Smart staging, compelling characters make Skylight's 'Sweeney Todd' come alive

Walk into the Cabot Theatre for Skylight Music Theatre’s thrilling production of “Sweeney Todd” and one immediately takes notice of the cadaver on stage, receiving the full attention of dissecting doctors and nurses.  

Well-heeled onlookers gaze down from above on this re-creation of a Victorian operating theater, in which voyeurs could watch bodies of the poor, the diseased and the insane – now safely dead and distant – as they were mapped and placed.  

But in a musical that’s all about the return of the repressed, director Matthew Ozawa makes clear that bodies and memories don’t always stay where they belong.  

In the first of many spine-tingling moments in this production, it’s Andrew Varela’s cadaverous Sweeney who arises from that operating table, staring at us and thirsting for vengeance.  You’d better believe we’re going to attend his tale, involving a man framed for a crime he never committed so a corrupt judge could steal Sweeney’s wife and child.

Upending the London he reviles, this Sweeney transforms the operating theater we’d first seen into an expressionist embodiment of his mind.  

Charles Murdock Lucas’ two-tiered scenic design of industrial scaffolding features hinges allowing the side pieces to fold inward; when they swing toward us, they become a giant version of Sweeney’s razor, raining blood on the back walls of a tonsorial parlor that’s bathed in reds by lighting designer Jason Fassl.

Those swinging set pieces also allow Ozawa to present multiple storylines at once, required by Sondheim’s score and Hugh Wheeler’s book.  That simultaneity is usually handled by a turntable, which slows things down and doesn’t allow us to appreciate how fully these characters live in each other’s minds and worlds.

An illustrative example: 

As he talks to his beadle (Ben Tajnai) about how to look good for Johanna (Kelly Britt), some part of Judge Turpin (Randall Dodge) knows that all she really wants is to be with Anthony (Lucas Pastrana). As staged here, we can see the two young lovers kissing within inches of the older men.

Such dramatic juxtapositions are true to a musical which brilliantly toggles between light and dark, comedy and horror, tender ballads and chilling dissonance.  All of which would mean little if the Skylight cast couldn’t sing this ridiculously demanding score and create compelling characters.  

By and large, it can and does. Some of the men struggle in the lower registers; one wishes for more chemistry between Britt and Pastrana (both of whom sing beautifully).

But Ozawa has made good on his promise to find the humanity within each character; the tandem of Varela’s Sweeney and Christina Hall’s Mrs. Lovett transcend caricature to present particularly rounded versions of these characters.  

We feel their pain and rage, their thwarted love and broken dreams. Yes: they’ve been irreparably twisted by a world they never made.  As this production drives home, so have we all. 

“Sweeney Todd” continues through June 11 at the Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway.  For tickets, visit skylightmusictheatre.org.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.  

PRODUCTION NOTES 

Mother Lovett: She’s been a widow for 17 years – just before Sweeney was sentenced to an Australian penal colony, Sweeney’s wife went mad and their young child became the Judge’s ward.  When I interviewed him a few weeks ago, Ozawa had imagined the lonely Mrs. Lovett as Johanna’s interim caretaker, during an interval when a declining Lucy could no longer care for the child and before the Judge swooped in to take her.  And why not?  Mrs. Lovett is clearly drawn to Johanna; long before Sweeney goes on a killing spree, Mrs. Lovett suggests that he slash Anthony’s throat so that she and Sweeney can raise Johanna themselves.      
 
Imagining Mrs. Lovett as a would-be mother deepens the relationship between her and Tobias (convincingly played here by Ryan Stajmiger as the bright if abused lad he must be, to dominate the street as he does when selling Pirelli’s elixir). And that, in turn, results in a truly affecting rendition of “Not While I’m Around,” during which this pair promise to protect one another. Mrs. Lovett knows as she sings that she won’t make good on her promise. But I’ve never seen her more heartbroken as a result.   

Hall makes this scene poignant because the Mrs. Lovett she’s hitherto presented is more than the comic caricature we’re usually given. Sure, Mrs. Lovett is funny. But she’s also filled with the underlying sadness of a lonely and aging woman who settles on Todd because time is running out and she doesn’t want to die alone. Hall’s Mrs. Lovett is filled with quiet desperation; she knows Sweeney doesn’t love her like she loves him. But as her pie shop demonstrates, she’s also a survivor who has learned to improvise. Doing so doesn’t make her daft. It makes her human. 

