Sweeney Todd (review)

Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "We'll hear the play." In John Doyle's spectacular revisioning of Sweeney Todd, that is exactly what happens. Doyle's Sweeney Todd focuses on the relationship between the performer and the audience. Even more than contact, this production demands that the audience listen to the piece. This is a bare-bones, stripped-to-the-core staging of Sondheim's dark, visceral piece.

John Doyle is a musical Scot. His love of musicals, American musicals—in particular, Stephen Sondheim's—is immense. In 1992 at the Liverpool Everyman, he produced his first actor-musician musical. He had the money to hire an orchestra; he had the money to hire actors. What he did not have, at the always strapped Everyman, was money to hire both actors and musicians. So he hired actors who could play musical instruments, who could become the orchestra when they were not acting and singing. Anchored by a pianist who was not, in that production, an actor, Candide proved his first foray into the area of actor-musicians.

Since that time, Doyle has directed a number of musicals in this manner, culminating in his 2005 Sweeney Todd on Broadway. Unlike so many traditional Broadway musicals, this is a true ensemble production. We see Patti LuPone on stage right, supporting another singer's number, playing the bells, the drums, and her tuba. Michael Cerveris emerges stage left sitting on his chair supporting a fellow actor as he plays the guitar. In a particularly poignant moment Johanna (Lauren Molina) and Anthony (Benjamin Magnuson), the lovers of the piece ("kiss me, kiss me" but they never do), not only sing but also play their cellos together.

Doyle's version of Sweeney Todd came to life at the tiny, two-hundred-seat Watermill Theatre in Newbury, England. The Watermill has audience, in floor seats and balconies, around three sides of the stage. There is room for a small playing area and not much in the way of set (which Doyle also designed, along with costumes). What has grown with each edition of the play is the size of the background area. At all the theatres, the set consisted, as it does in New York, of a raked stage with a series of shelves at the back, an upright piano at the base. There is a door stage left and a number of hooks for various properties and costume pieces. Music stands are placed stage left and right next to the rake with chairs to which actors retreat when not performing. A coffin center stage anchors the simple set. Sweeney rises out of the coffin for his entrance, and it is transformed into various locales: a judge's bench, the bakery, a place to sharpen a hacksaw, and a place to slit a throat. At the O'Neill, a thousand-seat theatre, the shelves soar up and up, much higher than they did in London, filled with Victoriana, bric-a-brac, gleaned—as they were for the Watermill, later for the Trafalgar, and now for the O'Neill—from the antique and junk shops of decaying Georgian Hastings, where Doyle has made his home for several years.

Doyle's New York production has grown not only in size, but also in grandeur, with New York theatre royalty Patti LuPone as Lovett and fellow Tony Award–winner Michael Cerveris in the title role. In private conversations and in public presentations, Doyle has repeatedly stressed how all theatre is about telling stories. In his production of Sweeney Todd, Doyle has keenly honed what he first started in a rehearsal hall in Liverpool.

Gone is the trick trap door of the original Hal Prince production; in its place is Artaudian ritual. Doyle has learned well from Peter Brook and Eastern theatre. As a murder is committed, the stage goes red with light and a piercing British policeman's whistle rips us...