“Sweeney Todd” is one of those Stephen Sondheim musicals that theatergoers either love — for its epic, operatic score and comically grisly story — or hate, for the very same reasons.
I’m in the love camp. Every time I see it — including the Broadway production I attended during its closing week last May — I appreciate Sondheim’s genius score and lyrics more.
The Broadway production was staged traditionally in its original Victorian England setting with gallons of stage blood and a prop barber chair where Sweeney, the “demon barber of Fleet Street,” slits his customers throats and then slides them down to a furnace, where their bodies get baked into meat pies by his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett.
San Diego Musical Theatre opened its own production of “Sweeney Todd” on Saturday. Director Jason Blitman has honored the show’s score and book, but reimagined several elements to give the story a more immersive, timeless and dystopian feel.
In Blitman’s staging, the 14-member cast — who use all of the theater as their performance space — dress in costumer Chong Mi Land’s modern attire, and the setting isn’t ye olde pie shop, but scenic designer Mathys Herbert’s more contemporary grimy, abandoned industrial factory.
There’s no prop barber chair, no blood and most of the killings are discreetly conducted behind a curtain. But, with Blitman’s eerie staging, gloomy lighting by Michelle Miles and sound by Jordan Gray, there is a foreboding sense that all of its characters all living on the knife’s edge.
Sondheim’s “Sweeney” score is multilayered and complex. The show’s Broadway orchestra had 26 musicians, but at SDMT, musical director Richard Dueñez Morrison conducts a five-piece live orchestra from the keyboard who impressively do the challenging score justice.
DeAndre Simmons leads the cast as Sweeney, a barber who has returned to London after 15 years in an Australian penal colony to take revenge on Judge Turpin, the man who unfairly imprisoned him. Simmons has a fierce, hollow-eyed stage presence and deep, rich operatic bass singing voice that’s perfect for the role.
Meghan O’Brien Lowery, dressed in khaki pants and combat-style boots, plays Mrs. Lovett as a self-dealing, seen-it-all pragmatist and she has a nice comic solo in “By the Sea.”
Tanner Vydos, as Judge Turpin, and Sam Castillo, as the young sailor Anthony, are both vocal standouts in the supporting cast. Soprano Salima Gangani brings a growing mania to the role of Johanna, Sweeney’s abandoned teenage daughter.
Matthew Javier is sweet-voiced as Mrs. Lovett’s baking apprentice, Tobias; high tenor Ryan Burtanog has many amusing scenes as Turpin’s accomplice Beadle Bamford; Kimberly Moller brings an air of desperation to the Beggar Woman; and Luis Sherlinee adds comic relief as rival barber Adolfo Pirelli.
“Sweeney Todd,” which runs 2 hours, 45 minutes, with intermission, may not be for everyone. But for those who love it, this production is definitely worth seeing.
‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’
When: 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 20
Where: San Diego Musical Theatre, 4650 Mercury St., Kearny Mesa
Tickets: $60-$70
Phone: (858) 560-5740
Online: sdmt.org