There Was a Barber and His Wife: Varela’s Sweeney is so much more than the cold, vengeance-seeking killing machine delivered in Tim Burton’s movie by Johnny Depp.  In the same scene during which he’s telling us that London is a cesspool, Varela’s Sweeney clasps Anthony’s shoulder, by way of awkwardly expressing his gratitude and affection for all the younger man has done for him.  At journey’s end, he’ll be cradling the limp body of his beloved with wrenching grief. In between, we’ll see numerous moments of tender regard as he recalls the world he’s lost.  

At the same time, Varela is no milquetoast. He may be a man of feeling, but much of that emotion involves the blinding rage of someone pushed too far, too often. When Sweeney snaps shortly before intermission, in a moment Sondheim has described as a “schizophrenic breakdown,” Varela is downright scary as his Sweeney breaks the fourth wall and threatens the audience. As Ozawa and Varela clearly understand, Sweeney is all the more frightening in such moments because we’ve seen numerous glimpses of the tender man he once was.

Mea Culpa: It’s one thing to humanize Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett. But Judge Turpin, who engineers Sweeney’s downfall before raping his wife? Ozawa has even managed this, with considerable help from actor Randall Dodge, who effectively conveys Turpin’s dawning realization that his feelings for Johanna might be more than fatherly. As played by Dodge, this epiphany doesn’t bring Turpin joy, but pain – leading to the oft-cut number, presented here, in which Turpin scourges himself in an effort to quell feelings he knows he shouldn’t have. He decides to marry Johanna because he can’t control himself – hardly an excuse, but at least an explanation.

Even Lucy’s rape at Turpin’s party goes down differently, here. As Ozawa pointed out when I interviewed him, it’s Mrs. Lovett who tells Sweeney what happened that night, and she presumably wasn’t even there. Ozawa’s staging leaves ambiguous what actually took place; his staging also drives home that we’re seeing this through Mrs. Lovett’s eyes, played out on a stage in her mind which has whisked her away from the pie shop serving as downstage foreground for Turpin’s imagined party.  

None of which makes the Judge a good guy. But it makes him more complicated, which in turn more fully engages us and makes it harder to dismiss him (or this piece) as campy melodrama.

City on Fire: Jason Orlenko’s evocative costuming leaves no doubt who is down, out and poor; it’s these members of the ensemble who will move the pivoting stage pieces and schlep props, before returning to the shadows, where we see them bearing witness and biding time, awaiting those moments when History’s wheel turns their way and allows them to take center stage.  

When they do, periodically singing Sweeney’s ballad of revenge and then swarming the stage as the musical careens toward a close, they join Susan Spencer’s harrowing, omnipresent beggar woman in resembling ghosts from the past; even Orlenko’s costuming suggests something slightly older than the late Victorian finery donned by the upper crust.  This is a “Sweeney” particularly attuned to the political as well as psychological unconscious; Ozawa suggests that there’s a high price to be paid for repressing either one.

The Engine Roared, The Engine Hissed: Eugene Lee’s Tony-winning scenic design for the original Broadway production involved a factory, created from the pieces of a derelict Rhode Island factory to conjure images of the Industrial Revolution. Like Ozawa here, original director Harold Prince wanted to give texture and depth to Sweeney’s motivation for revenge; ever self-critical, Prince ultimately concluded that Sondheim and Wheeler’s story couldn’t successfully carry such a heavy, politically charged symbol.

Working with a much tighter budget – apparent, at times, in a set that wobbles way more than it should – Ozawa makes this metaphor work. The smaller scale and more homespun design, here, might actually help advance the cause. One’s sense of a “real” factory on Broadway yields in the Skylight design to a more abstract and therefore more pliable idea of the machine as a ruthless organizing principle. Whether in a medical operating theater or Sweeney’s parlor, Turpin’s law court or Mrs. Lovett’s shop, what we see here is increasing mechanization and routinization, replacing the chaotically random world of the street (and street theater) with spaces and bodies that can be controlled and confined.  Doing and showing less, Ozawa ultimately says more, about both the world back then and the way we live now.