It’s one of the scariest moments in a musical theater score: In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’s lovely ballad “Not While I’m Around,” the adolescent Tobias (Gaten Matarazzo) reassures pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett (Annaleigh Ashford), who’s apprenticed him for months, that he’d do anything to keep her safe. She tries to sing those comforting words back to him, even as she realizes he knows too much and must be silenced, but the orchestra gives her away: Despite her gentle tonal melody, a solo violin scratches up against her voice in dissonant counterpoint. And the string section goes haywire as she embraces mercilessness.
It’s that kind of horror-rich compositional detail (it’s no wonder that Bernard Herrmann’s film music was a major inspiration) that makes Sweeney Todd the most suggestive and ambitious—and maybe just plain best—of Stephen Sondheim’s scores. And under the direction of Thomas Kail and the baton of Alex Lacamoire, both best known for their collaboration on Hamilton, the new Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd captures almost all of the evocative textures of Sondheim’s grand musical even if it only gestures toward its hair-raising dramatic potential.
It took me a few tries and several years—not until I understood the revenge tragedy, motored by a vibrant amorality, as its own long-standing theatrical genre—to get Sweeney Todd. This is a show whose tension can only be released with bloodletting. Indeed, when we meet Sweeney (Josh Groban), it’s already too late for redemption. The barber Benjamin Barker, now bearing the name Sweeney Todd, returns to London 15 years after he was sentenced to hard labor for life by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Jamie Jackson) who lusted after Sweeney’s wife. When Sweeney learns from Mrs. Lovett that his wife poisoned herself and the judge adopted Sweeney’s young daughter, Johanna (Maria Bilbao), as his ward, the path toward vengeance is paved.
This is Kail’s first musical outing on Broadway since Hamilton and some of the ensemble moments recall the frenetic staging directly across the street at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. But the omnipresence of Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography became an essential storytelling element in Hamilton. Steven Hoggett’s, in contrast, often distracts from the main action. More dangerous than distraction, Sweeney Todd’s large ensemble moves in meticulous formations, infusing the world of the show with a well-rehearsed grace at odds with the feral London that Sweeney describes as “a hole in the world like a great black pit/And the vermin of the world inhabit it.” Vermin have seldom scampered so elegantly.
It’s not only the dancing that makes it difficult to be too frightened of this Sweeney Todd. Groban, the quintessential crossover classical-pop star who made his Broadway debut in Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 seven years ago, sings beautifully and rages dutifully, but he’s not particularly creepy. Groban’s baritone has a rich, easily recognized vibrato, a warm timbre that follows him no matter what he sings. When Sweeney breaks toward insanity in the demonic “Epiphany,” Groban can’t unhinge his polished sound: Sweeney’s hellish transformation stops at the limits of Groban’s cautious descent into vocal raggedness.
That doesn’t damn his Sweeney, though, since Groban is better able than some to explore the other edges of the barber’s frayed psyche. When Mrs. Lovett mocks him early on for vowing violent revenge against his enemies, we share her incredulity; it’s hard to believe our kindly Groban could do such a dastardly thing until the blood starts rushing from throat after throat. His violence spawns evil and not the other way around. He is, in other words, believably human. We can see in Groban the man that Mrs. Lovett fell in love with 15 years ago, and because he so convincingly sells his tender longing for his lost wife, we can buy his need for payback too.
Ashford, who’s best known in musical theater for Kinky Boots and the recent Sunday in the Park with George revival, lends scene-stealing comic ingenuity to her manic Mrs. Lovett in a performance drenched in intoxicating slapstick: Thirty seconds into her first appearance in this production, in the grossly unhygienic baking number “The Worst Pies in London,” Ashford has landed a delicious face-plant in an attempt to squash a bug.
As charming as her pratfalls may be, though, Ashford excels most in her interaction with Sondheim’s tricksy lyrics, making Mrs. Lovett self-aware of all of the humor in the text. In that first song, as she laments her stale pastries, Mrs. Lovett puns, “Times is hard, sir/Even harder than the worst pies in London,” and now she winkingly waits for a response to her wordplay. This Mrs. Lovett, to paraphrase another character’s lyric, “may not be smart, but she ain’t dumb,” and her eureka moment—when she realizes that Sweeney’s victims may be good for the pie business—is the giddy apex of a genius of the gutter coming into her own.
Groban’s gentler Sweeney and Ashford’s barmy Mrs. Lovett mix to make the show’s darkly comedic flavor last longer than it usually does. By the time the story plummets unsparingly into tragedy, it’s perhaps more of a gut punch than usual—we were having so much fun!—and Groban, with his full-bodied keen, is perfectly primed to deliver on Sweeney’s final anguish.
As the malevolent Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford, respectively, Jackson and John Rapson sing with deliciously radiant scorn, while Jordan Fisher and Bilbao, the latter making her Broadway debut here, sound gorgeous as the young lovers. Ruthie Ann Miles’s Beggar Woman is appropriately frenzied, Nicholas Christopher gaudily delightful as the pompous rival barber Pirelli, and Stranger Things’s Matarazzo especially endearing. All of them are excellent at filling out these roles, even if none of them offer anything novel. It’s only Ashford, taking Mrs. Lovett’s lunatic possibilities even further than Angela Lansbury’s original, who reinvents the wheel as she battily slides down a flight of stairs or raucously imitates a seagull.
But is reinventing the wheel necessary for a show like Sweeney Todd, when the engine of the monumental score, paired with Hugh Wheeler’s perfectly paced book, has more than enough power to drive the story’s impact home? I understood better than I have before why the musical is so often programmed by opera companies, institutions with audiences that traditionally prioritize preservation over progress: As long as there are voices that can do the score justice (and, hopefully, as in this lucky case, a 26-piece orchestra), Sweeney Todd satiates all on its own. Even Mimi Lien’s slow-rotating set, with a giant lowering bridge on which much of the critical action plays out, has the hulking grandeur of opera-house scenery.
It’s hard to fault Kail too much for taking the stable route of a light directorial touch throughout this production, except that recent ones have shown that Sweeney Todd is durable enough to fold into new, exciting shapes. The most recent New York revival, a 2017 off-Broadway immersive production that transformed the Barrow Street Theatre into a pie shop, felt frighteningly fresh. And in the most unlikely of contexts for theatrical innovation, a New York Philharmonic-backed performance directed by Lonny Price in 2014, upended tradition and stretched the boundaries of the concert hall with bloodthirsty irreverence.
Sweeney Todd, then, can still shock, even if this production seldom goes for the jugular. Only in the very final moment does Kail deliver a truly terrifying piece of staging, a jump scare that offers a glimpse into the horror-doused alternative that could have been. No matter, though, as this Sweeney Todd is a fine showcase for a flabbergasting score, as well as a fitting exclamation point to a year of Sondheim revivals that have included a blissful take on Into the Woods and a redemptive off-Broadway vision of Merrily We Roll Along. And the cast album of this revival, potently, pristinely sung throughout, will surely be glorious.
Sweeney Todd is now running at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
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