional villain into a tragic anti-hero who, after being victimized by a cruel and corrupt legal system, sheds all moral strictures in order to better inhabit the baleful madness of his city and times–and have his vengeance.

On the Sunday before Halloween, I went to see John Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd at the Colonial Theater in Boston. The British director debuted this new production in Newbury’s Watermill Theater in 2004 to much critical acclaim; soon after, he took it to London’s prestigious West End and then to Broadway in New York. The show is now touring the United States and will arrive at Louisville’s Kentucky Center in mid-February.

Perhaps a little too aptly, there were faint orange traces of the previous night’s liberally applied fake blood on my hairline, and I zombie-walked down the aisle to my seat plagued by a hangover subdued only slightly by a cup of South Station coffee. My harried state, compounded by an admittedly snobbish cynicism toward musical theater and all its necessary indulgences, made me somewhat wary of the performance ahead.

I’ve always though of musical theater in its commercial apotheosis on Broadway as the theater’s equivalent to the worst aspects of Hollywood cinema—that unstoppable phenomenon by which the reigning mainstream’s unlimited financial, professional and creative resources must nevertheless bow to the profit margins of formulaic mediocrity. The crucial difference being that Hollywood’s formulas have long constituted the standard for our most basic narrative codes, while Broadway musicals necessarily rely on what have become little more than obtrusive, outdated eccentricities—quaint at best, laughable at worst.

And yet there was hope. I knew the production would exhibit Doyle’s celebrated trademarks of austere and inventive dramaturgy, drastically paring down the orchestral and scenic grandiosity of the Broadway original to a skeletal set and a cast of ten who, in the absence of an orchestra, double as the sole instrumentalists. Perhaps Doyle would successfully re-instill Sondheim’s extravagant, operatic musical with the Brechtian turns of Bond’s play.

Indeed, Sweeney Todd’s virtuosity—lyrical, musical, thematic—is remarkable. But it remains hopelessly particular to its genre. A fan of the genre will be entertained by the lyrical ingenuity and unusually sinister plot; a more rarefied aficionado will be stricken by the complexity and intelligence of the score, perhaps even noting (as I could not) the eponymous composition’s frequent quoting of the Gregorian Dies Irae; the rest of us, meanwhile, will be left to wonder when Sweeney’s going to stop singing about his goddamn razor blade and kill someone with it.

Back in 1979 Sondheim and Harold Prince, the show’s first director, were relatively unabashed about Sweeney Todd’s socio-political dimensions. The decay of virtue and the social injustices of Dickensian London ostensibly functioned as tidy analogues for an America closing off a decade of ideological uncertainty, jaded decadence and post-industrial malaise. The overarching message is encapsulated in the play’s final musical number: Sweeney, we are told (or rather, sung), is not an inhuman aberration but an emblem of our times; he is everywhere and he is in everyone. A compelling enough message, sure, but one that loses all subtlety when communicated in rhyme by a line of singing, costumed actors contorting their painted faces and waving their limbs dramatically about.

Nevertheless, by the time intermission rolled around I was willing to grudgingly abandon some of my predispositions. It seemed that Doyle had, in fact, managed to reconcile the fatal contradiction inherent in a story whose ostensibly grim, brooding and profoundly serious themes are packaged—caged—in the aesthetic norms of a genre that is anything but. About halfway into the second act, after a number of characters had died under Sweeney’s razor and yet remained onstage as musicians in white lab coats drenched in blood, I realized that the achievement of Doyle’s production is significantly greater than the mere reconciliation of a contradiction. It is, in fact, rather the opposite. The story’s socio-political underpinnings, born into a desolate, phantasmagoric landscape, achieve a dizzying and deeply disheartening ambivalence. Rather than pining for humanity’s loss of some concrete moral rubric, the play questions what these lost values were and whether they ever existed in the first place. At the story’s heart is a jarring discontinuity between the subject matter and the means of its delivery—a fundamental, unsettling and self-propagating irony. The city is aflame with madness and death, but its inhabitants nevertheless proceed—bizarrely, with either pathetic naïveté or, more often, a sort of mechanized desperation—through the stylized song and dance of their inescapable routine. The scarcity of unsung dialogue (which has won the play numerous flattering associations with opera over musical theater) confirms this; the characters are hopelessly trapped in the grossly incongruous performance of their lives.

Doyle’s production seizes on this grotesque and irreducible irony and thrusts it center-stage in a way the original Broadway show never could have. In Harold Prince’s original, Sweeney Todd harbors no internal tensions—the hopeless, violent reality of the characters and setting is summarily absorbed by the sort of lavish set design, orchestral performance, and rotating stage set-ups only Broadway dollars can buy. These are precisely the things with which Doyle has so wisely dispensed. His actors, clad in ambiguously modern and altogether unremarkable dress, amble around a set no less daunting for its starkness. Wooden planks are strewn about, a coffin doubles as a table, a handful of chairs litter the stage. In the background, shelves cluttered with bric-a-brac tower toward the ceiling, displaying chipped porcelain, bread-boxes, and, in a telling detail, the occasional crucifix. The play’s formal elements intrude insistently upon their own proceedings: the young and foolishly idealistic sub-protagonist sings a song of admiration to a love interest who is busy, front and center, playing the cello.