Music Review: Sweeney Todd – 2023 Broadway Cast Recording

SWEENEY TODD – 2023 Broadway Cast Recording (Warner Music Group’s Arts Music and Reprise Records).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was first staged in 1979. Sondheim took his inspiration for the show from Christopher Bond’s 1970 play Sweeney Todd which he had seen on a visit to London at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Bond had written the play while he was the resident writer at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. He later staged the Sondheim musical when he was artistic director at the Half Moon Theatre in Stepney Green in east London, and it was also performed in Liverpool.

The story of Sweeney Todd first appeared in serial form in a cheap Victorian paper under the title of The String of Pearls. There have been many other versions of the story told on film in 1928 and 1936, in a ballet by Malcolm Arnold and John Cranko in 1959, in performances by the Royal Ballet company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. John Schlesinger directed Peter Shaw’s television screenplay of the story with Ben Kingsley as Sweeney and Joanna Lumley as Nellie Lovett in 1998, and Tim Burton filmed Sondheim’s musical in 2007 with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

Sondheim was taken by the dramatic possibilities of Bond’s play with its plot about a man wrongly accused seeking revenge, and getting together with a woman, no better than she should be, who starts turning people into pies without a second thought. The plot was ripe for exploitation as a piece of dark musical drama which in the event is what it actually turned out to be, and with all its murderous action, it is more like a grand opera than a straightforward musical. It is a superb piece of grand guignol, a musical thriller that is both savage and darkly humorous. I reckon it is one of Sondheim’s masterpieces.

The original production opened at the Uris Theatre in New York on 1 March 1979 and closed after less than 600 performances. It starred Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett and Len Cariou as Sweeney. It was nominated for nine Tony Awards and won eight including Best Musical. In the second volume of his collected lyrics, Sondheim wrote: “Sweeney Todd was a resounding commercial failure both on Broadway and in the West End, the latter reception a particularly disappointing one to me, since I had written the show as my love letter to London.”

Anyway, the story doesn’t end there because a US national tour started in Washington DC in October 1980 and ended in Los Angeles in August 1981. Dorothy Loudon and George Hearn had already taken over in the leading roles. It was recorded for television in LA with Lansbury and Hearn and later released on video and DVD. Another US tour in 1982 featured June Havoc and Ross Petty. The London production with Sheila Hancock and Denis Quilley opened in July 1980 at Drury Lane but only reached just over 150 performances. There was a Broadway revival in 1989 but it won none of its four Tony nominations.

The London revival, however, was a huge success in 1993, opening at the National Theatre’s studio space, the Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) and then transferring later to the Lyttelton proscenium auditorium. It starred Julia McKenzie and Alun Armstrong, with Denis Quilley taking over as Sweeney for the transfer. It was nominated for six Oliviers and won four. Holland Park Opera staged its own production in 1996 and Sadler’s Wells in north London housed the Opera North production in 2002. The Royal Opera House had its own production in 2003.

Another revival at the Watermill in Newbury transferred to the West End in 2004 and toured the UK with Jason Donovan. It moved to Broadway in 2005 with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris. Since then there have been further West End revivals including the Royal Festival Hall in 2007 and the Chichester Festival Theatre production which transferred to the West End in 2012. In 2015 the show was staged in a pie shop in Tooting, south London, and in 2017 there was an Off-Broadway production in a facsimile of the Off-Tooting Broadway pie shop. And now, here it is again with the latest new 2023 production on Broadway which is proving to be a smash hit, the complete antithesis of the original staging in 1979.

From that litany of productions it is all too apparent that Sweeney Todd can work as either a big Broadway show or a small chamber production, although it generally seems to work better in a smaller space. Since 1980 it has been staged virtually everywhere, from opera houses to concert halls, from Fringe theatres to the Palace Watford where they used puppets to swell out the chorus, from the show I saw in the crypt of a Clerkenwell church to a promenade performance at the Bridewell Theatre in Fleet Street where the audience had to follow the protagonists around the building.

