‘Sweeney Todd’ Review: Gruesome tale fails to leave audience on edge of seat

By Shawntai Brown
Western Herald

(Photos courtesey of Miller Auditorium) Merritt David Janes, as Sweeney Todd and Carrie Cimma, as Mrs. Lovett, performed in the gruesome tale of “Sweeney Todd” Sept. 28 at Miller Auditorium.

“Sweeny Todd” brought the gruesome tale of a barber on a killing spree to the stage Sept. 28. Miller Auditorium opened its theatre doors to over 1000 patrons for the musical made famous by Stephen Sondheim.

While this tale made a box office hit, the stage performance was a very scaled down version of the show. Minimalist costumes and scenic design took attention away from the incredible acting and musical skills.
Incredibly talented actors and musicians helped to shape the performance, but some of their efforts got lost in the dim lighting and cluttered set.

The musical opened up to the quiet singing of Tobias, son of Mrs. Lovett, played by Chris Merchant. His faint voice was barely able to be heard and must have been nonexistent to the nose-bleed section. The vocals did improve as the show went on and included animated, character-centered singing, but achieving ear satisfaction was not as big a  concern as portraying the story.

Fortunately, the voices were able to play narrator, along with the little choreography the actors performed in the tight space. What lacked was the stage design.

Miller has been visited by some of the largest theater shows in the world, including Cats, Chicago, and Cirque de Solei. All have taken full advantage of the stage space and even stretched their show by breaking the boundaries between the stage and the audience. “Sweeny Todd” seemed afraid to spread in the performance space.

The show contained its set to center stage, leaving plenty of space on the sides where a gate of lights hung, not that they were used that often. There was a single scene staged and no changes throughout the show, although the script calls for several different settings. Most of the distinctions between locations and time were defined by the moving of a simple black coffin from an upright position to laying flat on triangular black legs.

Often, identifying where the story had moved to took about a minute of lyrics to figure out. This kind of minimalist set design approach is usually reserved for black box performances and not Tony Award-winning musicals.

A few scene changes would have better defined changes in time and location, as well as given the audience more to look at, since hours of watching actors sing in the same costume, in the same room, with little to no dancing or choreography is not always easy to sit through, even for the avid theatre goers.

What did shine was the enormous talent that the actors displayed as musicians. The 10-person cast played all of their music live on-stage. Many of the performers learned to play their instruments live in as little as three months. No squeaks or wrong notes wailed from the brass, woodwinds or strings and 10 ten-bodied cast sounded like a full orchestra at times.

Also, the actors did a great job of completely absorbing their characters and bringing out the human aspects to what could be static individuals. The barber, Sweeney Todd, Merrit David Janes, was a broken-hearted man seeking revenge. This came through very strong. The bakery owner, Mrs. Lovett, played by Carrie Cimma, was a London version of “The Nanny” who sometimes traded her English accent for a New York one; however, her acting painted a full and fun picture of a woman desperate for love. So desperate she would become an accomplice to murder.

Patrons still gave the show a standing ovation. In total the show was a tragic comedy that kept the audience engaged, even if they weren’t on the edge of their seat.

Shawntai Brown, a Western Herald Arts reporter, is a senior majoring in English and creative writing, and can be reached via e-mail at shawntai.g.brown@wmich.edu.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Sep 30 2008. Filed under A & E. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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