I've been on the fence about whether to believe the rumors, but now -- still without the slightest peep, confirming or denying, from the show's alleged producer or stars -- Ticketmaster will apparently begin selling tickets tomorrow (for AmEx presale):
https://www.theatermania.com/broadway/news/sweeney-todd-headed-back-to-broadway-with-josh-gro_94249.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/theater/josh-groban-sweeney-todd-broadway.html
The show's webpage is as yet very basic, but it's live:
https://sweeneytoddbroadway.comSweeney2023.jpg
I'm liking the logo better now that I can see it in higher-res. The vertical-ish smudges had hitherto suggested mostly just very vague smoky-flamey perhaps falling-ness, which is fine as far as it goes, but the larger image makes the coal-choked Westminster skyline a bit clearer. The use of the original clotted-blood title text and general color scheme (red and black text on a white or light-grey ground) makes a subtle tribute to Frank Verlizzo's 1979 poster art (https://i0.wp.com/newyorktheater.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Sweeney-Todd-Fraver-theater-poster.jpg?ssl=1), without recycling his iconic pair of Victorian-woodcut grotesques.
In vaguely ascending order of anticipation:
- Groban and Ashford are both very talented and accomplished performers, though I wouldn't call either a Broadway legend at this point. I was impressed, not gobsmacked, by his Pierre and her Dot. Hopefully they'll rise to the occasion. I'm eager to hear further casting details.
- I'm very curious what Kail will bring to this, and thrilled beyond measure that Sweeney will be back on Broadway in a big, ambitious, carte-blanche production with the full original orchestration -- the first time it's ever been revived there on anything like this scale.
- And I'm super excited to see what Mimi Lien has in store for us. (She is the 2015 MacArthur "genius" whose designs for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 struck me, when I finally saw it on Broadway, as the show's primary excuse for existing).
Jordan Fisher, Ruthie Ann Miles, Gaten Matarazzo, and More Join SWEENEY TODD; Full Principal Casting Announced! (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Jordan-Fisher-Ruthie-Ann-Miles-Gaten-Matarazzo-and-More-Join-SWEENEY-TODD-Full-Principal-Casting-Announced-20221214)
Judge Turpin will be played by Jamie Jackson, who played the role thrillingly in the Off Broadway import of Tooting Arts Club's immersive-pie-shop version (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=118.0) at Barrow Street five years ago.
Mr. Jackson had earlier played Sweeney himself, with terrifying brilliance, in the well-received (https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/nyregion/sweeney-todd-at-the-gateway-playhouse-review.html) summer theatre production that I designed (https://www.davidesler.com/sweeney-todd) in 2011.
In terms of mass-audience marquee name appeal, I'm wondering whether Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) as Tobias might just be the producers' shrewdest "get", perhaps even bigger than Groban.
It struck me some weeks ago that reviving Sweeney on this scale is an idea whose time may finally have arrived with near-ideal timing -- as long as Mr. Kail and his collaborators manage to resist picturesque Tim Burton-ism (which, encouragingly, isn't a mode one would readily expect from Ms. Lien (https://www.mimilien.com/work) anyway) and instead restore a healthy dollop of Prince's original Brechtian moral outrage. For better and (mostly -- entirely -- much, much) worse, the show's apocalyptic vision feels more frighteningly accessible now (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/opinion/2022-america-debates.html) than it has in decades, perhaps since it first opened in the "city on fire" that was late-1970s Times Square. These days, with anthropogenic planetary disaster on schedule to arrive any minute (https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/apocalypse-nowish/) now, Sondheim and Prince's nightmare -- just a single major world capital gorging itself insatiably on systemic greed and brutality -- feels like quaint understatement; in recent years, Sweeney's death fetish seems to have gone global.
The trick, as always with this material (only trickier and more urgent now), will be to find a middle ground between goth-flavored quirkiness (which Burton skirted, if at all, by only a hairline) and unwatchably self-serious nihilism. But that's Sweeney: in these (of all) times, if its grim humor actually raises a laugh -- or at least: if the laugh isn't choked by bile -- then you're not really doing it right. With mass murder now a daily commonplace, would it be irresponsible to ask Broadway audiences to consider Sweeney's butchery (not to mention Mrs. Lovett's) alongside today's headlines? Would it be irresponsible to ask them not to?
The show's website (https://sweeneytoddbroadway.com) has been built out a bit, now featuring cast bios.
It turns out that Matarazzo (https://sweeneytoddbroadway.com/cast-creative/#gaten-matarazzo) is, at 20, a seasoned Broadway veteran (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLAyF1-o6I); Les Misérables (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXdZquLplBw); Dear Evan Hansen (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photos-Gaten-Matarazzo-Returns-to-Broadway-in-DEAR-EVAN-HANSEN-20220720)) with previous Sondheim experience (Into The Woods (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNHEk0sJeIw) at the Hollywood Bowl), who appeared just last month in the City Center concert of Parade (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Qdov9nVyI) (also said to be moving to B'way this spring, presumably without him). So, encouragingly, he's not here just for the TV name-recognition, and his casting looks even more on-point (i.e., dude can actually sing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8bTtlMs15Y)).
Full cast announced:
https://playbill.com/article/cast-complete-for-broadway-revival-of-sweeney-todd-starring-josh-groban-and-annaleigh-ashford
No change to the principal cast, announced a few weeks ago; the news here is the 21-member ensemble, presumably including swings.
Alas, I no longer pay enough attention to B'way ensembles for any of the new names to ring a bell -- though it could also be said that I just don't see that many shows with big ensembles anymore. Not that they don't still exist; it's just that not too many big-ensemble-type shows these days interest me enough to go see them, let alone pore over their programs unconsciously committing names to memory, the way I did when I was much younger.
Perhaps Sweeney will be an exception. I've already purchased two sets of tickets -- one pair in the orchestra and another in the front mezz -- for separate performances, about a week and a half apart, in the latter half of April. But I might not even be able to wait that long; at some point, if I can afford to, I might try and see it sometime during previews (starting Feb. 26). This all might sound unduly optimistic on my part -- what if the production sucks?? -- but frankly, even if it does, that might still be worth at least one repeat visit: I mean, heaven forbid, but if this kind of investment of resources and talent in a proven masterpiece were to somehow go seriously askew, that itself would be worth studying.
Oh, dear... in hoping aloud that Kail & co. would not go all Tim Burton-y, perhaps I jinxed myself...
Somewhere I believe they had already said the production design would stick to the original period (19thC-ish, emphasis on the "-ish"), which is fine as far as it goes. But this image flirts heavily, to put it mildly, with theme-parkish silliness. (As several people have pointed out on the FB group, it also seems all but deliberately designed to make the title difficult to read).
