I GOT blood on my cello!"
Overhearing
that exclamation one night backstage at the Eugene O'Neill Theater,
Stephen Sondheim, Broadway's master manipulator of words, was struck
by its oddity.
"Do you
realize," he said to the young woman with the soiled strings,
"that you just crafted a sentence that has probably never before
been heard in the course of human history?"
Stephen Sondheim,
right, with the director John Doyle, whose "Demon Barber"
depends on the audience's imagination.
It may not be
the last time that phrase, or some similar declaration, is heard
in the wings of the Eugene O'Neill, where a radical new production
of Mr. Sondheim's radical old musical "Sweeney Todd" opens
on Thursday.
In John Doyle's
staging of this lusty tale of vengeance, the actors onstage do double
duty as the orchestra. The slicing of throats and the baking of
human flesh into meat pies take place alongside rather more peculiar
sights. It's not every day that you see a reigning Broadway diva,
Patti LuPone, swaddled in a tight black miniskirt, huffing and puffing
away at a tuba onstage, suggesting a tarty home-economics teacher
who joined the marching band.
"Sweeney
Todd," with its sumptuous score by Mr. Sondheim and scabrous
book by Hugh Wheeler, is by now a familiar commodity to lovers of
musical theater. Since its Broadway premiere in 1979 in Harold Prince's
celebrated production, it has made its bloodthirsty way across the
stages of theaters, concert halls and opera houses the world over,
in productions numbering in the hundreds. But Mr. Doyle's staging
dares to make it unfamiliar again by providing an unusually prominent
role for a performer that doesn't find much employment on Broadway
these days: the audience's imagination.
His minimalist
aesthetic, which dispenses with changes of scenery, elaborate Victorian
costumes and literal depictions of much of the action, works by
symbol and suggestion to unfold the story of a vengeful barber,
here played by Michael Cerveris, and his enterprising partner in
crime, the cheerfully amoral Mrs. Lovett, played by Ms. LuPone.
The results
scared the pants off Mr. Sondheim when he caught an earlier version
of Mr. Doyle's production in London, where it transferred after
its premiere at the Watermill Theater in Newbury, England. And scaring
the pants off Stephen Sondheim is one of the surest ways to win
him over.
"When I
first wrote this thing all I wanted to do was write a horror story,
a Grand Guignol piece," he recalled recently, settling in the
Eugene O'Neill auditorium with Mr. Doyle. "Of all the productions
I've seen, this is the one that comes closest to Grand Guignol,
closest to what I originally wanted to do. I characterize all the
major productions I've seen in terms of a single adjective. Hal's
was epic. Declan Donnellan's production was exactly the reverse,
it was very intimate. John's, for me, is the most intense."
Coming from
an acknowledged master of the postwar musical, who celebrated his
75th birthday this year, this kind of praise might give a director
a bit of a fright, particularly one making his Broadway debut. But
Mr. Doyle, a newcomer to the New York stage at the ripe age of 52,
seems gratified but hardly ruffled to hear Mr. Sondheim's assessment.
Perhaps it's because he's not one of the flavors-of-the-season regularly
imported from London to steer the choice revival assignments on
Broadway - David Leveaux, Matthew Warchus or Sam Mendes, to name
three. He's a relatively uncelebrated workhorse who has toiled for
most of his career in England's regional theaters, where he developed
his novel method of reducing the staff of musical productions.
Cynics who might
see this revival as a boon for frugal producers will not be surprised
to learn that necessity did indeed mother Mr. Doyle's invention.
"It was
originally an economic choice," Mr. Doyle confessed. "I
was running a small people's theater called the Everyman in Liverpool
and I wanted to do 'Candide.' We didn't have the resources for an
orchestra as well as a full cast, so I found just about the only
people in the U.K. who could both perform it and play it."
Since that first
production, back in 1992, which he recalls as more akin to a concert
staging, with the actors occasionally leaping up from behind their
music stands to act out scenes, Mr. Doyle has refined and developed
his style. In taking shows apart and putting them back together
under the ingenuity-inspiring constraints of his particular working
method, he's managed to renew classic works of theater, ranging
from Mr. Sondheim's "Into the Woods" to Gilbert and Sullivan's
"Gondoliers," by knitting more closely together musical
values and narrative shape. Mr. Doyle will apply it to another of
Mr. Sondheim's musicals, "Company," at the Cincinnati
Playhouse next spring.
Though he admitted
he was "gobsmacked" by the prospect of remounting "Sweeney
Todd" for Broadway, any anxieties were put to rest when Mr.
Sondheim shared his enthusiasm for the project. "Broadway is
a long way from where this production began," Mr. Doyle said.
"But I was determined not to make it bigger and broader for
Broadway, and Stephen was just as adamant about this. We wanted
to do the same piece of work. Make it clearer and stronger, perhaps,
but essentially I never wanted it to change."
Mr. Sondheim
and his representatives did have some concerns when they learned
that Mr. Doyle had cut the score at the Watermill. But a video of
the production put fears of a wholesale massacre to rest. In the
end Mr. Sondheim, who asked only that a few cuts be restored for
the Broadway run, has been an eager participant in the tinkering
and rethinking that has necessarily taken place.
In London Mrs.
