Brilliant Reworking Of Sondheim Musical Stars Cerveris, LuPone

NEW YORK - The shredded dark curtain rises to reveal 10 seated players, with a pale, drawn madman in pajamas and a straitjacket downstage staring out with hollowed, vacant eyes. A keeper in a white smock unties his bound arms, removes the jacket and a gag and hands the liberated man a violin and a bow.

Thus begins John Doyle's stark, bloody, gripping revival of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

Stephen Sondheim's most cruelly misanthropic musical is back on Broadway in a production reduced in scale but enlarged in visceral power, which opened Thursday night at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Starring a bald-shaven, glowering Michael Cerveris as the shave master with the razor and a black-wigged, sexy Patti LuPone as his partner in crime, this revision of a Victorian Penny Dreadful takes on the style of Germany's Weimar Republic in a black-and-white production that casts its ensemble as musicians as well as actors (LuPone toots on a tuba).

As Sondheim's searing music echoes the early collaborations between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Doyle's transmuting of "Sweeney Todd" from newly industrialized London to a nightmarish "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" works brilliantly. For the Weimar period, also grimly painted in Sam Mendes' version of "Cabaret," was a time of strife and dislocation when a murderer like Sweeney Todd might have flourished. Fritz Lang, the most famous film director of the time, reflected on his era with portraits of immoral master criminals and a hunted child killer. The Demon Barber of Fleet Street would have fit right in.

With a book by Hugh Wheeler from an adaptation by Christopher Bond, "Sweeney Todd" takes the shape of a black-humored revenge play. Cerveris' baleful Todd arises like a Dracula from a black coffin as the madman in blue-and-gray striped pajamas leads the ensemble in "the tale of Sweeney Todd": "He shaved the faces of gentlemen/Who never thereafter were heard of again."

The coffin is the main scenic element in the black-and-white scene and costume designs by the director, who also uses the occasional touch of red, like the scarf knitted by LuPone's Mrs. Lovett in Act II. A tall paling rises upstage, adorned with a tall wall of black shelving randomly crammed with assorted knickknacks and gewgaws. A high black step ladder, Victorian wooden chairs, an upstage piano and a drum kit complete the environment.

As the action begins, the barber who now calls himself Sweeney Todd returns to London after 15 years of exile as a convict in Australia. After climbing out of his black box, Cerveris' bull-like Todd sings darkly of his own credo. His acrid anthem contrasts with the lyrical beauties of Anthony, the sailor who rescued the escaped refugee from a raft. In a reedy tenor, Benjamin Magnuson's Anthony sings: "I have sailed the world, beheld its wonders ..." The repatriation also introduces Diana DiMarzio's birdlike Beggar Woman, alternately singing for alms in a pure soprano, then soliciting men in an obscene guttural. Todd roughly rebuffs her, while Anthony sweetly tenders a coin.

Cerveris only grows in power as his muscular baritone tells of the "vulture of the law" who stole the beautiful, virtuous wife of the barber, and of "a hole in the world/Like a great black pit" just before meeting Nellie Lovett at her empty pie shop. The coffin now serves as a counter. LuPone sets out a richly comic performance in a caricature of lust and greed, the ultimate capitalist/cannibal. With glee, she twists her mouth as she sings of "the worst pies in London." She has never been better. With a white apron over a black-mini, her over-the-knee opera hose torn, she wags her backside suggestively in a manner never approached by her predecessors on Broadway, Angela Lansbury and Beth Fowler. And, of course, the onetime Evita can sing, whether she is tartly trading rhymes with Cerveris on deliciously tasteless Act I finale, "Have a Little Priest" or flying up to a fine high register for a melodious line or two.

Between the first notes from Manoel Felciano's poignant, richly sung Tobias Ragg, the waif in pajamas, and the human pie duet for Cerveris' implacable Todd and LuPone's avaricious, lubricious Mrs. Lovett, the long first act zips by, as Doyle deals out a smart array of stage tricks. One fine piece of ingenuity, worked out through Sarah Travis' excellent music direction and arrangements, pairs the players with their instruments. Magnuson's innocent Anthony and Lauren Molina's gold-ringletted soprano ingenue, Todd's lost daughter Johanna, both play cellos, impressively. The two villains, Mark Jacoby's lean and smoothly urbane Judge Turpin and Alexander Gemignani's portly and unctuous Beadle, exhibit their chops on trumpets. Donna Lynne Champlin's Italian-accented rival barber, Pirelli, fills in on accordion (she also plays the superintendent at the madhouse where the play is ostensibly taking place, as in the neo-Brechtian "Marat/Sade"). DiMarzio's Beggar Woman plays a plaintive clarinet, while the man on acoustic bass, John Arbo, remains upstage until the moment comes for him to speak, then die, as Jonas Fogg, the head man at the asylum where the twisted Judge has stashed his intended, his ward Johanna.

Act I consists mostly of Todd's planning to avenge himself on the Judge and the Beadle, fellow conspirators, of Mrs. Lovett's discovery of a new, no-cost filling for her pies, and the courtship by the smitten sailor Anthony of Johanna, thwarted by the jealous and covetous Judge. The love story inspires one of Sondheim's loveliest songs, "Johanna," while Molina sings tremulously of "Green finch and Linnet bird/Nightingale, blackbird," all caged as she is. Sweeney's duel with Pirelli produces a comic bit, followed by the Italian's reduction to mincemeat.

The briefer second act brings a touching duet between Felciano's naive Tobias, passionate sung, and his adored Mrs. Lovett, played with cynical flirtiness by LuPone. More and more blood flows, announced by a piercing blast of a whistle and illustrated by the pouring of viscous scarlet liquid from one bucket to another, and by shock lighting by Richard G. Jones that turns the set red. At one point, the stage goes dark, in a voyage to the cellar where the meat is cut and thrice ground, and Tobias and Mrs. Lovett shoot flashlight beams out at the stunned audience.

Throughout, LuPone seems to be having the time of her life, whether she is strutting about with her tuba, clashing cymbals or tapping a triangle. She is truly a hilarious monster as she polishes a hacksaw or a huge cleaver. Yet she has a softer side, as when she warbles sweetly about a dream of a seaside idyll with Todd. But Cerveris is all black-hearted business as the Demon Barber, a man who truly loves his flashing silver razor and who pushes his baritone and persona to the darkest depths.