Theater Review—

‘Sweeney Todd’ May Not Be Everyone’s Cup Of  Tea, But TheatreWorks

New Milford’s Talented Company Makes It This Summer’s Production To See

By Julie Stern

NEW MILFORD — TheatreWorks New Milford is so filled with talent — acting, singing, directing and staging — that it boggles the mind. Last summer the company put on a production of Cabaret that sold out for its entire run, and could easily have continued to do so for months.

This summer, Brad Blake — who directed Cabaret — has come back with two of the supporting characters from that show as his leads in Stephen Sondheim’s Grand Guignol musical, Sweeney Todd.   Newtowner Mark Feltch is Sweeney Todd, “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” and Susan Pettibone is Mrs Lovett, the pitiless purveyor of meat pies who becomes his partner in murder and deception.

For anyone who is not familiar with the bare bones of the plot, Sweeney was once Benjamin Barker, an innocent barber who was wrongly transported to the convict colony of Australia, through the machinations of the evil Judge Turpin, who had lascivious designs on the barber’s beautiful, and virtuous, wife.

Fifteen years later, having escaped the prison colony, Barker returns to London, driven by the desire of gaining his revenge. Learning that his wife is gone and his infant daughter was adopted by the very judge who ruined his life, he sets himself up as “Sweeney Todd,” the best barber in London, in the same apartment where he and his wife once lived, upstairs above Mrs Lovett’s dingy meat pie shop.

Together they embark upon a grisly business, wherein Sweeney cuts the throats of unsuspecting customers, and Mrs Lovett grinds their corpses into meat for her pies. Sweeney’s motivation is his hope of eventually getting to kill his archenemy Judge Turpin, as well as Beadle Bamford, the judge’s hard-hearted underling. Mrs Lovett is more interested in the way her business starts to improve as her meat pies begin to have more substance and flavor.

There is also the side plot of the romance that blossoms between Sweeney’s daughter (now the judge’s ward) Joanna, and Anthony Hope, a good hearted young sailor who is the same man who rescued the escaped convict Sweeney from the sea. Not knowing Sweeney’s connection to Joanna, Anthony calls upon him to help in getting her away from Judge Turpin’s clutches so they can elope to Paris.

Bill Hughes’s grimily realistic set, George Meadows and Richard Pettibone’s lighting, and Lesley Neilson-Bowman’s costumes all contribute to the murky and pestilential atmosphere of Victorian England’s dark side. This, along with Sondheim’s discordant music, frequently punctuated by the squeal of a police whistle, recalls the Berthold Brecht-Kurt Weill collaboration, The Three Penny Opera.  That comparison is heightened by the use of a smirking chorus of London lowlifes to narrate the story.

However, while Sondheim’s lyrics are real poetry (complex, clever and powerful), he was not — and never would be — Kurt Weill.  “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” will never equal “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” There are some pretty good performances, mainly because Susan Pettibone is so good at mixing comic acting with a powerful voice (I grew up on Ethel Merman but Susan Pettibone is better).

Similarly, the first act really conveys the hypocrisy and social injustice of Victorian London (as in the Brechtian work), but this gives way to the kind of gruesome and macabre “gory details” that keep tabloids in business, telling us more than we ever wanted to know about Jeffrey Daumer.

You won’t see a better directed, more perfectly cast and acted piece this summer, and one in which the entire company performs with more enthusiasm and skill. In that sense this is definitely the equal of last year’s Cabaret. However, the subject matter is not for everyone. One man’s meat pie is another man’s poison, or what’s sauce for the goose may make the gander squeamish and so forth.

 (Performances continue weekends through August 25 at 5 Brookside Avenue in New Milford. Call 860-350-6863 for curtain times and ticket details.)