Revenge is a doomed undertaking in Sweeney Todd. In Stephen Sondheim’s sweeping grand guignol musical, a wronged street barber grows increasingly fixated on violent retribution for a crime against his wife and daughter – aided by his adoring accomplice Mrs Lovett, who runs a questionable pie shop on Fleet Street.
Categorised by Sondheim as a “dark operetta”, with about 80% of the score sung through, the grand melodrama has become a regular choice for opera companies since its Broadway debut in 1979. This Victorian Opera and New Zealand Opera co-production, directed by Stuart Maunder as part of the Sydney Opera House’s 50th anniversary program, is the latest: a lush and crowd-pleasing – albeit watered-down – taste of the perturbed obsession laced through Sondheim’s lyrics and Hugh Wheeler’s book.
The stomach-curdling playfulness of this show is set up before the curtain rises, with mini-pies and sparkling wine in blood-red champagne glasses served in the foyer. When the prologue Ballad of Sweeney Todd plays, and the organ sounds its opening chords, Victorian England is introduced as a knot of dark nooks and crevices, and its citizens caked in ghoulish makeup and period dress.
Benjamin Barker (Ben Mingay) has mysteriously returned to London with a new name, Sweeney Todd, after being sentenced to life in an Australian penal colony under false charges. He picks up his old occupation as a barber, renting out the floor above Mrs Lovett’s meat pie shop. But what begins as an overly zealous plan to lure and kill Judge Turpin (Dean Vince) – the man who raped his wife and entrapped their daughter, Johanna, as his ward – turns into a much more arbitrary and murderous vengeance against all of humanity, one razor and one throat at a time.
Mingay, a bass baritone, plays Todd with butter-smooth charm. It’s a deep and commanding voice that complements his stage presence: a towering force in a black leather jacket and suspenders, with thick black eyeliner smudged around his eyes. Sweeney Todd is a complex character: both a tortured victim wronged by a corrupt society and a villain with an undiscriminating taste for blood. Mingay’s interpretation of him is stern and tough, performed at a cold distance, but his voice wins the audience over – even when the emotional anguish isn’t always present.
Antoinette Halloran has an unhinged and affectionate take on Mrs Lovett, more of a flouncy right-hand woman than a partner-in-crime, and she plays expertly into the macabre humour of a pie shop that’s making good use of the bodies. Her unrequited love feels desperate and one-sided, particularly in By the Sea, which is performed to an impassive Sweeney. Harry Targett and Ashleigh Rubenach bring polished performances and a fresh-faced naivety to the young lovers, Anthony and Johanna; and Vince and Elias Wilson are appropriately slimy as the judge and Beadle Bamford.
The production is at its best when it’s performed heart on sleeve, such as in act one closer Epiphany, where Sweeney explodes in red-hot anger; and the tender, show-stopping ballad Not While I’m Around, performed by a sublime Jeremi Campese as Tobias, the sweet young assistant whom Mrs Lovett takes under her wing.
Maunder’s solid direction is not much interested in digging deep into the text to find new meanings but his sophisticated take on the material and aesthetic vision keep the show moving steadily through eye-catching numbers. Roger Kirk’s set design opens up the Drama theatre’s mid-sized stage, bookended with barricade-like scaffolding, and with a rotating two-level cube in the centre, which unveils all the grimy angles of the upstairs-downstairs pie-and-barbershop. The lighting design from Philip Lethlean (realised by Jason Morphett) spotlights the characters through footlights and window backlighting, enriching the storytelling as it shifts between the action and the Greek chorus of citizens on the streets of London.
Under the musical direction of Simon Holt, a nine-piece orchestra holds the line with that complex Sondheim syncopation and competing musical counterpoints. But on opening night there were a couple of technical bumps: the piercing sound effects to dramatise the deaths were uncomfortably loud, and the balance between the orchestra and the performers felt a touch muddled, especially in the bigger ensemble numbers.
For a musical that explicitly features humans being grinded into savoury pies, there’s not a lot of blood on display in this quasi-opera production – but the squeamish, haunting theatricality is ever-present. While the production lacks the razor sharpness to cut out something new, it does propel the show to its cataclysmic end.
Sweeney Todd runs at the Sydney Opera House until 27 August