(https://assets.playbill.com/playbill-covers/Sweeney-Todd-Playbill-2023-02-26_Web.jpg)
My fear is that the production itself could be aimed equally low, at some marketer's stereotype of the generation raised on the 2007 Burton film, to whom the murderous duo's goth-glam f***ability is presumed to be not only somehow relevant but non-negotiable, and for whom Victorian horror appears to be more or less circumscribed by a notably risible strain of pop-cultural fantasy running roughly from the 2001 Depp vehicle From Hell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-UL3V15E8s) to the 2014-16 Showtime series Penny Dreadful (https://www.sho.com/video/27693/penny-dreadful-trailer) (and not yet fully run its course, they seem to be hoping. Steampunk Revival, anyone? ...no?...).
I can still hope that this image bears only a loose and fanciful relation (or, better yet, none) to the actual tone of the production; I do have serious difficulty imagining a Mimi Lien set -- any Mimi Lien set, for any show, anywhere, ever -- looking anything at all like this. Part of me wants to imagine that the cheesiness here might be intentional and ironic, some kind of weird metatheatrical fakeout that will promptly be exploded by the production itself. But if not, I guess it at least reorients my thinking well in advance -- a strong, not to say harsh, expectation-check to prevent me from being too unpleasantly surprised. Going in with lowered expectations has served me well more than once before... sigh.
Meanwhile, last month (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Up-on-the-Marquee-SWEENEY-TOOD-with-Josh-Groban-and-Annaleigh-Ashford-20221208) the earlier logo already went up on the Lunt-Fontanne's marquee; next time I'm in the neighborhood I should check to see whether it has, like the show's website (https://sweeneytoddbroadway.com), been updated to the new look. Other than using the same bloody title font from the Fraver original, the two designs seem starkly different and unlikely to mesh well. The first felt like a riff on the original, this new one feels like a riff on the film; the marketers seem to be intent on selling this as unimaginatively as humanly possible. Hopefully the production itself has a stronger handle on what it wants to be -- and is a shred of originality too much to hope for (again, what ends up onstage may have zero to do with the way it's being marketed) from creatives who've made their names on some of the most inventive work Broadway has seen in the 21st century?
Another weirdly glamorous Saturday, so startlingly "isn't-this-how-New-Yorkers-are-supposed-to-spend-their-weekends?" that it makes me mourn for having squandered 99% of my free time over the past 34 years. Short story long, my new friend from the Merrily cancellation line last weekend (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=1931.msg7478#msg7478) invited me to see L'Elisir d'Amore (https://www.metopera.org/season/2022-23-season/lelisir-damore/) yesterday afternoon, courtesy of a Met-chorister friend of his who gets a company discount on last-minute tix. After the matinée, he had a single ticket to see Kimberly Akimbo on his own last night, so after dinner I walked him to the Booth -- and then, finding myself just a block away from the Lunt-Fontanne, decided to check out the Sweeney marquee as promised in my previous post:
IMG_0080.mov
The printed signage at street level remains the red-on-white, text-only version from last fall. But the video marquee above, while retaining that logo as well, now alternates it with the new Burton-esque photo image of Groban and Ashford in papier-mâché hell. The two versions complement each other precisely as not-at-all as I imagined they wouldn't -- so much so that it now looks almost like a bald and clumsy reach for two separate existing fandoms at once: Burton's movie, and the original staging (aka millennials and boomers, respectively). Unimaginative marketing, squared! (Also, while my phone camera admittedly isn't doing the video marquee any favors colorwise, it is striking how hellbent these graphic designers seem to be on making legibility as challenging as possible).
It's tempting to gripe that the movie-lovers are being courted more assiduously here: a full photo-shoot with sets and costumes, compared to the simple two-color gloss on Fraver's original design which is apparently all we stage purists rate.
But I'm still holding out some scrap of hope that this odd triangulation will ultimately pay off in a production that surprises both camps, perhaps combining the two staging aesthetics in a kind of best-of-both-worlds scenario... who knows, maybe even finding something new and unexpected in the process? Hey, I can dream.
The New Yorker recently sat down for a "Talk of the Town" chat with Groban and Ashford, over meat pies at Tea & Sympathy (https://www.teaandsympathy.com/menu) in the West Village:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/meat-pies-one-meatless-with-sweeney-todds-newest-stars
NYT piece, a decent though not wildly-informative overview of the new production (currently about halfway through previews (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2222.msg7535#msg7535), opening March 26):
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/theater/sweeney-todd-sondheim-josh-groban.html
WDO0t6r-1.jpg
https://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1155152&page=22#5384677
Brand-new photos:
BroadwayWorld: First Look at Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford & More in Sweeney Todd on Broadway (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photos-First-Look-at-Josh-Groban-Annaleigh-Ashford-More-in-SWEENEY-TODD-on-Broadway-20230324)
NYT review (Critic's Pick): The Many Thrilling Flavors of a Full-Scale Sweeney Todd (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/theater/sweeney-todd-broadway-review-josh-groban.html)
Quote from: Jesse Green, The New York Times 3/26/23The ravishingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious revival that opened on Sunday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, and directed by Thomas Kail, has a rictus on its face and a scar in its heart.
... Kail's production makes a convincing new case for Sweeney as a Broadway-size property, with its cast of 25 and its orchestra playing Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations for 26. Under Alex Lacamoire's musical supervision, the musicians' performance, like that of the ensemble in the choral numbers, is glorious.
... But I have never not loved Sweeney. In a pie shop or a foundry, I am always transported, largely by the music, to a place where grief twists people into nightmares, and others find ways to monetize that. I hope the current producers likewise find ways to monetize Kail's production, because what is Broadway for if not a Sweeney that, however rare, is this well-done?
...and for other reviews, here's
Playbill's review roundup (https://playbill.com/article/reviews-what-do-critics-think-of-sweeney-todd-starring-josh-groban-and-annaleigh-ashford); or, with blurbs of each review as well as links, here's
ShowScore (https://www.show-score.com/broadway-shows/sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber-of-fleet-street-broadway) -- both updated as new reviews come in. Spoiler: the critics are all ecstatic to have
Sweeney back with a full cast and orchestra; some have quibbles, generally acknowledged as such; but most are too favorable to really even be called mixed.
