Our eyes don’t normally fill with tears during “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Horror-musical by Stephen Sondheim where throats are gruesomely slit and cannibalism is definitely hilarious.
2 hours and 45 minutes with one intermission. On the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 W. forty sixth St.
But minutes after the brand new Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, which premiered Sunday night on the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, I used to be already nervous.
Such is the overwhelming experience of hearing Sondheim’s great 1979 rating in all its glory played by a 26-piece orchestra – not in some cavernous concert hall or opera house, but in a real Broadway theater. A while has passed.
Actor-musician director John Doyle’s 2005 small production of Patti LuPone and the engrossing 2017 off-Broadway production on the Barrow Street Theater were otherwise great, but director Thomas Kail’s revival packs an unparalleled orchestral punch.
That famous first lyric “Attend the story of Sweeney Todd” is not a lot a suggestion this time as a command.
So we set off with Groban as Sweeney, a Victorian-era London barber who is wrongly imprisoned by a lecherous judge who lusts after Todd’s wife, Lucy. Locked away in Australia turns him into a monster bent on killing Judge Turpin (Jamie Jackson) and Turpin’s dour sidekick, Beadle (John Rapson), back in England. He reaches London and things get bloody bloody.
We immediately realize that Groban is not the menacing, feral Todd that Len Cariou and Michael Cerveris were, but a calmer guy who has an ax to grind. This selection works each ways. Sweeney is more human, yes, but some scenes lack intensity. His song “Epiphany” – through which he declares “Everyone deserves to die!” It isn’t as scary appropriately. Still, Groban is as well-sung Sweeney as you’d expect.
The barbarian barber goes straight from the boat to Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop in Fleet Street, where he served the worst pies in London and we were served Ashford’s uninterrupted hilarity.
Ashford is a particularly talented comedian. Nonetheless, her Lovett is greater than a schtick. With modern flair, it evokes memories of very real women who befriended serial killers like Ted Bundy or Charles Manson to seek out purpose or love.
She’s wildly funny: her “By the Sea,” through which Mrs. Lovett imagines relaxing on the coast together with her murderous friend, is full of more jokes than we thought would fit. But she’s sad too – painfully eager to have someone by her side.
Sweeney and his eccentric ex-housekeeper team up – he wants revenge, she wants him – and embark on a bloody rampage in London.
But how one can cover their traces? Mrs. Lovett’s shop is struggling, and she will’t afford high-quality meat (Yes, Sweeney Todd could possibly be set in 2023 Recent York), so she devises a maniacal plan to make use of the bodies of Sweeney’s victims to fill her baked goods.
In one in every of the best first act finales ever composed, “A Little Priest,” Ashford and Groban’s conspirators attempt to blow one another up like “SNL” actors.
Sweeney and Lovett of their murderous madness are swimming in a sea of lost souls.
Jordan Fisher plays Anthony, a bright-eyed sailor who falls in love with Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna (Maria Bilbao), who is imprisoned by an evil judge. Fisher wins us over with straightforwardness, but doesn’t quite nail the soaring “Johanna.” He’ll get there.
And the way lucky we’re to see Ruthie Ann Miles take on the role of a mad beggar and add unparalleled depth and pain to her mad screams and cries.
Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo takes on one other monster as little Toby, originally an assistant to the funny Italian hairdresser Pirelli (Nicholas Christopher, flawless) who has turn into a waiter at a pastry shop. She stalks him as he hums “Not While I’m Around” to his beloved Mrs. Lovett. “Sweeney” is a rare musical where an actor who wrestled with Vecna on Netflix actually adds to his performance.
Nonetheless, not all the things is perfect in a pastry shop. What gets in the way in which of Hamilton director Kail’s conventional but removed from jaded production is Steven Hoggett’s largely nonsensical choreography.
Hoggett has done a superb job in previous series similar to Once and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, where movement appears in an organic, magical way.
But in “Sweeney Todd,” the dances and gestures he staged are too profuse and clumsy, distracting us from Sondheim’s incomparable and relaxing lyrics that ought to be the song’s high-tension. Stillness is far more terrifying than actors spastically chopping the air with their hands.
And there are occasions when it looks as if Kail just didn’t just like the song, so he danced an interpretive dance on stage on Mimi Lien’s Bridge and Tunnel set to propel him forward.
Regardless, all it takes is a wave of the orchestra and the hellish wailing of the chorus to harrowingly remind us that we’re in one in every of the best musicals ever written.