| Titles | Artists | Composers | Broadway | Opera | Home |
Sweeney Todd Live In Concert
Concert Cast with the San Francisco Philharmonic
Starring George Hearn and Patti LuPone
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
VIDEO
Read an off-site Synopsis of the show on Musicals.Net.
This is what got me hooked on Sweeney Todd. It premiered on PBS on the appropriate date of October 31, 2001. I'd heard about it from various sources on the Internet, but I didn't know anything about the show except that it was written by Sondheim. And the only thing I knew about Sondheim was that Into the Woods was really good.
So I looked around online a bit and found a couple of synopses. Frankly, the plot sounded pretty strange to me. Barbers cutting people up and serving them in meat pies? Yuck. But people seemed to like it. I debated whether or not to watch it. Certainly there would hardly be anything else good on TV to watch; all those terrible old vampire movies and so forth.
I kept debating it. I downloaded a bunch of songs from the OBC online, but I couldn't get into it. It wasn't that I liked it or didn't like it; I just couldn’t understand it properly. Like when I'm not wearing my glasses I can't read anything that isn't within about eight inches of my eyes, but when I put my glasses on the blurry lines resolve into printed text and my brain can take the next step in reading them. It was like that; I could hear it, sure, but the songs didn't resolve themselves into an idea in my head. I decided to watch it if I could, and try like hell to like it, but I was almost positive I'd find it too weird to enjoy.
When 9:00 rolled around on Halloween night, nobody had any plans to watch anything particular on TV, and I was looking for something to do. So I grabbed the remote and flipped it to PBS. It was actually about 9:05, so I missed the whole opening ballad part, and jumped in right at the beginning of "There's No Place Like London."
Now. I don't know about your opinion, but here's mine: Davis Gaines is not a good first impression to have of a show. What's with his face? He does some pretty weird facial expressions while he sings. He does have a really nice voice.
George Hearn didn't particularly impress me at first, either, although I really liked his voice. It's mostly the song, I think – "No Place Like London" is, of course, essential to the plot and actually pretty good, but it's not really catchy.
So here I am, debating whether or not to leave the TV on. At that point I was beginning to believe my original suspicions that I wouldn't like the show. But luckily I'm a patient person, and there wasn't anything else I wanted to watch. So I left it on… and lo and behold, I got hooked in the very next scene.
I've heard a lot of people give Patti LuPone a bad review in this role, because they insist that Angela Lansbury was so much better. I don't know about that. LuPone can't be all that bad, because she's the one who hooked me. "The Worst Pies in London" was really good. I was like, OK. This woman is good. I'm watching this to the end even if it does end up sucking; I want to see the whole thing.
The rest is history. I loved it.
Now on to the actual review…
George Hearn is great. I don't give a crap what anyone says about him overacting. I've never seen it. (Read my review of the National Tour Video with Hearn and Angela Lansbury for a long, in-depth discussion of the Hearn vs. Cariou debate.) His voice is fantastic. Really fantastic. Patti LuPone hooked me, but George Hearn made me really love the show.
Now… I have heard a lot of people say they didn't like the way Patti Lupone played the role. They say she was too sexy. This seems mostly to result from comments about her dress, which apparently displayed more cleavage than people felt was in character for Mrs. Lovett. People, first of all, don't you have better things to do than to stare at the front of her dress all night? I for one didn't even notice her dress. (I'm a 15-year-old girl and I'm straight, so admittedly I had no reason to.) Secondly, that was the dress, not Patti LuPone.
People were also apparently upset that she was not Angela Lansbury reincarnated. Sorry, guys, but everyone has their own interpretation. I for one like both! I will admit freely that this concert was my first exposure to Sweeney Todd, and so unlike most of the rest of you I compare everyone to Hearn and LuPone rather than Cariou and Lansbury. But let me examine things in detail.
To sum up LuPone's performance compared to Lansbury's, I would say she played Mrs. Lovett with a harsher personality. I really don't know how to explain what I mean. LuPone was slightly less bubbly, although she was still cheerful and lively. Only that's not really it. It's a matter of tone - here, a literary term meaning the author's attitude toward the story. Except this was the actor's attitude toward the character. See what I mean? No? Hmm… It's almost as if LuPone's Mrs. Lovett was more desperate. Someone pointed out somewhere that Mrs. Lovett has no redeeming virtues at all, when you think about it, but the audience still loves her. And it's perfectly true. Only with Angela Lansbury, it's not immediately obvious. At first glance, she's indistinguishable from someone's cookie-baking grandma. But LuPone somehow endeared herself to the audience without being quite as grandmotherly. It was obvious from the first that she would do anything to anybody if she thought it would get her ahead. But we still liked her! I don't get it any more than you probably do. But it's the plain truth.
Supporting cast is stellar. I already mentioned Davis Gaines. I got used to him… his voice redeems his weird expressions. And since it was a concert, how he looked wasn't quite as big a deal as it would have been otherwise. Lisa Vroman was a lovely Johanna, but I have an ingrained dislike for that type of high soprano. It's not her fault, actually, it's the song – I have the same problem with some other musicals (Christine in POTO occasionally annoys me.) Timothy Nolen was a really good Judge Turpin. He's got a really nice voice. He wasn't quite as repulsive ("repulsive" here is a good thing – as in making Judge Turpin repulsive) as Edmund Lyndeck, but he really didn't have the opportunity to be with the dialogue cut. Neil Patrick Harris was wonderful as Tobias, except I got a totally wrong impression about the character. It wasn't Harris's fault though; he's just too old and too tall. Tobias is supposed to be a young boy of 14 or so, made more like 10 at heart by a rough life of abuse by Pirelli. Instead, he came off as a young man (early 20's) with significant mental retardation. It didn't bother me at all – if you think about it, that interpretation works quite as well with the storyline. But it was only after seeing Ken Jennings in the Nat'l Tour video that I realized Tobias was supposed to be a younger boy. However, I loved Harris's rendition of "Not While I'm Around." He also did a good job at the end where Toby goes… er… over the edge.
The chorus is really good too… and of course the orchestra is lovely… the San Francisco Philharmonic, I believe.
Another complaint I have heard is that the cast played up the inside jokes too much. The biggest instance was probably right before "A Little Priest" when Todd says they'll go bury Pirelli in some secret place after dark. Mrs. Lovett's next line is usually delivered thoughtlessly, and she doesn't come up with her ingenious idea until a moment or so later. But this time, they dragged the humor out, and played it like she'd already been turning the idea over in her mind for a while. "Well of course, we could do that…" and then a pause. "You know me…bright ideas just POP into me 'ead, and I keep thinking…" People said she was giving away the joke and wrecking it. Personally I didn't think she gave away anything. After all, if there was anyone in that audience that didn't at least know that all the bodies wound up as meat pies, I'd be really surprised. Even I knew that, and I didn't know a darn thing about the show. You've got to play to your audience a bit, and they knew that their audience was 95% (if not more) people who were already fans of the show. (Hmm… and of those 5% I know at least one that became a fan… ME.) Thankfully, this has been released on DVD. Especially if you don't have the Hearn/Lansbury video, you really should own this one.
Also see my reviews of the Sweeney Todd OBC and Live in Concert CDs and the National Tour Video.