Rex Reed strikes the only truly sour note, pillorying Kail's production (and everyone involved, with the sole exception of Groban) while doing everything possible to admit-without-admitting that nothing really
could please him, short of time-travel to relive his own transcendent first experience of the show in 1979. Which makes it all the odder when he chooses to gripe about Gaten Matarazzo being "too old" to play Toby -- at 20, Matarazzo is more than a decade younger (and according to the interweb, only an inch or two taller) than the 5'3" but not otherwise especially young-looking 31-year-old Ken Jennings was in Reed's beloved original. Likewise, it seems strange to whine bitterly about Mimi Lien's "damn suspension bridge," whose movement "keeps diverting attention" and which Reed "kept wishing would disappear from the show completely"-- when, just a few paragraphs earlier, he was rhapsodizing at extraordinary length about Eugene Lee's original design... the centerpiece of which (though he appears to have somehow forgotten this entirely) was a moving suspension bridge so strikingly similar to Lien's that one has to assume she and Kail are paying unabashed homage to Lee and Prince.
In any case, as of this morning Reed seems to be the only real naysayer: the rest range from qualified thumbs-up to solid rave.
For your listening pleasure:
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/29/1166249500/as-sweeney-todd-returns-to-broadway-4-sweeneys-dish-about-the-difficult-role
Quote from: KathyB on Mar 29, 2023, 07:13 AMFor your listening pleasure:
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/29/1166249500/as-sweeney-todd-returns-to-broadway-4-sweeneys-dish-about-the-difficult-role
That is so sweet! I'd been eyeing it online but hadn't yet checked it out, so thanks for posting that, Kathy!
Much as I want to be surprised next month, I've heard some things about the set that I can't figure out for the life of me -- mostly to do with the crane tower (shown at SL in the pic above (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2109.msg7549#msg7549), where it reportedly spends the first act just sitting there innocently anchoring the staircase up to the bridge, before coming into its own in the second).
It's said, by some who have seen the show, that in Act 2 this unit moves across the stage (okay); rotates to become the bakehouse (okay); and later serves as Fogg's Asylum (okay, I guess, if you can cram the entire ensemble into the various levels of that tower and then figure out ways for them all to "escape" onto the stage and/or bridge with as much directness and velocity as possible so that it really feels like an explosion of inmates escaping into the streets. It could be fun to have someone grab onto the hook and swing or be airlifted from the tower by crane, preferably fast enough to appear somewhat uncontrolled and perilous without actually being so (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/theater/peter-pan-goes-wrong-broadway.html)).
But it's also said that this crane (and/or the tower itself), after delivering the crate containing Sweeney's trick barber chair during "God, That's Good!", also somehow
becomes the chute for the bodies (described with admirably un-spoilerish vagueness by JG in the
Times as "a production in itself"). I keep staring at the few photos that show the crane (but always in its SL home position, betraying no secrets) and trying to imagine every move it could possibly make: lateral, rotational, angular,
telescopic...? While I've come up with a few semi-plausible possibilities, I don't really have much confidence in any of them.
Of course I've studied the script's demands in this regard, in painstaking detail, when I did the show a decade ago. The only time we actually
have to see the entire trajectory from chair to bakehouse is during the trial run with the books in "GTG" -- and even that can be faked, as it was in the original. So I'm wondering if the crane-chute is perhaps only used for the bakehouse end of things, meaning probably only the books and the Beadle -- who could also be "faked," as a dummy, since the only movement I can really imagine involving the crane-as-chute would involve a murderously high drop, as in the movie. Meanwhile, the chair-drop proper could be done in the usual way, with a "collapsible" chair and a trapdoor in the barbershop (here, the bridge) floor, through which books and bodies simply disappear. Unsurprisingly, there does seem to be some kind of black masking added under the bridge, specifically masking the area beneath the chair, in the production photo of "GTG" (https://images.app.goo.gl/qomCbQMvi5xLgzc86).
I dunno, though, I still can't offer this theory with a whole lot of confidence... so kudos, I guess, to Ms. Lien for stumping me!
The New Yorker review: A Sonically Thrilling Revival of Sweeney Todd on Broadway (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/10/sweeney-todd-theatre-review-broadway)
Quote from: Helen Shaw, The New Yorker 3/30/23... Kail, best known for directing Hamilton, does put his own stamp on the material — an elaborate letter handoff is one apparent bit of self-quotation — but he makes only a small impression. Sondheim's sooty, sour-hearted music and lyrics are the things that etch themselves into your mind. And listening to a Broadway orchestra play, at full strength, Jonathan Tunick's original arrangements is like getting musically mugged: whammo — you wake up in an alley surrounded by piccolos.
"He served a dark and a vengeful god," the chorus sings of Sweeney. That's not the rueful, slight, broken man we meet in this production. Groban's exquisite baritone is so angelic, so carefully placed, that it draws back the curtains of the show's own gloom. It also wouldn't menace a mouse, so he cedes the show's primary energy to Ashford's hilarious version of Lovett, who's ready to wreck their plans, the stage, the show as long as it serves her chaotic shtick.
... But then, he's at a theatrical disadvantage. In Mimi Lien's set, Groban's character is often "upstairs," which places him on a platform, behind a sight-line-spoiling railing, while Ashford gets to prowl the stage lip. Up those dozen stairs, he seems miles away. Get him down by the footlights, though, with the company's incredible sopranos shrieking their siren-high "Sweeney! Sweeney!," and he's in business. (This is a young and handsome cast, but only in one moment — when Groban grips Ashford by the jaw, dancing her backward — do you get a sense of how erotic and scary the pair might have been.)
Even in photos, that railing has been bugging me too. I was actually startled by audience pics (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2222.msg7535#msg7535) from the mezzanine, in early previews, in which the set overall appeared surprisingly shallow front-to-back, for a stage as big as the Lunt's -- so I suspect the tonsorial parlor really isn't "miles away" at all. But the railing, necessary for safety, compounds whatever distance there is by adding a barrier. (I'm not at all sure whether Equity would allow Eugene Lee's eight-foot-tall, guardrail-free mobile cube these days, but they certainly wouldn't let their actors onto a bridge that rises thirty feet above stage level, without a sturdy railing). It looks as though Lien has made the horizontal rails themselves very slender indeed (perhaps just half-inch cable), but as much as I sympathize with her desire to give at least the vertical posts some weight and character, I'm afraid the better choice might have been to slim them down too, to the thinnest steel rod that would do the job, for the sake of "sightlines" both actual and psychological (if that makes sense). Shaw isn't the first viewer I've heard complaining that this barbershop
feels distant and obstructed -- even if it's actually scarcely either, in measurable terms.
I should mention that full, taller-than-head-height second levels are
always a tricky balancing act between audience intimacy and sightlines, even
before factoring in the inescapable issue of railings. This production is challenged from both directions, with an especially deep auditorium and high stage (above the eye-level of spectators in front-orchestra seats -- reportedly making the Judge's and BW's corpses, in the final scene, invisible from the first several rows).
