Let’s be honest, this blood-spattered musical thriller was the one most of us had been waiting for.
The other two operas in Welsh National Opera’s “Madness” season - Bellini’s I Puritani and Handel’s Orlando - were totally absorbing in their exploration of madness born of unrequited love, jealousy and deception. But the gruesome goings-on in Sweeney Todd’s barber shop have captured the imagination in a sometimes worrying way ever since they were first related in the “Penny Blood” publications of Victorian times.
Here is madness fuelled by fury, hatred, grievance and a lust for revenge. So, enough of all that lovelorn angst, let’s have madness with more meat, so to speak. Here’s Sweeney!
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Alas, our expectations were largely dashed because this production is something of a disappointment. It is after all a Sondheim musical and on the whole its probably fair to say that musicals are the poor cousin of opera.
This was a co-production between Welsh National Opera, the Wales Millennium Centre, West Yorkshire Playhouse in association with the Royal Exchange Theatre. Perhaps too many cooks spoiled the broth (or pies), but the production seemed to lack a clear direction or firm idea of what it wanted to achieve.
The other two productions in this season were imaginative and daringly inventive in their treatment of the original works, attributes which this one largely lacked, although there were some thought-provoking passages.
The opening, for instance, was gripping as various apparently dysfunctional characters wandered on stage even as the audience was gathering. There was a Pinteresque sense of threat as we appeared to be in the London of the Krays.
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The problem was that the serious and multi-faceted underbelly of the story was largely lost in a production that too often concentrated on black humour and even comedy.
In his interesting essay in the programme notes, Dale Townshend pointed out that in Victorian and our own times the story could be seen as a an examination of the destructive forces of cut-throat capitalism. In the current age of austerity this might have been an avenue which could have been rewardingly explored in this production.
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But enough moaning. It was clear at the end that a good many people in the large audience simply loved what they had been served. But as Bob Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) might have said, it wasn’t m y cup of meat.
To be fair, it was well directed by James Brining, designer Colin Richmond did and excellent job, and each and every member of the cast were excellent within the confines in which they had to operate.
David Arnsperger offered a nuanced picture of Sweeney Todd, who often seemed intellectually refined as he slit the throats of his customers and dispatched them to Mrs Lovett’s pie shop. Janis Kelly was gruesomely entertaining as Mrs Lovett, although sometimes she appeared to have step straight out of Eastenders.
