Did anyone else here end up seeing this? SweetLips22, if you attended (the tale), what did you think? My thoughts:
The cast: Anthony Warlow sounded amazing as always. He sounded beautiful in songs like 'My Friends', but was willing to have his voice be harsh and unattractive during angry/crazy moments. His 'Epiphany' got a huge reaction. According to my knowledge of Sweeneys, he didn't try for any kind of radical reinterpretation of the role; it was a good, committed, traditional interpretation. Not that I was particularly expecting or hoping for a different type of Sweeney anyway.
Gina Riley has a decent voice IMO, certainly good enough and suitable for Mrs Lovett. (In fact, she may have a nicer voice which, rightly, she didn't use for this role.) I thought she did well with the comedic aspects of the role, playing up the social (not musical) tone-deafness of Mrs Lovett in scenes where she blithely signs her own take on things, without noticing that others aren't on board. This worked well for me in 'My Friends' and 'By The Sea', and moderately well in 'Not While I'm Around'. I would have liked a bit more wariness from her in the latter scene; her suggestion to take Toby down to the bakehouse didn't have any (for example) jovial 'overacting' to show that she was faking it to fool him, or hesitation to show that she was frantically thinking out what to do. It was instead played at the same level as everything prior. Similarly, her style REALLY didn't work for me during her final scene. To me, she again came across as blithely confident that she and Sweeney were on the same page, even before "Mrs Lovett, you're a bloody wonder..." I felt that it undercut the gravity of the scene, especially while Warlow was going for broke with the emotions beside her. If she had wanted to play it as "trying to brazen it out", personally I would again have preferred that we saw some hints of desperation or fear underneath the bluster. (Maybe her performance would have worked better for me if I had been seated closer to the stage? I'm not sure.)
The rest of the cast sounded great vocally; acting-wise I have some (further) nitpicks but generally I thought they were decent to good.
The production: As this was originally promoted as a concert production, I was pleasantly surprised that it was reasonably fully staged. The show was begun with a framing device during the 'Ballad', in which a group of spiritualists gathered to hold a seance in a dilapidated parlour, summoning the spirits of Sweeney et al. The whole show was held within the parlour, with additional setpieces for the various locations. This worked for me for the most part, and led to some nice moments. One moment which did NOT work for me was Sweeney's first appearance, rising up from the spiritualists' table, because they had him stand up beneath the tablecloth for a 'big reveal' by throwing the tablecloth off a moment later. This meant that Sweeney's first appearance made him look like a kid pretending to be a ghost on Halloween. Nope. On the plus side, Johanna's first appearance was done via a parlour wall portrait of a young lady which became transparent and then opened, revealing Johanna framed in her window. The 'Letter' was sung by ensemble members around the spiritualists' table, with one writing and reacting in tandem with Sweeney, as if he were channelling Sweeney's words and emotions.
I'm glad to hear your friend enjoyed it, including Gina. I'll admit my audience seemed to have no complaints with her.
