Sweeney Todd
Theater West End • Sanford, Florida
Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by Derek Critzer • Musical Direction by Brandon Moon
Staring Ayó Teriah Demps and Desiree Montes
Ah, musical comedy: always an appropriate approach to a story, no matter how brutal. Here’s a cheery musical love story filled with infatuation, unexpected meetings, and cannibalism. You can say many things about a Steven Sondheim musical, but happy endings are bittersweet and the body count here is relatively high for musical theater.
Mr. Todd (Demps) escaped the prison colony of Australia and made it back to the UK with just a straight razor and the shirt on his back. It’s not much, but it does allow him to shorten both the facial hair and the lifetimes of his enemies. He finds his way to a sleazy inn near the Thames River featuring the worst meat pies. Here he meets Ms. Lovett (Montes), purveyor of dreadful meat pies. Stray cats are getting scarce, and she needs a new source of protein. Sweeney takes up with her and improves her food and her profits thanks to his adjacent barber shop. Sweeney then locates his daughter, now the ward of evil Judge Turpin (Michael Colavolpe). Turpin is judge and jury for all the crimes in London and he has few friends. Soon well-coifed swells are getting their shaves at Sweeney’s, but only once: it’s a simple snip and a snap and the well-heeled judge is brought down.
Sweeney Todd is a long, dark story with some really despicable people in it. But they are the interesting characters. Hulking Sweeney looks like he doesn’t really need a sharp object to draw blood. And with Mrs. Lovett, it’s not the quantity of her kills, its her desire to become a proper middle-class housewife that makes her creepy. The judge remains a cardboard cutout of evil, fighting poverty with incarceration and cutting a pass for the crimes of the well dressed. Here Sweeney and Lovett become the truly heartless — while the judge may be evil, the other Londoners that they dispose of are no better or worse than any of us, sinners or saints.
The show is long, but never drags. Event and music fly by, and I particularly loved the oven built for the climax. It’s an ominous prop, and only as I was leaving did I notice the oven was topped by a kid’s wading pool. That’s where good theater comes from: turning the mundane into the most casual horror. It’s a long show, but one that flies fast.
Just don’t take any drinks from strangers.
The show runs through October 1, 2023.
