GoSmileLaughCryClap said: "
3. Josh Groban is not an accomplished actor. He is also not an amateur. His vocal accomplishment with the role is unmatched by anyone I have seen in the role, and that is where his talent triumphs. Len Cariou was absolutely genius in the role, and to this day my favorite. But his voice always became tight and strained in its upper range and by the middle of the run his voice was shredded by the vocal demands and screaming through Epiphany! George Hearn followed him with a ham fisted portrayal and a voice with a wobble you could drive a train through. He always reminded me of Bert Lahr’s cowardly lion. The opera singers I have seen in various productions over sing the role, and are often saddled with short rehearsal periods and stilted direction.
4. Mrs. Lovett. Angela Lansbury mugged with the best of them, as attested by her original reviews. Annaleigh Ashford basically gives the same kind of performance, amped up a bit. Yes there’s more physicality, but none of it interferes with the pacing of her scenes or songs. And everything she does is verified in the text. There isn’t any coming out of nowhere schtick.
5. Sound again. While it may come as a surprise, ST was more difficult to hear at the Uris than the new one is at the Lunt Fontaine. I remember the first time I saw the original from the middle of the mezzanine. You could hear the laughter and applause coming from downstairs while everyone in the rear mezz were sitting on their hands. It was eerie and seemingly a metaphor for the whole show.
6. Design and direction. While impressive that Eugene Lee transported an iron foundry to NYC and ripped the proscenium off the Uris stage, there was a catch. While fascinating to look at as you entered the theater, when the lights went down all you had was a square spinning pie shop, a ladder and a bridge. Period. And while Hal Prince did a great job with pacing and transitions, his insistence on shoving constant metaphors about the Industrial Revolution and its dehumanizing outcomes became largely irrelevant. Why? Because Stephen Sondheim absorbed and reinterpreted everybody’s ideas during the writing process. Everything that Prince chose to dramatize was already taken care of in the libretto and score. That’s why no factory whistle now. Redundant.
So that’s where I stand. Having seen the original many times, all the revivals and many regional and opera productions, this is the one that comes closest to my experience in 1979 when I was a very young and very impressionable theatergoer. And lastly, for everyone claiming they can’t hear what people are saying from the stage, take Sondheim’s advice. Listen.
This is a fascinating read. A few observations and questions for someone who saw the original so many times:
3. Len Cariou sounds great on the original cast recording and a YouTube video I ran across, but I did see a thread here that mentioned he was having trouble with his voice later in the run. I gather that was your experience? I was impressed with Josh Groban's vocal performance, because it's an awfully important part of making the show work. He was good enough as an actor, though he seemed to lack Cariou's intensity.
4. Mrs. Lovett. It's tough for anyone to compare with Angela Lansbury, and I agree that she hams things up herself. The contrast between her performance and Annaleigh Ashford's is probably not as great as many people, including me, have believed. But it always felt like Lansbury was making every effort to entertain Sweeney Todd. Ashford often seemed to be trying to get a laugh from the audience even when Sweeney wasn't watching. Also, in "A Little Priest," the orchestra stops playing for a long time while Ashford does this and that, and I thought it interrupted the flow of a song that depends on a certain momentum to keep the wordplay and important plot information coming. It does end smashingly, though. My other problem with Ashford is that I sometimes had trouble hearing her clearly and distinctly over the orchestra. I knew the words, so that wasn’t a major crisis for me, but it was occasionally an issue.
5. So I guess large productions of Sweeney Todd have always had problems back in the mezzanine.
6. Fair points. Sondheim's lyrics and Wheeler's book are filled with all the sorts of things Hal Prince and Eugene Lee had on stage. But doesn't the latter serve the former? I can argue either side of the factory whistle issue, but I can't say I missed it. I did think the glistening, pristine surfaces and clean look of the costumes in the revival weren't as good as the original.
I had never seen a full-scale production of Sweeney Todd before, and despite my quibbles, I liked the show. The audience is eating it up (pardon the pun). I must say that after several recent Sondheim revivals, in New York City and in my area, underperformed at the box office, it was an awful lot of fun to be in a packed Broadway house watching one of his best musicals. And it also seems better in retrospect, at least to me.
Updated On: 4/14/23 at 05:08 AM
