Sweeney Todd
NOT for nothing did Stephen Sondheim once say: “I wanted to write a musical like a horror movie. I wanted to scare people.”
With the tasty pairing of Ramin Karimloo and Meow Meow leading an acting company of 11 and a band of 7, this staging is anything but cautious. And what a cast.
Cautious as I am about superlatives, I think the term “one-of-a-kind masterpiece” must be applied to Sweeney Todd. This Birmingham Rep production is a knockout.
In a world where climate and energy shocks drive a relentless cost of living crisis — where people skip meals, children go hungry, and diet-related illness runs rampant — the suggestion is that there is something completely insane about a society where the gap between rich and poor is so great.
Anyway. The plot: a skilled barber with a grudge returns to Victorian London to seek his revenge on the judge who wrongly convicted him. Karimloo is a melancholy Sweeney Todd “the demon barber of Fleet Street” whose menace is growing. He is our quiet beefcake ‘Mr T’ who transforms into a mass murderer.
“And no wonder with the price of meat what it is.”
Mrs Lovett is an amoral loner too — desperate enough for love that she becomes an accomplice to cannibalism. Meow Meow – baker of the ‘worst pies in town’ – is perfect in the grasping role: we laugh as she’s overtaken by her love of profit and her lust for Sweeney.
She is never funnier or more disconcertingly lovable than during ‘A Little Priest’, that ingenious hymn to the delights of cannibalism.
There is some great singing and some terrific performances too: Shem Omari James is a lyrical sailor, Jo Stephenson is Sweeney’s imprisoned daughter, David Bedella a oily judge, and Julius D’Silva his sadistic henchman — all first rate. Leo Munby’s musical direction and Kelsh Buckham-Drage’s sound design ensure every word is audible.
By Act 2 blood lust spirals out of control with appalling consequences as Sondheim’s rasping and jittery music winds its way into urban anxiety, it has an unusual integrity of vision. Wow.
“Inconspicuous Sweeney was, Quick and quiet and clean ‘e was.”
Tinovimbanashe Sibanda’s expressionist movement direction is a shrewd corruption of everyday movement. It’s a brilliantly delivered, vivid, sometimes frightening staging of this penny-dreadful murder story.
Whichever way you slice it – Joe Murphy’s nearly three-hour unfussy production uses the vast Rep stage imaginatively, lit so the main characters seem to appear in shafts of the animated staging and Rory Beaton’s lighting as if from heaven, or vanish into the furnaces of hell. The result is quietly lethal.
All in all, the show is a hit (Sir Matthew Bourne was sat behind me) and is selling out.
This is unmissable.