Mother nature accommodated Paramount Theatre’s opening of “Sweeney Todd — The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the macabre and masterful musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler.
On opening night, a full moon partly obscured by wispy clouds provided a suitably sinister backdrop for this tale of a murderous barber consumed by vengeance and his partner-in-crime, a mercenary meat pie shop owner, with middle-class pretensions. Inside the historic Paramount, director Jim Corti’s powerfully acted, grimly majestic production delivered to Aurora theatergoers Grand Guignol in all its grandeur.
“Sweeney Todd — The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
Much of its splendor came from the orchestra pit, where 19 instrumentalists — under the unerring direction of conductor Tom Vendafreddo — played the musical’s original orchestrations. But the thrills Paramount’s production affords extend beyond the musical pleasures of Sondheim’s darkly beautiful compositions and mordantly clever lyrics.
Among this production’s great delights is Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s set, a towering steel structure that stretches 40 feet in the air and overwhelms in the most magnificent way. Comprised of catwalks and metal elevator cages stacked one atop the other, it suggests a prison interior. Considering nearly every “Sweeney Todd” character (with a few tragic exceptions) is a criminal, Kmiec’s set stands as a striking visual metaphor.
Others come courtesy of designers Nick Belley and Jesse Klug, whose ghastly up-lighting makes Sweeney and company appear positively satanic. Belly and Klug are also responsible for a chilling visual during Paul-Jordan Jansen’s performance of Sweeney’s embittered “Epiphany.” They briefly bathe the entire stage in black and gray, suggesting the destruction and decay that results from the pursuit of vengeance. In that fleeting moment, the point is made as forcefully as any lyric or any note.
Based on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play, itself rooted in 19th-century “penny dreadful” novels, “Sweeney Todd” is the tale of Benjamin Barker (Jansen, a singing actor of consequence), a London barber unjustly sentenced to prison by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Larry Adams, the picture of genteel evil), who took advantage of Barker’s absence to destroy his family.
After 15 years, Barker escapes his Australian penitentiary and, with help from the sailor Anthony (played with boundless optimism by the fresh-scrubbed Patrick Rooney), he returns to London to exact vengeance.
Returning to his Fleet Street home, he encounters Mrs. Lovett (Bri Sudia, an actress of great warmth), proprietor of a meat pie shop who chronicles her failing business in the deliciously tricky “The Worst Pies in London.”
Mrs. Lovett returns to Sweeney his barber razors, which she’d kept hidden. After dispatching his competition, the preening blackmailer Adolfo Pirelli (Matt Deitchman), Sweeney resumes his trade while embarking on a killing spree. Assisting him is Mrs. Lovett, who disposes of their victims in an oven vividly conjured by Kmiec, Belley and Klug. At the same time, she takes under her wing Pirelli’s ill-treated assistant Tobias (a sympathetic Anthony Norman), a young man so starved for affection he’ll take whatever scraps Mrs. Lovett offers.
Meanwhile Anthony has fallen for Judge Turpin’s ward Johanna (Cecilia Iole, a lovely, effervescent soprano). He pursues her despite warnings from the judge’s henchman Beadle (a brutish and fanciful Craig W. Underwood) to stay away. Last but not least is Emily Rohm’s gorgeously sung Beggar Woman, a half-blind, half-mad outcast who perceives all too well the mischief permeating her city.
Sudia, a rapidly rising star with terrific timing, mines perfectly the musical’s gallows humor. The result is perhaps the drollest Mrs. Lovett I’ve seen.
With his broad shoulders, barrel chest and bulging biceps, Jansen is as imposing physically as he is vocally. From his appearance it’s clear Jansen’s Sweeney has spent his years in the penitentiary building up his body in preparation to exact his revenge. And a gruesome revenge it is, conceived by special effects designer Patrick Ham. But we expect no less from “Sweeney Todd,” which, in some respects, is musical theater’s equivalent of a slasher film, something the ever-astute Corti alludes to in his program notes.
But Sondheim and Wheeler’s masterwork is more. It is a chilling portrait of people consumed by vengeance, greed and lust. Sweeney himself rightly discerns “the history of the world my pet, is learn forgiveness and try to forget.”
If only he followed his own advice. If only we were all so inclined.
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