Todd triumphant

This is just a quick note regarding Boston Conservatory's current production of Sweeney Todd, which completes its one-weekend run this Sunday in the Conservatory's brand-new, as-yet-unnamed theatre.

Okay - first, the bad news: the new theatre is a wonderful improvement over the tatty, claustrophobic space in which Conservatory students long performed; the seats are comfy, the sight lines good, everything is gleaming and brand-new.  But alas, the space is still somewhat disappointing acoustically.  It seems the rough dimensions of the old theatre remain in place, although now there's a genuine orchestra pit (hurrah!) and the hall has been swathed in dark, high-tech surfaces that we suppose were meant to work some kind of acoustical magic on it.

But wonderful sound has yet to pop out of the acoustician's hat.  The trouble is that even with the new pit, the theatre is afflicted with balance problems - the orchestra's too loud (and the singers are still amplified over it, though not as much as they used to be).  What's more troubling is that loud as it is, the sound feels slightly flat; the place booms, but doesn't resonate.  So I'm not sure simply installing more sound absorption or whatever in the pit is the answer.  It is a puzzlement.  Boston Conservatory reportedly engaged acoustical engineer Larry Kirkegaard, who did the Shalin Liu Hall up in Rockport, to work on the space; somehow I don't think his job is over.  In the meantime, my advice to the orchestra is: play softer.

But the good news is that this production of Sweeney Todd is quite memorable, and I would advise Sondheim fans to run out and grab tickets, only there aren't any - the show sold out weeks ago.  There were a few odd artistic decisions here and there in the acting (neither the Judge nor his Beadle seemed at all formidable), but leads Robert Lance Mooney and Julie Thomas (above left) sang and acted superbly in notoriously challenging roles - although intriguingly, they traced different arcs over the course of the show.  As Mrs. Lovett, Thomas was all comic bustle, to hilariously detailed effect - but she didn't seem in touch with the darker aspects of the role (particularly during "Not While I'm Around," sung quite affectingly by Dan Rosales, when she should be contemplating murder).  Meanwhile Mooney, who seemed a bit withdrawn at first, blossomed in the second half to truly operatic heights of intensity.  There were other strong turns from Mike Heslin as Anthony, Marissa Miller as Johanna, and Daniel George as Pirelli.  And it was wonderful, after years of stripped-down chamber versions, to hear the great Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations (even if at too high a volume).

The artistic idea that seemed to be in director Neil Donohoe's sights was the ongoing question of whether Sweeney Todd counts as musical or grand opera.  It is, of course, about 75% sung-through, I think - but on the other hand, its musical style isn't always operatic; Sondheim switches from opera to operetta to music hall and back again at a moment's notice.  And the work is probably best sung by singers with Broadway training - which essentially covers technical resources with a casual, I'm-just-tossing-this-off-like-a-regular-guy kind of articulation.  Still, what Donohoe and this cast demonstrated is that in its climaxes, Sweeney Todd reaches the musical and emotional intensity we expect of grand opera - in fact, it eclipses quite a few works in the repertory.  And much of the show was a dark hoot, to boot.  It was the kind of Conservatory production one wishes could find a longer life in some other space around town.  The only thing it really needed - like grand opera - was super-titles.  Sondheim's lyrics are just too delicious to miss, and some of them always are, even in halls with clearer acoustics than this one.  Can we all decide on that in the future?  Sweeney (and maybe all Sondheim) needs super-titles to be super.

Attend this Sweeney Todd

I was finally lured to Metro Stage's Sweeney Todd this weekend - its last - despite, I admit, my skepticism over its casting. Was there really a Sweeney Todd and a Mrs. Lovett wandering around Boston and its 'burbs, I wondered?

Well, there are, in the persons of Ben DiScipio and Shana Dirik (left and below right), who take Sondheim's two most demanding roles and play them for all they're worth and then some. Trust me; some thirty years ago, I saw Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury in the original production, and I caught Michael Cerveris and Patti Lupone in the fascinating Broadway revival. DiScipio and Dirik could have stepped into either couple's shoes.

Indeed, DiScipio was more murderously intense than Cariou, and Dirik has a better voice (and better diction!) than either Lansbury or Lupone (at this point), and she's as funny and demented as either. Whenever these two stalked the stage, this production was electrifying, and as director Paul Farwell seems to have followed closely Harold Prince's footsteps in the 1979 original, at times one felt one was watching something like "Sweeney Resurrected."

What's more, there were other pleasures beyond this impressive central duo; the production's women were remarkable, with sparkling acting and singing from Victoria Thornsbury as Johanna, and compelling vocals, but less convincing internal mania, from Arjana Andris as the Beggar Woman. The chorus was likewise in fine shape, and the reduced instrumental ensemble sounded surprisingly crisp. Things got rockier with the supporting male vocals (with Robert Case the notable exception), despite their generally on-target acting. And the physical production was, inevitably, a bit ragged (Metro Stage is a fledgling attempt to bridge the community-professional theatre gap). Still, director Farwell managed most of the show's complicated business smoothly on his constricted stage, and some sequences, particularly "City on Fire," worked perhaps better than they had on Broadway.