Ashford's Mrs. Lovett seems to be dividing audiences: most love her, with some calling her an award-worthy creation of comic genius; but there is a substantial minority who can't stand her. To generalize, the yays seem more willing to attribute Ashford's extreme clowning to her character -- as a tactic to get and keep Todd's attention -- and more able to perceive fleeting glimpses of (Mrs. L's) icy calculation behind the mask of wackjob bawdiness. The nays are having none of it, seeing only Ashford herself mercilessly hogging
our attention with scene-stealing shtick -- to the point where her escalating stakes in the second act come too late for us to care about the character she's allegedly playing. (It's worth noting that the nays also tend to be people with some prior experience of
ST, having seen at least one previous production, or the movie, or both. They're also often folks who haven't liked Ms. Ashford in previous roles, on similar grounds).
Groban, on the other hand, seems to be causing mild ambivalence
within many viewers (though he also has his rabid fans and detractors, the latter generally arguing that he's simply hopelessly miscast, a marquee name whose presence has made the production fiscally viable only by simultaneously rendering it artistically pointless). The conventional wisdom is that he sings the part beautifully and grows in ferocity over the course of the evening, but can't entirely shed the nice-guy persona he's honed over years as a concert performer -- but I wouldn't be altogether surprised if that were as much a problem of confirmation bias as of anything Groban is or isn't doing with the role.
Here's a handful of so-so audio-only clips somebody posted on YouTube a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/@Diiejjrkxngjeiekm/featured(So-so in terms of audio quality, that is; adjusting for that, the voices and orchestra both sound very good indeed. Even if the production is flawed, I suspect the presumably-forthcoming cast album might be worth having).
Watching Michelle Williams talk to Jimmy Fallon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vj45OebXlY) about Sweeney's opening night a few weeks ago made me wonder whether -- being married to Thomas Kail and all -- she might conceivably take over from Annaleigh Ashford at some point, should the show (currently booking through mid-January 2024) end up outrunning Ashford's contract. While Williams these days presumably has no need to take replacement gigs in revivals, she does profess to love doing theatre (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-vbvOTShkk), and musicals (https://youtu.be/AJlKGomtS7k?t=6811) in particular. Mrs. L. is one of those roles that many (most?) performers would kill to play, and if she should happen to be one such, the chance might never again be quite this wide-open (I'd imagine) to her. And if the production has any thought of outlasting Groban's contract, it will likely need a name such as hers in order to do so. (At least one such name, that is: I don't know how long Groban or Ashford are currently planning on staying with the show, but I assume Matarazzo will need to return to Stranger Things, which films in Atlanta, not too long after its final season begins production (https://screenrant.com/stranger-things-season-5-filming-date-noah-schnapp/) in the next month or two).
______________
Can't wait to see the show Friday night... :o
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/04/sweeney-todd-josh-groban-annaleigh-ashford
Well, I saw it. It had its moments, but I'm afraid the nays pretty much have it, as far as I'm concerned -- not only about the two leads (though their respective choices and/or limitations do indeed throw the tone fatally out of whack), but about the production overall.
I should hasten to add that an actual vote would clearly have gone to the yeas, judging by the almost annoyingly enthusiastic response of the audience last night, who burst into positively roaring applause and/or laughter every time there was a suitable opportunity, and once or twice even when there wasn't. Part of this may be lingering pandemic weirdness, the bottled-up enthusiasm of audiences still getting used to returning to live theatre. A fair amount of it was clearly fan appreciation: folks whose reason for coming was specifically to make noise, by Pavlovian reflex, for whichever performers, characters, and/or plot twists happened to be their preexisting faves.
On the basis of what's onstage, I can't really guess what Kail and Hoggett thought they were doing, other than harvesting applause and laughter (and piles of money) from a motley combination of disparate fandoms. But they've done Sweeney Todd no perceptible favors, and an enormous number of disservices, minor and not-so-minor, that cumulatively turn it into something I don't quite recognize and don't much like. Intentionally or not, it plays as a show that just wants the broadest possible audience to have the Most. Fun. Ever., free of challenge, tension, or anything that might trigger unpleasant emotions like fear or revulsion; the thrills have thereby been surgically removed along with the darkness. Possibly this production will read differently if it eventually settles in and starts drawing less manically enthusiastic audiences, or learns to stop milking them for approval.
Aside from turning into a crusty old fart more generally, I'm afraid I really may at this point be irreparably spoiled for this particular show: I just know it (specifically, its original staging) far too well. That probably accounts for a depressingly high percentage of my multitudinous issues with this production, though it certainly doesn't explain all of them. (It's worth mentioning that I've been pretty much allergic, all my life, to the very notion of "definitive" productions, and perplexed by fans' proprietary hostility toward remakes/reboots/"reimaginings" of their favorite shows/movies/series etc. -- so to now find myself on that side of the equation is kind of a new and unsettling experience for me). But I'll be seeing this again near the end of the month with a friend who's never seen Sweeney, in any version, and who claims to know literally nothing about it -- so I'll be very curious to see what he thinks. Who knows: if a second viewing manages to soften my opinion a bit, maybe the ungodly expense will have been worth it.
Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Apr 15, 2023, 08:04 AMnot only about the two leads (though their respective choices and/or limitations do indeed throw the tone fatally out of whack)
Interested to know more about this, if you'll elaborate?
Quote from: Leighton on Apr 16, 2023, 01:31 PMQuote from: scenicdesign71 on Apr 15, 2023, 08:04 AMnot only about the two leads (though their respective choices and/or limitations do indeed throw the tone fatally out of whack)
Interested to know more about this, if you'll elaborate?
The basic problem is that Ashford turns the evening into her own screwball comedy ("she swallowed the second act whole," as my mom observed the other night), leaving Groban's competent but tamely affable Sweeney helplessly sidelined. (He works up a respectable rage/grief for both "Epiphany" and the Final Sequence, but overall elicits more that-guy-needs-a-hug sympathy than hair-raising dread).
I'll leave it at that until I've seen it again on the 26th, just to avoid cementing negative first impressions by putting them down in too much detail. I doubt a second viewing will win me over entirely, but I want to at least give it a chance.
Still no release date for the full album, but this single track came out last week:
The sound is polished to an almost inappropriately bright sheen, and in general the choices that stand out to me
as choices also tend to stand out to me as bad ones. Jaunty tone? Nope. AutoTune (it's subtle, but I don't
think I'm imagining it)? Sorry. Tinkering with lyrics? Thanks for playing, you can see yourself out. ("For neatness he deserves a nod, does Sweeney Todd" -- pointlessly updated to present-tense, before immediately slipping back into past-tense in the following line, "Inconspicuous, Sweeney was" -- inexcusably muddies Sondheim's razor-sharp, libretto-spanning original strategy of keeping all the Ballads in past-tense until the finale, where the shift into present-tense is meant to shock the ear. How anyone could fail to have grasped that -- or could find it somehow less compelling than whatever the lame excuse was for "improving" the original "deserve
d a nod,
did Sweeney Todd": sure, maybe he
still does deserve that nod, so what, who cares? -- while claiming to be a serious longtime fan of the original, as Kail and Lacamoire do... eludes me).
