Australia is the punchline of a cruel joke in musical theatre god Stephen Sondheim’s razor-sharp dark fable, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
An operatic story that’s almost entirely sung, it begins with a Greek chorus of down-and-out Victorians. Gossiping like fishwives on the blackened cobblestones of London’s tavern and brothel-lined Fleet Street, they catch us up to speed with a sorry tale of wicked ways and now-broken strays in opening number ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’.
We’re told that the marriage of barber Benjamin Barker and his beloved wife Lucy was torn asunder when the lasciviously corrupt Judge Turpin sets his sights on her. Tasking his servant Beadle Bamford with luring Lucy to a masquerade ball, Turpin then assaults her, with his monstrous action driving her to despair. But there’s one last one-two punch. Benjamin is transported to the colonies on trumped-up charges, while the judge scoops up their infant daughter Johanna as his ward.
Transportation is precisely what this saucily gothic melodrama does in this gloriously grotesque production from Victorian Opera, helmed by artistic director Stuart Maunder. From the off, Philip Lethlean’s lighting design seizes our attention by the throat, as sickly blue-green beams dance like hellfire, piercing the fog and conjuring this rackety corner of a consumption-choked city from out of the darkness. As the lights reveal Roger Kirk’s jaw-dropping set, it’s all dirt-caked bricks, groaning wooden gangways and broken, soot-smeared windows – a suitably gruesome playground for ghastly misdeeds.
No sooner has the opening hoi polloi parted than Benjamin reappears, almost 20 years later. Now going by Sweeney Todd (bass-baritone Ben Mingay), he’s been fished from the sea by kind-hearted sailor Anthony Hope (baritone Lachlann Lawton). The younger man will soon fall head over salty heels for Johanna (soprano Alessia Pintabona), who is essentially held prisoner by the odious Turpin (Adrian Tamburini) with the assistance of his obsequious cur, Beadle (Kanen Breen).
All the while, Sweeney is consumed by the dark heart of vengeance, falling into an opportunistic alliance with his former landlady, Mrs Lovett (soprano Antoinette Halloran). A scurrilous pie shop proprietor whose baked goods are 90 per cent stray cat and indeterminate toenails, she owns her scrap-scavenged deception in belted-out number ‘The Worst Pies in London’. Besotted with the boiling rage barber, alas, he barely notices her, hiring an abandoned room above her icky emporium, serenading his blades in ‘My Friends’.
When a ferocious feud breaks out with Italian barber Adolfo Pirelli – Melbourne audiences will relish this Franco Cozzo nod from Cruel Intentions actor Euan Fistrovic Doidge – it tilts Sweeney’s malignant wrath into a murderous spree, his straight razor shaving close to the bone. Suddenly Mrs Lovett’s pies are all the rage, and they have ill-gotten gained the services of Adolfo’s sweet but simple-minded assistant, Tobias Ragg (Mat Verevis).
For all its dark material, Sondheim’s is a wickedly fun work of mischief with swooping music pierced by the screech of a factory whistle and big, bawdy lyrics whipping up the book by Hugh Wheeler. Stretching frayed lace over seedy bones, it’s based on The String of Pearls, a wildly popular Victorian-era penny dreadful, a smutty horror-infused style of street paper.
Mingay is mighty in the title role, toying with our affections like a cat and its claw-trapped mouse. Much like Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s fractured creation Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Benjamin/Sweeney’s broken soul cuts an intriguing dash. Not quite an anti-hero, we still sympathise with him even as we shriek-laugh with revulsion at his dastardly deeds. It’s a credit to Mingay that his outsized charisma shines through these murky waters.
But Halloran’s increasingly unhinged Lovett – one part Miss Havisham, the other Barbara Windsor – sparkles brightest in this gruesomely soiled spectacular. Equally complex, the part is a gift to those who can slit their way through the comedy lacked through murder most macabre – such as shepherd’s pie topped with actual shepherd in music hall ditty ‘A Little Priest’ – and yet still sell us on her aching love for Sweeney.
Johanna and Anthony are more meagrely drawn characters, with Lawton particularly lost here, but Tamburini is a fabulously awful villain, all sinewy muscle and self-flagellating menace as a game Breen snaps at his heels like a particularly yappy lapdog. When the true identity of an elderly homeless woman is unveiled, the bitter-tasting brutality of it all breaks us in the very best way. Maunder has a steady hand on this spiralling tragicomedy, with Kirk’s costumes bolstering the brilliant crumbling. The central revolve of Lovett’s shop, home to the blood-letting chamber above and the chute down to its infernal oven, is wildly inventive.
As conducted by Phoebe Briggs, the Victorian Opera Chamber Orchestra is in fine form. This really is one of Sondheim’s most marvellous scores; a triumph of more is more, much like Lovett’s pies and the sorry souls Sweeny sends her way.
Tickets for Sweeney Todd at Arts Centre Melbourne start from $39 and you can find them here.
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