[PRESS] The Show Report: Bon Appétit Orange County! The thrilling return of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd”

Bon Appétit Orange County! The thrilling return of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET, which opened July 12th at Anaheim’s Chance Theater, has Southern California baking love, one meat pie at a time. The show stars WINSTON PEACOCK and JOCELYN A. BROWN in a highly symbolic, surreal vision of a tale about a man possessed by grief and a thirst for vengeance.

JAMES MICHAEL MCHALE, the show’s ferociously inventive director, has aimed his hypnotic interpretation of this 1979 adaptation at the barbarous child in everyone, the squirming spectator, who wants to have his worst fears confirmed and dispelled in one breath.

Surely no previous production of “Sweeney Todd” has had such a high quotient of truly unsettling horror or stage spectacle. Director McHale, conditioned by long years in regional theater (who received 6 OC Theatre Guild Awards two years ago, including Outstanding Direction of a Musical, for Green Days AMERICAN IDIOT, also at Chance Theater), draws you airlessly close to the action, taking a page right out of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade” with classic imagery of madhouses, body snatchers and a world of lost and battered souls.

Director McHale obviously appreciates the cathartic value of make-believe carnage. He also grasps the wondrous multifacetedness of Mr. Sondheim’s most ravishing score — its narrative momentum, its sharply honed wit and its harsh psychological insight. Musically directed by LEX LEIGH, Sondheim takes his structural and emotional cues from the Dies Irae, the Catholic Mass for the dead, among others.

Few shows have been as regularly reworked, adapted and rewritten on musical, opera and concert stages as “Sweeney Todd,” from elaborate Industrial Age epic to pared-down chamber piece. That makes it all the more bracing to experience one of the most beguiling musicals you may ever see. So “lift your razor high, Sweeney,” as Sondheim’s glitteringly lugubrious masterwork is also lifted high in an audacious reinterpretation, sure to incite passionate division as sharp and violent as the slash of the murderous barber’s blade.

For “Sweeney Todd” is arguably the angriest major musical ever written, a sensibility that here becomes a galvanizing asset. No one is forgiven in “Sweeney Todd,” from its vengeance-bent title character to the frothy romantic juveniles — a vibrant NAYA RAMSEY-CLARKE (who has played the character of Johanna twice-before) and DYLAN AUGUST’S (“The Who’s Tommy”) compelling Anthony Hope.

As for our stars, Ms. Brown’s Mrs. Lovett, the cannibal pie maker and Sweeney’s would-be love interest, is a deliciously tarty vulgarian, looking like a decadent “age of enlightenment” Otto Dix diva in her asymmetrical half-bob, her long striped skirt, spiderweb knee-highs and large, belted support stomacher. With her hyperemotional vocal stylings and credible accent, JOCELYN A. BROWN is a fiendish delight — ravaged, coarse and carnal in an approach rooted less in the usual vaudevillian twinkle than in the fraying eroticism and bone-deep weariness of an over-the-hill B girl from a 1960’s detective movie.

And Mr. Peacock’s stunningly realized Sweeney seems destined to haunt the nightmares of anyone attending for days to come. His face shadowed into hollows by Jacqueline Malenke’s morose lighting, his eyes glazed with obsession and all-encompassing contempt, he brings to mind flashes of serial killers from decades ago. His voice has both the fiery sheen and coldness of Sweeney’s silver razors, his softer vocals drawing out the sadness beneath Sweeney’s monstrous actions. He is, in a word, magnificent.

The gleeful malice of both Mr. Peacock and Ms. Brown makes for a rollicking first act, and it makes their descent into gloomier, more desperate moods in the second act more harrowing.

The rest of the cast — especially ADAM LEIVA as Tobias, Mrs. Lovett’s young, uneducated apprentice who became Sweeney’s downfall, and ABEL MIRAMONTES as an eloquently deadpan Beadle — work on adroit equal footing with the leads. As sordid and slovenly as their stage personae are, they exude that subliminal, ecstatic hum that comes from a cast clicking in symbiosis.

Sweeney’s rival barber and first victim, Pirelli, is played tawdrily by EMMANUEL MADERA. JUSTIN RYAN’s Judge Turpin neatly drops his arrogant authority to expose himself in self-castigation and ugly desire in his take on “Johanna,” and both Mr. Miramontes as a puffed-up Beadle Bamford and LAURA M. HATHAWAY as the unnerving beggar woman have striking moments.

Mr. Leiva’s ever-alert, febrile Tobias is a key element in a production notable for its intensity, and his achingly sweet delivery of the tender and haunting “Not While I’m Around” is stirring in its crystalline emotional purity.

As the sailor Anthony, who rescues Sweeney and becomes the determined suitor of his daughter Johanna, Mr. August registers as a distinctive presence, while Ms. Ramsey-Clarke’s Johanna is at once both aswoon and more knowing than the usual trapped bird (“Kiss Me,” duet: Johanna & Anthony). It seems even the more innocent among this production’s characters are capable of darker deeds.

The show is mesmerizing on a number of levels. The gruesome tale of the demon barber and his amoral accomplice Mrs. Lovett remains a compelling yarn, building to a chilling climax in which horror is given a disquietingly human face. And as a display of focus and technique, there can be few experiences equal to watching the prodigiously talented cast grapple with such a demanding score and complex lyrics during complicated moves choreographed by MO GOODFELLOW with unerring precision.

Interesting sidenote: The actual character of Sweeney Todd has a long and colorful history, and is hinted at in various author’s works. In Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), for instance, the servant Sam Weller says that a pieman used cats “for beefsteak, veal, and kidney, ‘cording to the demand”, and recommends that people should buy pies only “when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain’t kitten.” Dickens then developed this in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), published two years before the appearance of Sweeney Todd in The String of Pearls, with a character named Tom Pinch who is grateful that his own “evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many country legends as doing a lively retail business in the metropolis.”

All of a sudden I’m thinking of that old saying, “a finger in every pie.”  Yikes!