All in all, this proved a surprisingly strong showing for Metro, given that Sweeney Todd is the kind of operatic peak many a professional company would hesitate before attempting. Those fans who have longed to scale its heights again, in the company of expert leads, would do well to check out Sweeney's final bow, tonight.

Attend the tale of Burton's Todd

From Scissorhands to the razor's edge: Johnny Depp tries out his vocal chops in Sweeney Todd.

The critics have been kind to Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. A.O. Scott, of the Times, crowed that it was "something of a masterpiece." "There is an exhileration in every fiber of the film," Roger Ebert swooned. And to the Globe's Ty Burr, the film's spurting jugulars were "a conceptual masterstroke."

But Burr, alas, somewhat gave the critical game away with his opening gambit:

"To devotees of Broadway musicals: Fear not, your beloved Sweeney Todd has come to the screen relatively intact."

Of course only someone who didn't really understand Sweeney Todd could write that; the savage cardiovascular calisthenics of Burton's "vision" (at left) have little to do with the heart of Todd, which operates most lethally at a blithely grim remove from its business. To truly evoke its wittily tortured soul on screen would require a technique based on the brain, not the gut, as well as a method that could find a match for Sondheim's ravishing mix of Marx, the music hall, and the macabre. It's not that Burton's movie is bad, exactly (in fact, it's probably the best we could expect from today's Hollywood). It's just that the movie seems to operate on a separate, parallel track to its score, a kind of odd "image track" that's synched up with the sound but doesn't really embody, elaborate, or expand upon it. If this is the best we can expect from Hollywood, then I think we should also admit it's hopelessly inadequate to the challenges of a masterpiece of the stage.

But of course we can't do that. Indeed, among most of the film reviews, there's an almost touching sense of trying to join the grown-ups' cultural table - or, even more embarrassingly, trying to drag the movie audience to it, too - all while proffering the most amusingly patronizing praise I've read in a long while. Burr tells his audience directly (just to make sure): "This is a musical." Only it's "a bloody brilliant musical." Okay, point taken. Still, Burr is miles more sophisticated than Peter Travers, who piles on the brain-dead kick-ass clichés: Burton "sets a new gold standard for bringing a stage musical to the screen . . . [Burton] knows that what Sondheim composes is considered holy writ. And yet Burton and screenwriter John Logan . . . have deleted songs, abridged characters and sliced an hour off the show's three-hour running time in the name of keeping the tale fixed on Sweeney's need for vengeance." In other words: never mind the bollocks, here's Sweeney!

Of course not everyone's trying to act like an adult. Over at salon, Stephanie Zacharek informs us that she has "no idea what it takes to carry material like this -- to sing songs whose melodies are like meandering, worm-shaped exoskeletons, deliberately fashioned with lots of twists and turns so more words can be crammed in." Wow, lots of words (maybe even words like 'exoskeleton'!) - what a bummer.

Strangely enough, the one thing everyone can agree on is that the singing needs to be excused. Depp, it turns out, is okay - he sings forcefully and can hit the notes (and his acting carries him the rest of the way); Bonham Carter (left) can hit the notes, too, but with not an ounce of breath to spare. The rest of the cast is not much better. And this, as even most of the film critics agree, is the greatest score since the golden age of West Side Story and My Fair Lady. And yet we're stuck with movie actors who can't sing? Why can't they be fucking dubbed? Has the method-actor mania of the Hollywood machine now reached such an extreme that we can't admit our actors aren't capable of delivering a nearly-operatic score? Somebody page Marni Nixon!

Sigh. So this musical screws its score, to varying degrees - the score which is, of course, the reason for doing it at all. Still, a few numbers come over - "Pretty Women" being the most powerful of them (perhaps because it's simply the theatrical scene shot in fluid close-up). Most, however, don't - some (like the show-stopping "Worst Pies in London") lay a complete egg, while others are merely pale shadows of their theatrical selves ("Not While I'm Around," "A Little Priest"). The movie actually improves only one, the relatively minor "By the Sea," which Burton gives a highly amusing fantasy treatment.

Elsewhere you wonder why, exactly, the director "fell in love with" Sondheim's musical, as he claims; like Ty Burr, he doesn't really get it. He misdirects Bonham Carter completely, transforming Mrs. Lovett into one of his standard-issue, ghoulishly sexy waifs (while Mrs. Lovett is actually a bloodily efficient bourgois wannabe), and he doesn't seem to grasp at all the musical's corruscating social vision. To Burton, the idea that man feeds on man is nowhere near as important as the ick factor of actual human flesh sprouting from a meat grinder; indeed, his film operates as a kind of symbol of the excesses of current cinema, in which sensation is end-all and be-all. To be fair, he stages a few sequences with vigor, elicits an eloquently repellent turn from Timothy Spall, and closes with a haunting tableau. But if you haven't really captured either the score or the ideas of the musical, have you really done your job? Only our film critics could think so.