But then, in the theatre -- and topping the list of this production's serious failings -- lyrics get swallowed in bulk all evening anyway, by either the cast or the acoustics, often both at once. (The show's Tony nomination for sound design is one of the more preposterous jokes in living awards-season memory; Tunick's full 26-piece orchestration has surely never before sounded this tame). So at least the recording's slickness may largely correct that, if this track is anything to judge by. The last piece of the aural puzzle would be to fix the cast's Babel of mangled accents, Ashford's being by far the most egregious (which is a shame, since otherwise -- and without the visual distraction of her single-mindedly chewing down the
entire set
all night -- she's in fine voice). Hearing her Kevin Costner-level "accent" recorded in crystalline stereo -- as opposed to the dynamically-challenged mush that prevails at the Lunt -- might make it even worse, crossing an already blurry line from merely frustrating and disappointing to irredeemably offensive. (At least Costner wasn't disfiguring what anyone would call a masterpiece of screenwriting). But the problem may be less pronounced (pun intended) in sung contexts than in spoken ones -- the latter being less likely to appear on the recording -- and I suppose we can hope there was a dialect coach on hand in the studio to smooth out any remaining bumps for posterity.
Having said all that, the new track does sound "pretty".
Quote from: scenicdesign71 on May 16, 2023, 04:55 AMAshford's [accent], by far the most egregious ... may be less pronounced (pun intended) in sung contexts than in spoken ones -- the latter being less likely to appear on the recording -- and I suppose we can hope there was a dialect coach on hand in the studio to smooth out any remaining bumps for posterity.
No such luck, apparently. Which is all the more unfortunate since, as I said, her singing is otherwise lovely. But the vowels are so cringe ("...with the fishes
sploshing, ...wouldn't that be
smoshing?") that, as a matter of basic (in)competence -- and sheer distraction -- someone really should have made the executive decision to just forego the alleged "accent" altogether. Or else replaced either Ashford or her dialect coach, or both.
Groban bugs me less, despite being 100% menace-free: his limitations, while significant, at least aren't nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying like Ashford's. And if nothing else, he too, of course, sounds beautiful:
Again the sound, both orchestral and vocal, is polished to Hollywood-soundtrack silkiness. It makes for a surprisingly smooth and pleasant listen -- and in doing so, misses the show's essential nature by a wide margin. (I'm guessing that the new transitional material, bridging various scenes in Act I, might not end up on the album: in the theater, this material likewise felt pitched toward a sort of melody-forward, megamusical-like flow; but if I'm recalling correctly, it doesn't actually segue directly into or out of the surrounding scenes, instead reprising themes we've just heard -- a rather dramaturgically-clunky, old-fashioned notion of "scene-change music").
It's almost as if Kail and Lacamoire were hoping to boost Sondheim's masterpiece from critical darling into box-office-smash status by shoehorning it into the slick template of Broadway's 1980s "British invasion". For starters, notwithstanding
Hamilton's wholesale recycling (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=221.msg5323#msg5323) of ideas from the Nunn-Napier
Les Miz, I'm not convinced that that particular style is actually Kail's forte. But even if it were, it would be a woefully wrongheaded approach to this material.
Worst of all, onstage, is the arch tone of the comedy, suggesting an appeal to young fans of the show's School Edition (https://www.mtishows.com/sweeney-todd-school-edition) (surely the worst candidate for Junior-ization since
'night, Mother (https://youtu.be/z5VfekpUpms?t=36)), or of its camp apotheosis in
Jersey Girl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXZ-NAPnfsw). Any actual production of
Sweeney Todd which leaves such fans' previous sense of the show remotely intact can be said to have failed beyond redemption. More broadly still, as may be clear by now, I'm actually kinda settling into the opinion (sorry-not-sorry for the snobbery) that any
Sweeney that succeeds in pleasing a truly mass audience -- particularly a "family" audience, and certainly if it does so by emphasizing "fun" as a primary (or even relevant) factor -- can be definitionally classified as a sellout and a failure. (Whatever its other disappointments, Tim Burton's resolutely dark and mirthless film at least got this right).
Sweeney's humor, such as it is, is at once savagely ugly and coolly intellectual -- both qualities anathema to mainstream American taste, in 2023 as in 1979, when some of its original critics dinged it for exactly that reason. Any comfortable middle-ground between those two comic poles (white-hot fury and stone-faced irony) is precisely what the show is designed to exclude; those critics saw it clearly for what it was, even if they lacked the taste to appreciate it. So if your production is somehow dwelling in that middle ground, or even wasting time searching for it, you've missed the point entirely.
"Sometimes you just have to educate an audience," said Angela Lansbury (https://themillions.com/2023/03/what-does-a-sweeney-todd-revival-owe-us.html) of
Sweeney's original production. The producers and artists behind this first full-scale B'way revival would likely find that idea quaint, or perhaps even alien to the point of incomprehensibility.
Sometimes I think I'm catching some of SJS's rhymes for the "first" time long, long after first hearing them -- but his work (well, most of it) has been in my head for so many years now that I'm rarely 100% sure whether I've really only-just-now noticed a given rhyme, or whether I might perhaps have clocked it eons ago and then eventually stopped registering it; there's a built-in déja-vu when the material has been this familiar for this many decades.
This is not one of those times (...I don't think). Speaking of Ashford's sploshing-smoshing travesty, I just now caught, for the truly first time (I'm 99% sure...?), what I suspect might at least have begun as a slightly sketchy attempt at rhyming-in-dialect:
His voice was soft, his manner mild.
He seldom laughed, but he often smiled.
Maybe there's some vague in-between delivery that could make soft/laughed work, after a fashion, in a (sung) Cockney accent. But I strongly suspect that a serious dialectician would insist that there's a definite, subtle (but really, not that subtle) distinction to be drawn between the aw/ah vowels here. Brit.: Sorft/larft, or something like that.
Oh, well. And I've been so smugly, presumptuously fond, for so many years, of hazing Tim Rice for doing this kind of thing in his own, native vernacular. (I still don't think soft/laughed is as bad as farmers/pyjamas. Literally nothing is as bad as farmers/pyjamas, no matter how well the sounds may actually align in standard RP).
