SWEENEY TODD, Broadway 2023

[scenicdesign71]

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.

I'd be curious what a dialect expert 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; 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.

[scenicdesign71]

Variety:  Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford Set Exits From Broadway Hit Sweeney Todd

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 is planned, starting in early 2025.

[scenicdesign71]

Rumors, rumors...

[Ed.: Rumor confirmed]

[KathyB]

The Sweeney Todd Tiny Desk Concert:

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/1217040744/sweeney-todd-tiny-desk-concert

[scenicdesign71]

NYT piece on Sutton Foster, who recently took over 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.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/theater/sutton-foster-sweeney-todd.html


And here are some new production shots featuring Foster, Tveit, and Joe Locke as Tobias.

[scenicdesign71]

Two weeks ago someone posted video of the show's first act, with Groban and Ashford. 

And someone else posted this Roblox version, 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).

[scenicdesign71]

Theatermania:  Sweeney Todd to End Broadway Run When Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster Depart

...which is to say, May 8.

At 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, as far as Sweeneys go, having played 19 previews and 557 performances according to IBDB.

Unchallenged to date (and especially by this mediocre revival), 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.

The new production, however, has apparently recouped, which Prince's did not.  But that's understandable, given that his was a significantly larger physical production; presumably a much harder sell to audiences in 1979 (for perspective, its Tony competitors for Best Musical that year were The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and They're Playing Our Song, both of which recouped and tidily outran Sweeney, and Michael Bennett's Ballroom, which did neither); and unblessed by the dubious miracle of dynamic pricing (Broadway tickets back then topped out at $25, roughly equivalent to a hundred bucks in today's dollars).

[KathyB]

[...] 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.

[scenicdesign71]

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.