SWEENEY TODD, Broadway 2023

[scenicdesign71]

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

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/theater/josh-groban-sweeney-todd-broadway.html

[scenicdesign71]

The show's webpage is as yet very basic, but it's live:
https://sweeneytoddbroadway.com

You cannot view this attachment.

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, 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).

[scenicdesign71]

Jordan Fisher, Ruthie Ann Miles, Gaten Matarazzo, and More Join SWEENEY TODD; Full Principal Casting Announced!

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 at Barrow Street five years ago.

Mr. Jackson had earlier played Sweeney himself, with terrifying brilliance, in the well-received summer theatre production that I designed 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 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 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 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?

[scenicdesign71]

The show's website has been built out a bit, now featuring cast bios.

It turns out that Matarazzo is, at 20, a seasoned Broadway veteran (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Les Misérables; Dear Evan Hansen) with previous Sondheim experience (Into The Woods at the Hollywood Bowl), who appeared just last month in the City Center concert of Parade (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).

[scenicdesign71]

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.

[scenicdesign71]

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).



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 to the 2014-16 Showtime series Penny Dreadful (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 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, 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?

[scenicdesign71]

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 invited me to see L'Elisir d'Amore 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:

You cannot view this attachment.

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.

[scenicdesign71]

The New Yorker recently sat down for a "Talk of the Town" chat with Groban and Ashford, over meat pies at Tea & Sympathy in the West Village:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/meat-pies-one-meatless-with-sweeney-todds-newest-stars

[scenicdesign71]

NYT piece, a decent though not wildly-informative overview of the new production (currently about halfway through previews, opening March 26):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/theater/sweeney-todd-sondheim-josh-groban.html


You cannot view this attachment.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1155152&page=22#5384677

[scenicdesign71]

[scenicdesign71]

Brand-new photos:

BroadwayWorld:  First Look at Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford & More in Sweeney Todd on Broadway

[scenicdesign71]

NYT review (Critic's Pick):  The Many Thrilling Flavors of a Full-Scale Sweeney Todd

The 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; or, with blurbs of each review as well as links, here's ShowScore -- 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.

[KathyB]

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

[scenicdesign71]

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

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, 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).

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".

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!