Lovett played the trumpet; here she plays the tuba. (Ms. LuPone,
who has starred in concert productions of "Sweeney," was
discovered to have played the tuba in an all-girl marching band
in high school. Picture it!) So the trumpet needed to be reassigned,
for starters. Perhaps the hardest chore was retaining the many flavors
in Mr. Sondheim's score with an orchestra of just 10 players, especially
since 2 or 3 of them must sing, act or help with props and costumes
at any given moment. (The original Broadway production had an orchestra
of 27.)
"Because
different instruments are now played by different characters, the
staging has had to change quite a bit," Mr. Doyle said. "In
a way that was good because it forced us to go back to square one
and start again. People may wonder why a character performs a particular
action. It's because to lose the musical voicing provided by another
actor who might perform it would be detrimental to the orchestration.
It's a jigsaw puzzle."
As it happens,
Mr. Sondheim is known for his mathematical prowess and his love
of puzzles, and the Rubik's Cube of staging challenges proposed
by Mr. Doyle's production may in part explain the excitement he
exudes in discussing them. He has regularly attended previews and
offered small suggestions on how to clarify a bit of staging.
"This score
is moderately complex in terms of harmony," Mr. Sondheim said.
"It's not just chordal harmony. If you take out a given line
in the instrumentation you've lost the harmony. It makes it extremely
difficult. Most scores you could take out a line and have the essential
harmony still there. Not in this one."
"And the
underscoring needed to be reconceived because John's scene changes
are different," he added. "I wrote music to cover much
more complicated changes of scene and longer scenes. And I always
write underscoring very meticulously to cover the precise amount
of dialogue, so when dialogue was cut or changed, Sarah and John
had to put in musical effects."
Mr. Sondheim
is referring to Sarah Travis, Mr. Doyle's close collaborator on
the project, who stepped up to the daunting task of reducing and
re-orchestrating one of the most celebrated scores in musical theater
history. Mr. Sondheim has high praise both for the technical proficiency
of her work and the unexpected new glints of theatrical coloring
it brings to his shivery score.
"I think
what she's done is absolutely brilliant," he said. "Jonathan
Tunick's original orchestrations may be the best ever heard on Broadway,
but this is a whole other matter. The variety of sounds she's gotten
out of the instruments and also the practical way in which they
allow John to work with the performers onstage is extraordinary.
But what got me most about the orchestrations is what they did for
the play's atmosphere. These are wonderfully weird textures. The
sound of an accordion playing with a violin - it's very creepy."
As Mr. Sondheim
indicated, Mr. Prince's concept of the show, which placed the merrily
gruesome story inside a morality tale of clashing classes, did not
entirely jibe with his original conception. But Mr. Sondheim has
a strong affection for that version.
"I like
spectacle too," he said. "When you have a great story
you can tell it in many different ways."
"There
are certain things missing in this production - orchestral climaxes,
choral climaxes - that are simply impossible because of the resources,"
he added. "And there are nuances lost because of the compression
of the narrative required by this method of performing the piece.
But what you gain is a swiftness and intensity that draws the audience
into this macabre world, and that is created by a unified ensemble
working in one tone. Here it's as if the audience is drawn into
a tunnel."
If Mr. Sondheim
delights in the skin-crawling, screw-turning concentration of this
production, it may be because the staging encourages viewers to
let their imaginations play across its stark, haunting images, finding
what they seek in the shadows. Richard Frankel, one of the producers,
said: "I found it enormously moving when I saw it in London
and thought it illuminated this show I've known and loved for the
past 25 years in a startling new way. It's like painting on the
walls of a cave in a way, using anything at hand to tell the story."
Mr. Frankel
may also have been moved by the prospect of engineering what is
increasingly a troublesome feat on Broadway: producing a major musical
revival that actually turns a profit. The prior Broadway revival,
a scaled-down version directed by Susan H. Schulman, was famously
nicknamed "Teeny Todd," and some chat room wags have called
this one "Teeny Tiny Todd." But the show isn't as economical
as it might look from across the footlights. Mr. Frankel said that
because the cast members were being paid both as actors and musicians,
the cost savings in terms of artistic personnel were not very great.
Still, at $3.5 million, the budget is modest by the standards of
musicals, with most of the savings deriving from the single set
and reduced backstage personnel.
The original
production of "Sweeney Todd" lost money, despite eight
Tony awards and a healthy run of 557 performances. Risky when it
was new - some audience members fled the theater when Sweeney put
his razor to work - the show remains risky, perhaps especially in
Mr. Doyle's unorthodox production.
"The imaginative
journey, from the audience's point of view, is going to be very
different," Mr. Doyle said. "This is not naturalistic
theater. It's more poetic than prescriptive. It's playful - almost
told in a way that children would tell the story, using what was
available to them." But Mr. Frankel remains sanguine that audiences
will respond.
"I think
it works to our advantage that you have to listen hard to this production,
not just let it wash over you," he said. "I think it's
great that at previews people are leaning forward in their seats
hanging on every word. I stand in the back of the theater and am
delighted by the silence."
Mr. Sondheim
has had the same experience. "When an audience's imagination
is engaged they enjoy it even more. It's what makes theater different
from the movies. The theater is a poetical medium and the movies
are a reportorial medium. That's the fun of the theater." He
has also been pleasantly struck by the youth of the audiences at
previews. "Patti told me that some kid was overheard the other
night comparing this version to his high school production,"
he recalled. " 'Hey, they didn't get that moment at all.' "
Young audiences.
Rapt attention in the balcony. Stimulated imaginations. On Broadway,
no less. Now, that's spooky.
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