Of course, there may have been no such intent on Sondheim's part. On all the recordings I've checked (OBCR, tour video, B'way 2005, London 2012, B'way 2023), soft/laughed skews toward an American-ish pronunciation: sawft/laffed, not rhyming at all, not trying to, not even close. But I do wonder whether SJS might have perhaps originally hoped it could rhyme in Cockney, then came to accept that it just doesn't, and consequently made the singers flatten the vowel in laughed to ensure it wouldn't sound like a failed attempt.
Farmers/pyjamas in RP is perfectly acceptable. Soft/laughed cannot rhyme in RP or cockney - or any other British dialect I can think of! I wonder if it's the -ft at the end of each word that's meant to 'rhyme'?
At this point I'm wondering if the entire album will be released piecemeal before becoming available
as an album:
Groban's Sweeney won't convince everyone (and hasn't). But unlike many, I don't think this revival's problems begin, end, or even necessarily have much to do with him. In a production that wasn't so woefully misguided in so many other ways, he could probably give us a better-than-good account of the title role. Unfortunately, this is the production we have, and if there is a hypothetical performance titanic enough to triumph over this mess of directorial missteps (a very big "if", in any case), Groban's isn't it. Even so, setting aside the regrettable context -- which should be somewhat easier with the recording than it is at the Lunt -- I'd call it a respectable attempt, nowhere more so than in "Epiphany".
The misguided slickness that seems to characterize the rest of this album (at least what we've heard of it so far) seems somewhat less intrusive here; perhaps this song is simply too irreducibly jagged to ever be entirely tamed by overly-polished musical direction or studio engineering. It does feel like more of a sprint than the original, though the tempo isn't significantly faster: nine seconds shorter than the OBCR, much of which can be accounted for by the lack of the original applause-killing "unresolved" quiet ending -- which is likewise missing at the Lunt, presumably for reasons too obvious (if wrong-headed) to need explanation. Groban of course gets plenty of applause -- not undeserved, though I still wish they'd use the quiet ending to discourage it, to the extent that that's possible. Yet, onstage, his "Epiphany" fails to stop the show in quite the
way it ought to, which is essential to any really good
ST, and which has nothing to do with (and can survive) applause: it's a feeling of disruption, of overwhelm, of decisively fracturing the show at its halfway point -- and it's missing from this production, though not through any obvious fault of the singer. Instead, the song feels just slightly hurried-through, with a businesslike briskness that does come through on this track, more from the orchestra (too smooth, too even-keeled, not loud or ugly enough) than from Groban himself. Twenty-six pieces notwithstanding, the original's knock-you-back-in-your-seat "wall of sound" is altogether missing -- from the entire show, but nowhere more conspicuously than in this song, both at the Lunt and on this recording. What's frustrating is that the distance between this and a truly world-class "Epiphany" is not huge, and could probably have been bridged by better direction and/or musical direction (and, onstage, better sound design). JG isn't there yet, but he's within hailing distance, which is a lot more than can be said for most of his collaborators.
Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Jun 26, 2023, 12:21 PMInterview with the late Eugene Lee's longtime associate Patrick Lynch about Lee's original Sweeney Todd set and its influence on the new Trinity Rep production (https://www.trinityrep.com/show/sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber-of-fleet-street/), on which they'd both been working at the time of Lee's death:
https://playbill.com/article/before-eugene-lee-died-he-was-revisiting-his-tony-winning-sweeney-todd-set-design-in-rhode-island
Another forehead-slap moment: of course the governing scenic metaphor for an updated Sweeney, rather than an industrial-era factory, would become a 21st-century prison (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html).
...or maybe a macabre allegory about 21st-century gentrification (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/arts/television/the-horror-of-dolores-roach-justina-machado-aaron-mark.html)? (Incarceration, however, does also play a pivotal role in this modern-day, gender-flipped
Sweeney redux (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_horror_of_dolores_roach/s01/reviews?type=top_critics)):
The Horror of Dolores Roach on Amazon Prime Video (https://www.amazon.com/Horror-Dolores-Roach-Season/dp/B0C4VLB35N)(Or at least it did in the show's original Off-Broadway source). I haven't yet seen the Amazon series, or listened to the horror-fiction podcast (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/dolores-roach/episodes) on which it's based. Indeed, I even missed creator Aaron Mark's initial pass at this story in 2015, as an unnervingly effective one-woman fright-fest (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/theater/review-empanada-loca-a-tough-life-and-a-special-ingredient.html) called
Empanada Loca -- though I heard good things about it at the time, and was especially sorry to have missed it after hearing some intriguing technical details from a friend who painted its original stage production at LAByrinth, and whose descriptions alone gave me the willies, sight unseen: a pitch-black abandoned subway tunnel; an oil-drum fire; an animatronic, partially-edible (!) subway rat [prop] somehow built to be impaled nightly by Dolores as it scampered across the stage, roasted over said fire throughout the hourlong runtime, and then devoured by her in the final moments. (After a lifetime of indifference to rodents, just my friend's
explanation of this image may have singlehandedly inspired my late-blooming, mild but unpleasant murophobia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_mice_and_rats)).
Prior to its (retitled) podcast and TV incarnations,
Empanada Loca became the first in Mark's triptych of sanguinary Off-Broadway horror monologues, soon followed by
Another Medea (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/theater/tom-hewitt-in-another-medea.html) and
Squeamish (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/theater/review-in-squeamish-its-the-therapist-whos-troubled.html). And I
was fortunately later able to catch all three shows, right around Halloween 2017, under the auspices of another friend's solo-theatre company, All For One: the first two revived as one-night-only benefit readings (https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/news/two-tales-of-terror-rubin-vega-hewitt_82902.html/) featuring their original stars, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tom Hewitt respectively; and the third in its original production (https://www.afo.nyc/squeamish) starring Alison Fraser. (The latter -- in further tribute to Mr. Mark's talent for constructing skin-crawling scenarios from words alone, and to Ms. Fraser's persuasive performance -- elicited from me a previously-latent strain of hematophobia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_phobia) which, as with
Empanada Loca's roasted-rat epilogue, hasn't entirely subsided since).
Empanada Loca on Audible:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Empanada-Loca-Audiobook/B0763W58HTAnother Medea on Spotify:
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pandemic-playhouse/episodes/ANOTHER-MEDEA-e19fjsp/a-a6prme9Squeamish on Spotify:
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pandemic-playhouse/episodes/SQUEAMISH-eclmlb/a-a1tl3g9As relatively rare theatrical forays into horror, skillfully structured as vibrant solo storytelling ("Grand Guignol in the style of Spalding Gray," in Mark's own description), all three plays intrigued me at the time: he's a smart and polished writer-director with a slightly sadistic gift for tightening the screws on characters and audiences alike. Transmuted eight years later into what looks like relatively campy dark comedy,
Dolores's TV trailer suggests a shift into a tonal register that won't likely get so far under anyone's skin as to ignite lasting phobias. Then again, trailers often tend to reach for the most easily-legible trope, sometimes so lazily as to actively distort the material they're ostensibly selling. Either way, I'm still curious enough to watch.