This musical thriller about the notorious serial-killing barber appears to have progressed from being an initial flop in 1979 to achieving classic status without ever passing through success. It is a grisly tale of a wronged barber trying to wreak his revenge on Judge Turpin, the man who stole his wife Lucy and daughter Johanna and sent him away to Australia on a trumped-up charge. On returning to London Todd meets an unscrupulous pie-maker willing to supplement her meat supplies with human flesh after Sweeney has ‘dealt’ with them. This might, generally speaking, seem a frightful case of over-the-top grand guignol but in the hands of Sondheim and his librettist Hugh Wheeler the results are both darkly entertaining and superbly thrilling.

The latest production on Broadway may well turn out to be the most successful in the show’s 40-odd year career. And, judging by the new recording, the current cast could be the definitive one, apart from the original version which, despite its initial lack of success, will always have a secure and special place in Broadway’s musical history. It is not surprising that every aspect of the new recording summons up the murky depths of the score and the dramatic brilliance of the lyrics. The show and this recording will surely become the benchmark for any future attempts at capturing the frightening menace along with the curiously uplifting feeling that the show engenders.

The spirited orchestrations, from the opening Prelude onwards provide a juxtaposition of horror and comedy that tempers the drama with touches of farce, leavening the piece with a great deal of, admittedly grisly, gallows humour. One minute Todd is thinking about slitting his customers’ throats (in ‘Epiphany’) but in the next Mrs Lovett is considering how to deal with the bodies by turning them into pies in an almost lighthearted way (in ‘A Little Priest’) as she says: “And we have shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd on top.”

Josh Groban plays Sweeney and by all accounts he is terrific. He certainly comes across on the album as a very sincere Todd with nothing to stop his plans. The opening and finale number ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ is dramatic to the point of fearfulness and hits the audience even on the album with a shuddering jolt. Then the climate changes for ‘No Place Like London’, an almost too jolly evocation of the city by Groban, Jordan Fisher as Anthony and Ruthie Ann Miles as the Beggar Woman, all in good and powerful voice.

As Mrs Lovett, Annaleigh Ashford is brilliant as she extols ‘The Worst Pies in London’, a long, difficult number that she seems to manage with great ease and is very funny too. Her explanation of what happened to Todd’s family she relates with great compassion in ‘Poor Thing’. She then joins Todd in the moving duet of ‘My Friends’ in which Sweeney praises his razors, the tools of his trade in both barbering and murder. The clarity of the writing of both the score and the lyrics is particularly firm here, one idea being  juxtaposed with another as Todd and Nellie talk at odds.

With such a downbeat plot it is still possible to find what amounts to a love song in ‘Green Finch and Yellow Bird’, sung beautifully by Maria Bilbao as Todd’s daughter Johanna, which is followed by Anthony, Todd’s shipmate, who has fallen in love with Johanna, singing ‘Ah, Miss’ to her as she lies in an asylum. Jordan Fisher beautifully captures the passion and the frustration of not being able to reach her. There’s a little hiatus of comedy in ‘Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir’ and ‘The Contest’ that introduce the rival barber and his little helper Tobias, delightfully sung by Nicholas Christopher and Gaten Matarazzo who subsequently helps out Nellie and her bakery. Other terrific numbers include ‘Kiss Me’, ‘Ladies in Their Sensitivities’ and the by now classic ‘Pretty Women’.

The end of Act I number, ‘A Little Priest’ always sends the audience away with a smile before the horrors of Act II are played out. There is not one superfluous number in the whole score, and Act II has some brilliant coups de theatre including ‘God, That’s Good’, with the ensemble tasting those delicious pies, and ‘By the Sea’ in which Nellie pictures Todd and herself setting up a seaside boarding house (“Have a nice sunny suite/For the guest to rest in/Now and then, you could do the guest in…”). Once Tobias has hooked up with Nellie he has the loving declaration of love in ‘Not While I’m Around’, beautifully sung by Matarazzo.

The piece ends with great chorus work for ‘City on Fire’, the ‘Beggar Woman’s Lullaby’, in a sympathetic performance by Ruthie Ann Miles and the great finale reprise of ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’. I think if you hear this splendid recording you will come to the conclusion that Sweeney Todd is truly Sondheim’s masterwork.

Michael Darvell