Norm Lewis in Sweeney
Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre.
Norm Lewis as Sweeney and Carolee Carmello as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Norm Lewis’s
Sweeney Todd doesn’t need the wild wig Len Cariou wore, when playing the same
role in 1979, or Michael Cerveris’s flour-white makeup, from 2005. He is unforgivingly physical, enormous, a veritable
brick wall in himself. He towers, which
is a difficult proposition at the cramped Barrow Street Theatre, where he recently
replaced Jeremy Secomb in the long-running production of Sweeney Todd there, and which has been retrofitted as a working pie
shop. Theatergoers chow down on meat
pies in the half-hour before show-time, after which Lewis and the ensemble make
up the difference by making a meal of the material.
The most fascinating
thing about Lewis’s portrayal is his eyes, which are easily observed since the
actors spend most of the show prowling a room that can’t be more than two
hundred feet square. He gives, throughout,
a traditional performance, with the requisite steeliness and single-minded
resolve, but his eyes angle upward, dreamily – he’s impatient, as we are, for
the carnage to begin.
The
director, Bill Buckhurst, hasn’t brought anything to the granular details of
his staging that’s all too revolutionary – the shock to the system of this production
is the closeness of it all. The material
in Sweeney Todd is so powerful that
sitting in the middle of it is like
being hit by a tidal wave. Lewis, in “Epiphany,”
the strongest moment in Sweeney’s character arc, clambers onto tables, roars in
the faces of some audience members, and menaces others with a razor to the
neck. You can’t let go, even for a
minute. Once you’re in it, you’re in it
for the long haul.
There are
downsides to this. The seating
arrangement – long, dining-hall style tables perpendicular to the main staging
area – leaves many “diners” in the middle facing away from much of the action,
and the actors, who aren’t artificially magnified and don’t make much attempt
to compensate for it, can occasionally be hard to hear. Perhaps it’s unavoidable now, though, that
any production of this musical, Stephen Sondheim’s finest and the most dramatically perfect ever written, expects a certain
measure of audience familiarity at the door.
If any lyrics are muffled, the average audience member can probably fill
in the blanks.
Same with
the story. In the continuing
decades-long backlash to Harold Prince’s overwhelming staging of the original
1979 production, Buckhurst’s is minimalist, with no stage blood or gore (just red light), and one pie
counter and a staircase substituting for two floors of the same building, which
would be confusing if not for the fact that, like a Shakespeare play, the
conventions of the story are so rooted in the tradition and the American
consciousness that it gives interpreters room to play.
It doesn’t
really register that Buckhurst doesn’t play, much. Carolee Carmello, as Mrs. Lovett, goes the
safe, Angela Lansbury-tinted route, but with more of an agreeably shaded
maternal instinct. John-Michael Lyles is
delightfully over-the-top as a Tobias who might have just emerged from Wonka’s
Factory. (Both are new to the cast as
well.) Otherwise, the rest of the ensemble is basically by-the-numbers. Sondheim said of Hal Prince’s Industrial
Revolution-inspired set for the original production, all done in steam-engine
machinery, that Prince’s view was that this was a world that “turns out Sweeney
Todds.” This has proven to be true in
more ways than one. Todd is so flawless that it effectively functions as its own
machinery, producing revival after revival, iteration after iteration, and lead
performance after lead performance, every one of which is worth seeing, even
without any particular innovation. The
pie shop is open for business on Barrow Street.
But, effectively, it’s already been in business, without pause, for
almost forty years.
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