[Ed.: There is in fact a restaurant called Empanada Loca here in New York (https://empanadaloca.com), though it's in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, not Washington Heights (where Mark locates the fictional, decades-old neighborhood mom-and-pop shop in his story). Both Empanada Loca
s, the play and the real-life Brooklyn restaurant, opened in 2015; I remember discovering this at the time, while Googling the play's title, and being struck by the coincidence. In hindsight, I wonder whether its change of title, from the podcast onward, might have been spurred by resistance on the part of the real restaurant's owners to being accidentally associated with such a viscerally unappetizing story. (While the Tooting Arts Sweeney Todd
served meat pies (http://www.sweeneytoddnyc.com/more-hot-pies/) to its audiences, and at least one stand-alone restaurant (http://www.sweeneyandtodd.co.uk) has been named after the character, Mark's play lacks the foggy-olde-London quaintness of its legendary forerunner, and -- no surprise, if you've read this far -- he leans into his story's cannibalistic ickiness in far more vivid detail than Sondheim, Wheeler or Bond ever did). Still, title notwithstanding, Mark's fictional WaHi empanaderia
has retained its name within
the story, up to and including its new TV incarnation].
Good god, the AutoTune.
Both times I saw the show, Matarazzo was fine, though somewhat flavorless under what I assume was the modern mandate against having an able-bodied, neurotypical actor play Tobias as -- never mind "simple," heaven forbid! -- in any way recognizably Tobias-like. Indeed, rendered in this production as a rather boringly ordinary young dude whose (unfortunate, we're fleetingly told) life experiences have left no perceptible imprint beyond vague social awkwardness and occasional guardedness -- in other words, a rather boringly ordinary young dude, full stop -- the problem arises that this Toby's inexplicable affection for Ashford's off-on-her-own-planet Mrs. Lovett sometimes feels mildly creepy and off-putting. Her sorrowful realization that he'll have to be sacrificed therefore becomes, in Ashford's incoherent performance, the improbably sharp pang of an amoral Martian obliged to liquidate one of the least-interesting (to her, by all appearances, as well as to us), kinda annoyingly clingy but otherwise dully nondescript Earthlings in her immediate orbit. Puzzling.
Anyway, the AutoTune: having heard Matarazzo sing this song live twice, perfectly adequately both times, I cannot imagine the reasoning by which his voice could possibly have needed this much studio tweaking; he doesn't sound memorably fantastic onstage, but at least there he sounds like a human being.
I was cleaning out my email when I came across this, from April:
Mimi Lien Designed a Set Built for Beheadings (https://link.nymag.com/view/57b4b8b33f92a47021423519imfqx.5ma/9b2220b0)
The headline is silly clickbait, but the article is mildly interesting and contains a couple of nice pictures of Ms. Lien's set model.
It's an elegant design, "on paper," as it were -- sinister and brutal-looking, a symphony of soaring lines, crushing weight and soot-blackened texture. It just doesn't work as well as one would hope in reality: the staging makes no compelling use of the set whatsoever, and, as mentioned elsewhere (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2272.msg7657#msg7657), its sightlines are sometimes appalling at precisely the most crucial moments.
These should have been solvable problems, which is frustrating, but on balance it does leave me with some sympathy for the designer; in the end, we have limited control over how our designs are used. (Full disclosure: I painted a show (https://www.lct.org/shows/luck-of-the-irish/) for Ms. Lien once, ten years ago at the then-brand-new LCT3, where she was very pleasant to work with).
I've listened to the cast recording twice so far, and was prepared to hate it, but... I don't. I think Groban is excellent, and the rest of the cast sounds at least good, although the actress playing Johanna gets a little shrill at times. I wouldn't know AutoTune if it hit me over the head, so I don't recognize it. The thing that bothers me is that every instance of "tt" is guttural (is that the right word? Maybe it's glottal.), and I'm not used to hearing "a LI--le priest" and "Penny buys a BO--le". Maybe I'll get used to it.
Quote from: KathyB on Sep 20, 2023, 05:22 PMI've listened to the cast recording twice so far, and was prepared to hate it, but... I don't. I think Groban is excellent, and the rest of the cast sounds at least good, although the actress playing Johanna gets a little shrill at times. I wouldn't know AutoTune if it hit me over the head, so I don't recognize it. The thing that bothers me is that every instance of "tt" is guttural (is that the right word? Maybe it's glottal.), and I'm not used to hearing "a LI--le priest" and "Penny buys a BO--le". Maybe I'll get used to it.
I'd be curious what a dialect expert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V29OhkbzwuQ) had to say about those glottal t's, which actually come and go freely within single songs, sometimes single lines, though someone does seem to have decided that "tt"'s deserved the most consistency. Obviously not all Cockney t's are glottal (though I guess it's true that all tt's pretty much are), but the choices here sometimes seem so arbitrary that I suspect they may have more to do with Ashford's limitations than with accuracy.
Or, conceivably, with someone's questionable sense of how much Cockney realness a mostly-American audience can handle. I wouldn't necessarily say Ashford is doing us, or the material, any great favors intelligibility-wise. But I recall Angela Lansbury being quoted many years ago -- perhaps in
Sondheim & Co. -- saying she'd devised a kind of Cockney Lite for the role, so as not to entirely confound American ears already being challenged to keep up with SJS's lyrics. (And in turn, somewhat more recently [but still at least a decade ago], a Scottish-born actress friend of mine disillusioned me by pronouncing Lansbury's accent as Mrs. Lovett "ridiculous").
Accents aside, my ire has been somewhat soothed by the new recording's finished mix (Apple Music's version, at least) and/or the lack of compression on the complete album, as compared to the YouTube tracks posted above. I have no idea what the specific technical differences are, but to my ear they do improve matters -- strikingly enough that, after a few tracks, I went back and played some of them back-to-back with the YouTube versions to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I don't have the knowledge or terminology to really describe what I'm hearing, but it's like there's more spatial depth and clarity on the album; the orchestra feels more present and the instrumentation more distinct; it has texture (as do the voices), where on YouTube it seems to recede and blend into a kind of silken goo.
I doubt I'll ever love the breakneck tempo of much of "The Letter" and, especially, "City on Fire," in this version.
But Groban does indeed sound great throughout. And with enough repetition, who knows, eventually maybe I'll even simmer down enough to cut Ashford some slack; as I've said in previous posts, from a purely musical perspective, she's absolutely fine. It's the accent, and her particular brand of clowning (somewhat less evident on the album, mercifully), that set my teeth on edge.
