Sweeney Todd review – Mrs Lovett steals murderous mish-mash of a show

Putting musicals on the operatic stage is still, for some, the beginning of a slippery slope akin to Sweeney Todd’s murderous chute. Yet Stephen Sondheim’s musical was taken up by opera houses five years after its Broadway premiere, and anyone tut-tutting about Welsh National Opera’s new production might note that it features in San Francisco Opera’s current programme, too. The tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is part of WNO’s Madness season: Todd, returning to London to seek vengeance for a miscarriage of justice, purports also to seek salvation, but it’s all the starting point for his deranged descent into barbarous killing.

James Brining’s take on the piece isn’t penny-dreadful or more unsavoury than Mrs Lovett’s gruesome pies, but is a bit of a mish-mash. Set just before Thatcher’s care in the community programme was rolled out, the prologue takes place in Mr Fogg’s asylum, to which Todd’s daughter Johanna will later be consigned by the grotesque paedophile Judge Turpin (Steven Page), and where the WNO chorus play unsettling misfits. But Colin Richmond’s design boxes the action in containers, bloodied corpses sometimes making messy, random exits.

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Confusingly, David Arnsperger’s Todd retains too many of his native German inflections to sound authentically Cockney and lacks charisma. He was upstaged by the arrival, in a tinselled-up van, of Paul Charles Clarke’s fake-Italian barber Pirelli, the latter’s alter-ego Liverpudlian blackmailer equally strong. However, even with Pirelli’s throat quickly slit, Arnsperger didn’t ever command the stage as Sweeney Todd should.

The opera singers project their characters and Sondheim’s clever lyrics more convincingly than their musical theatre colleagues, and this disparity makes for unevenness. Janis Kelly’s Mrs Lovett steals the honours, with fine comic timing. Her massive oven is the witch’s from Richard Jones’s iconic Hansel and Gretel WNO staging: brownie points for recycling, but it means her incineration looks all too familiar. James Holmes conducts with gusto.

• At Mayflower theatre, Southampton, 15-17 October. Box office: 023 8071 1811. Then touring until 29 November.