Found the NY Times Review:
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: April 8, 1989, Saturday
LEAD: In the 10 years since it first opened on Broadway, 'Sweeney Todd,' Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Grand Guignol musical of revenge run amok, has only grown in stature.
In the 10 years since it first opened on Broadway, 'Sweeney Todd,' Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Grand Guignol musical of revenge run amok, has only grown in stature.
Among other things, 'Sweeney Todd' anticipated darker times. New York City today, with its homelessness and municipal corruption scandals, feels a lot more like the show's grim 19th-century London setting than it did a decade ago. That's why the show's railing misanthropy hits so much closer to home. In 10 years, the somewhat forbidding Sondheim score has also been absorbed into the culture. Music that echoes composers as disparate as Gilbert and Sullivan, Puccini and Bernard Herrmann has been recognized as one of the most majestic of modern operatic scores.
One of the questions surrounding the future of 'Sweeney Todd' has been how much weight it could carry if given a drastically scaled-down production from the one on Broadway that used a gigantic set incorporating parts from an iron foundry. The York Theater Company's stunning revival happily proves the show can be just as gripping when done as a small chamber opera. In some ways it even benefits from the more intimate scale.
Susan H. Schulman, the director of the York Theater revival, has ingeniously re-conceived 'Sweeney Todd' as an environmental theater piece in which the floor in front of the audience is a painted cobblestone street. At one end stands the shop where the demon barber dispenses bloody murder. Opposite looms the headquarters of the diabolical Judge Turpin. The theater walls are a painted set of shabby tenements and clotheslines. Inside this ominous shadowy environment, one has a real sense of social constriction and lurking danger. During the course of the evening, the company sweeps back and forth between the two sites, stopping occasionally to make accusatory, threatening eye contact with the audience.
The director has assembled a cast almost as impressive as the Broadway company, with the brilliant performance of Bob Gunton in the title role, surpassing even Len Cariou's iron portrayal in the original cast. Hollow-eyed and zombie-like, ignited by an unappeasable lust for vengeance, Mr. Gunton projects an intensity that at moments borders on seizure. Even in the show's lighter moments, he remains a tense, quivering hulk, wracked with demons. And as his murderous fury escalates into a literal foaming at the mouth, he becomes a terrifying, pitiable creature who still retains enough humanity to engage compassion. Vocally Mr. Gunton has a harder, more gravelly tone than Mr. Cariou's more mellifluous baritone. But this harsher quality gives his solos an extra edge of crazy determination.
As his doting accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, Beth Fowler is quite different from Angela Lansbury and in her own way as convincing. Instead of a savage comic caricature of an avaricious shopkeeper with dime-novel dreams, she is a more conventional, self-deluded woman with a streak of genuine tenderness. Jim Walton and Gretchen Kingsley-Weihe as the young lovers are less satisfying. Though both have fine singing voices, their stage encounters are clumsy and rushed. But David Barron imbues the role of Judge Turpin with just the right air of corrupt self-righteousness. And Eddie Korbich and Calvin Remsberg are outstanding as Tobias Ragg and the Beadle.
Not the least of the production's accomplishments is the musical director David Krane's reduction of the original orchestral score into full-bodied arrangements for three synthesizers whose textural subtleties range from birdsong to snare drum. And the colder, pricklier electronic textures that frequently sound like pipe organ and harpsichord eerily complement the play's fiendish imagery of glinting, lethal razor blades.
Five years ago, the York Theater mounted an incandescent revival of 'Pacific Overtures,' another complicated Sondheim show that one would have thought impossible to revive effectively in a small church theater. In 'Sweeney Todd,' the company has more than matched that impressive accomplishment. NO PLACE LIKE LONDON SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; boook by Hugh Wheeler; from an adaptation by Christopher Bond; directed by Susan H. Schulman; scenic design and graphics, James Morgan; costume design, Beba Shamash; lighting design, May Jo Dondlinger; technical director, James E. Fuller Jr.; production stage manager, Trey Hunt; music director, David Krane; choreographer, Michael Lichtefeld. Presented by the York Theater Company, Janet Hayes Walker, producing director; Molly Pickering Grose, managing director. At the Church of the Heavenly Rest, 2 East 90th Street. Sweeney Todd . . . Bob Gunton Mrs. Lovett . . . Beth Fowler Judge Turpin . . . David Barron The Beadle . . . Calvin Remsberg Tobias Ragg . . . Eddie Korbich Johanna . . . Gretchen Kingsley-Weihe Anthony Hope . . . Jim Walton Dora . . . Dawn Stone Jonas Fogg . . . Tony Gilbert Policeman . . . David E. Mallard Bird Seller . . . Ted Keegan Mrs. Mooney . . . Mary Ellen Phillips Beggar Woman . . . SuEllen Estey Pirelli . . . Bill Nable
I am a firm believer in serendipity- all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.
.gif?width=300)