I wanted to love Ruthie Ann Miles, but found her only adequate onstage (I think she might have been managing a cold at one of the perfs I saw), so I'm happy to say she's quite wonderful on the album. (Both times I saw her onstage, her accent kept sliding oddly between Cockney yowl -- fine -- and full-on Liam Neeson brogue -- huh? I mean, I guess you
could devise a backstory for the BW to defend that choice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueRLSSne1Ws); and, to Miles's credit, both dialects at least sounded more believable to me than anything Ashford could ever dream of, admittedly a low bar to clear; but I found the brogue distracting, so I'm just as glad for it to have vanished in the recording studio). I especially like the startling shift, in her last moments, from the pleading "...she's the devil's wife" into a manic, wholly unhinged (and spoken, not sung, which might bother some purists) "Beadle, dear Beadle" -- and just as abruptly back again for her final lines. I don't specifically remember that whiplash moment from either of the performances I saw; maybe she wasn't doing it that way, at that point in the run, or maybe it just wasn't as memorable onstage (where the entire Final Sequence felt so limp and at-sea that I remember very few details even after two viewings) -- but on the recording it's kinda spine-tingling. Shockingly unexpected, schizoid register shifts have been part of the BW's DNA since 1979; but execution is everything, and Miles's attack makes this particular moment both gasp-worthy and heartbreaking.
Variety: Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford Set Exits From Broadway Hit Sweeney Todd (https://variety.com/2023/legit/news/josh-groban-annaleigh-ashford-exit-broadway-sweeney-todd-1235762111/)
Namely January 14, 2024. But the production hopes to continue with new leads (casting TBA), which gives me the shamefully petty but undeniable sinking feeling that it may outrun the blindingly superior 1979 original (which would require staying afloat for just three more months after Groban and Ashford leave); and that it will likely recoup its investment (as Prince's never did) even before their exit.
A national tour (https://playbill.com/article/tony-nominated-sweeney-todd-revival-will-tour-u-s-in-2025) is planned, starting in early 2025.
Rumors, rumors... (https://pagesix.com/2023/10/30/celebrity-news/aaron-tveit-sutton-foster-will-next-star-in-sweeney-todd-broadway-buzz/)
[Ed.: Rumor confirmed (https://variety.com/2023/legit/news/aaron-tveit-sutton-foster-sweeney-todd-broadway-1235773659/)]
The Sweeney Todd Tiny Desk Concert:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/1217040744/sweeney-todd-tiny-desk-concert
NYT piece on Sutton Foster, who recently took over (https://www.instagram.com/p/C3Is183OdKP/) Mrs. Lovett for Sweeney's likely-final three months; she's been rehearsing off and on since last fall, while juggling concert appearances and the recent Encores! Once Upon A Mattress (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CswHHvTbeV8):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/theater/sutton-foster-sweeney-todd.html
And here are some new production shots (https://broadwaydirect.com/first-look-aaron-tveit-sutton-foster-and-joe-locke-join-sweeney-todd/) featuring Foster, Tveit, and Joe Locke as Tobias.
Two weeks ago someone posted video of the show's first act (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aE64Ldgq10), with Groban and Ashford.
And someone else posted this Roblox version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndzhRB1fUqo), compressing an hour of Act I highlights into 15 minutes while capturing all the theatrical intelligence and nuance of the actual production: literally, if you could just watch the whole show animated this way, you'd save yourself the cost of a B'way ticket without missing a thing. Though the design and staging aren't always an exact match for what's happening at the Lunt, they're not far off -- and more importantly, this digital "toy theatre" tribute captures the vibe, and even the performance style, of Kail's revival with astonishing accuracy. (I'm not even being snarky here. Well, okay, maybe a little; but I'm not being hyperbolic: from my jaundiced perspective, the creators of the revival, and of this video homage to it, get the exact same things wrong about Sweeney Todd, in exactly the same ways and with exactly the same painfully misguided theatre-kid enthusiasm. They're doing what they're doing with absolute love and no shortage of talent — and not a clue how badly their efforts are trivializing the material).
Theatermania: Sweeney Todd to End Broadway Run When Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster Depart (https://www.theatermania.com/news/sweeney-todd-to-end-broadway-run-when-aaron-tveit-and-sutton-foster-depart_1733253/)...which is to say, May 8.
Quote from: David Gordon, TheatermaniaAt the time of closing, it will have played 28 preview performances and 407 regular performances.
I am not proud to have become someone who keeps score, but I can't deny feeling pleasantly surprised and relieved that Harold Prince's original production remains unchallenged for Broadway longevity, having played 19 previews and 557 performances according to IBDB (https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/sweeney-todd-3925).
Unchallenged by this production, at any rate; it's not that I consider Prince's staging untouchable in principle — only that I've yet to see a better one anywhere.
Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Mar 14, 2024, 02:38 PM[...] it's not that I consider Prince's staging untouchable in principle — only that I've yet to see a better one anywhere.
One of the productions of
Sweeney that I've seen (a college production) was heavily influenced by the original Prince staging (it had the barber shop on top of the pie shop that spun around on wheels to become the parlor). Another one--Opera Colorado--took the staging in a completely different direction, and it's my most memorable
Sweeney. There was a platform over part of the stage where the chorus mostly stayed. There was a large framed image on that wall of a Dürer-like food chain starting with the krill and ending up with the Big Fish several steps later, representative of how everyone gets preyed on by the higher-ups. I thought it was an effective way of not showing the beehive. The action took place all over the stage, which was an in-the-round space with part of the seating blocked off. the barber chair was center stage, and when something (bodies, books, etc.) needed to go down the chair-chute, it got dropped from the ceiling at another part of the stage that represented the bakehouse. The parlor was in a different part of the stage. I'm sure the reason that they went off from Prince's original staging was due to the limitations of the not-quite-in-the-round space. It was an amazing production.
That in-the-roundish staging sounds fascinating,
@KathyB — thank you for the description!
I've seen other memorable
Sweeneys too, most of which departed dramatically from Prince's actual staging. A space that actually forces such a departure might actually be a blessing of sorts, though the food-chain diagram you mention does suggest homage to his original concept at least.
Notwithstanding all the ink I've spilled here, it's hard for me to articulate exactly what it is about Prince's original contribution that I find so essential. But one of the big things that bothers me about the current revival is its wishy-washiness: John Doyle's reinterpretation at least interested me for its thoroughgoingness, while Kail's limp homage just feels wrongheaded and pointless, managing to miss, with impressively perverse marksmanship, everything that was great about the original — while adding nothing worthwhile in its place, unless you count the dubious innovation of recouping at the box office by playing
Sweeney as toothless dramedy.