Razor's Edge

By T.E. Kalem

SWEENEY TODD

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by Hugh Wheeler

Sweeney Todd is one giant step for vegetarianism. Sweeney (Len Cariou), "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street," slits the throats of stray clients and deposits their bodies with Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury), who has them ground up and served as meat pies in her pie shoppe. This musical is a black-comedy opera with helpings of ha'penny Brecht. Its underlying theme, and epater le bourgeois tone, is that man exists only to eat or be eaten by his fellows.

Sweeney is a victim of injustice. Railroaded to Australia by Judge Turpin (Edmund Lyndeck), a lecher who coveted Sweeney's beautiful wife, Sweeney escapes and returns to find his wife seemingly dead and his daughter a ward of the judge. Sweeney vows vengeance. His neighbor Mrs. Lovett has preserved his razor, and the grisly culinary combine of Lovett and Todd begins operations. There's many a slit 'twixt the throat and the lip before the cup of revenge spills over.

Most of Stephen Sondheim's score matches the best competition--Stephen Sondheim. However, Broadway's Uris Theater is the worst place to hear his intricately clever lyrics. As a tractor factory, the cavernous Uris might pass muster, but as a theater, no. Irony is Sondheim's razor, and its cutting edge is equally present in bittersweet ballads (Pretty Women, Johanna) or in A Little Priest, an antic account of what kinds of pies the varying professions taste like ("Here's a politician so oily/ It's served with a doily").

As Sweeney, Cariou performs with epic ashen gravity like a scion of the House of Usher summoned forth by Poe. Quite wonderful and totally different is Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett, a blowsy pragmatist as wickedly succulent as one of her pies. Within a broodingly ominous iron clad set, Harold Prince directs his accomplished forces with the flash, flourish and panache of a Broadway Patton.

But to what end? Nature abhors a moral vacuum, and no sophistication of Style can fill it.

-- T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.