SWEENEY TODD, Broadway 2023

[scenicdesign71]

The New Yorker review:  A Sonically Thrilling Revival of Sweeney Todd on Broadway

... 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 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).

[scenicdesign71]

Watching Michelle Williams talk to Jimmy Fallon 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, and musicals 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 in the next month or two).

______________


Can't wait to see the show Friday night...   

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/04/sweeney-todd-josh-groban-annaleigh-ashford

[scenicdesign71]

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.

[Leighton]

not 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?

[scenicdesign71]

not 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.

[scenicdesign71]

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 "deserved 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".

[scenicdesign71]

Ashford'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 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 (surely the worst candidate for Junior-ization since 'night, Mother), or of its camp apotheosis in Jersey Girl.  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 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.

[scenicdesign71]

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.

[Leighton]

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'?

[scenicdesign71]

At this point I'm wondering if the entire album will be released piecemeal before becoming available as an album:

[scenicdesign71]

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.

[scenicdesign71]

Interview 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, 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.

...or maybe a macabre allegory about 21st-century gentrification?  (Incarceration, however, does also play a pivotal role in this modern-day, gender-flipped Sweeney redux):

The Horror of Dolores Roach on Amazon Prime Video

(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 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 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).

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 and Squeamish.  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 featuring their original stars, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tom Hewitt respectively; and the third in its original production 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 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/B0763W58HT
Another Medea on Spotify:     https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pandemic-playhouse/episodes/ANOTHER-MEDEA-e19fjsp/a-a6prme9
Squeamish on Spotify:            https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pandemic-playhouse/episodes/SQUEAMISH-eclmlb/a-a1tl3g9

As 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, 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 Locas, 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 to its audiences, and at least one stand-alone restaurant 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].

[scenicdesign71]

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.

[scenicdesign71]

I was cleaning out my email when I came across this, from April:

Mimi Lien Designed a Set Built for Beheadings

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, 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 for Ms. Lien once, ten years ago at the then-brand-new LCT3, where she was very pleasant to work with).

[KathyB]

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.