Sweeney Todd

BARBER SHOP Hess and Kaye slice up the company.

Photo: davidallenstudio.com

Alluring to both the most highbrow ticket buyer and the lowliest groundling, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is one of the only artifacts in American theater that can claim Shakespearean appeal. And perhaps the litmus test of its Bardic durability is its ability to withstand radical reinterpretation, such as this famous Doyle Sweeney. Performed by a mod-looking, tricked-out cast of merely ten, all of whom double as the show’s orchestra, Doyle’s representational staging was justly the toast of the Broadway season a few years back. And even though this touring version has washed out the almost-dehydrated drollness of the original’s sense of humor and replaced it with a slightly condescending farm-state bawdiness, Sondheim’s thrilling, amoral masterwork still stands up, Shakespeare-style; in any form, Sweeney Todd somehow remains a baroque balustrade and a salty slasher opera at the same time.

Without hyperbole, Sarah Travis’s new, reduced, Tony-winning orchestrations have to be heard to be believed. Giving an entire pit’s worth of duties to essentially eight actors (the titular killer barber and the woman who bakes his victims into pies are usually too busy to pick up instruments), Travis, with Doyle’s ensemble, makes the music sound like it’s coming out of nowhere. In most cases the appropriate compliment would be, “They play music really well for actors.” But the musicianship is so nimble here, and the remaining original cast members, who once seemed more like musicians asked to act, are now so seasoned that the lines are blurred. Doyle’s suggestive goth staging will make the story difficult to follow for those who have seen neither the stage nor recent film versions. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from meeting Doyle and company halfway.