A minimalist staging by John Doyle of the tale of the barber of Fleet Street emphasized the raw talents of its cast.
A minimalist staging by John Doyle of the tale of the barber of Fleet Street emphasized the raw talents of its cast.
How the 2005 Revival of ‘Sweeney Todd’ Inspired a New Wave in Theater
A minimalist staging by John Doyle of the tale of the barber of Fleet Street emphasized the raw talents of its cast.
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How the 2005 Revival of ‘Sweeney Todd’ Inspired a New Wave in Theater
Every now and then, a piece of American performance is so memorable that it both redefines its medium and reframes the culture at large. Here, an appraisal of one such enduring and heavily referenced work — a 2005 Broadway revival that brought a much-needed austerity and economy to the stage — alongside a gathering of the stars who not only made it but were made by it, too.
ByPatricia Cohen
FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, theatrical lore was built upon flashy pyrotechnics that elicited stunned gasps from audience members: In the ’80s, a hydraulically powered tire airlifted a feline in “Cats,” while a 1,500-pound crystal chandelier was crashed onto the stage in “The Phantom of the Opera.” In the ’90s, a whirring rotary helicopter ascended to the rafters in “Miss Saigon.”
Broadway still loves extravaganzas, of course, and often provides a home for even ill-fated ones. But over the past decade or so, it has leaned in the opposite direction — toward streamlined productions that forgo razzle-dazzle to instead focus on a small ensemble cast, who not only recite the lines and sing the score but frequently play the instruments, too.
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This shift can be traced to the revelatory 2005 Broadway revival ofStephen SondheimandHugh Wheeler’s 1979 masterwork, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” — a Grand Guignol tale about a murderous barber who bakes his customers into meat pies. Directed by John Doyle and starringMichael Cerverisas the title character andPatti LuPoneas his blood-hungry accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, that show not only incited a new era of theatrical minimalism but encouraged a new generation of composers, directors and musicians to experiment on Broadway. “It opened the door for other shows,” says Doyle, who has recently beenat work onanother Sondheim revival, 1990’s “Assassins,” at New York’s Classic Stage Company, where he is the artistic director. “Sweeney” is one of several Sondheim shows he has reinterpreted over the years — a production, he says, that “allowed for the fact that musicals could be something other than spectacle,” where the actors, using the full range of their skills, could “capture the essence of storytelling.” In this case, every performer also served as an orchestra member, playing Sondheim’s complex score while simultaneously portraying a character. Donna Lynne Champlin, as the competing barber, Pirelli, learned accordion for the show, and several cast members took turns on the center-stage piano. LuPone, who played the tuba in an all-girls marching band while in high school on Long Island in the 1960s, pumped out each horn blast as if it were steam escaping a pie. Cerveris strummed the guitar, an instrument he was introduced to in grade school in West Virginia, and says the experience was “an opportunity to be a whole artist for the first time,” adding that it was, in fact, a return to theater as it was practiced in Shakespearean times: “Doyle engages the audience in a way that harks back to childhood play.”
Economic necessity helped inspire the show’s asceticism, which characterizes much of Doyle’s work. The 67-year-old Scottish director spent much of his career in the United Kingdom at regional theaters, where penny-pinching is as much of an art as speaking in iambic pentameter; he had initially modernized “Sweeney Todd” in 2004 for the Watermill Theater, a 220-seat house in the English countryside. “I was trying to find the least expensive way of doing this enormous piece with only nine or 10 people,” he says. The handful of actors played all the characters and instruments on a mostly empty stage with a single coffin to serve as the bow of a ship, a table for rolling out pie crusts or the entrance to a madhouse. (By contrast, the directorHarold Prince’s original Broadway production had a 27-piece orchestra and a 27-person cast.) When Doyle learned the producers wanted to transfer his revival to Broadway after it opened on London’s West End later that year, “I really, truly thought they had lost their minds,” he recalls.
Yet the minimalism of Doyle’s production accentuated the play’s subtleties. Sweeney’s brutish world is one in which everyone must make do with what’s on hand, whether it’s a barber’s knife to slit a throat or a corpse to fill a meat pie. “Well, waste not, want not, as I always say,” Mrs. Lovett remarks when she realizes the slumped body in Sweeney’s barber’s chair could be converted into the next day’s supper. Such economy likewise governed the production. As Anthony and Johanna, the actorsBenjamin MagnusonandLauren Molinanot only sang the romantic ballad “Johanna” but accompanied themselves on cellos. Two arms and two bows swept across the strings, their movements in tandem. Later, the lovers’ cello movements transformed into violent slashing that mirrored Sweeney’s razor strokes, and later still, into the self-flagellating whip cracks administered by Judge Turpin (Mark Jacoby), the morally depraved engineer of Sweeney’s downfall. Nothing’s wasted, and the effect is spellbinding. Of Doyle’s production, Sondheim told a journalist at the time, “John’s, for me, is the most intense.”
AN EXUBERANT REVIVAL of “The Pajama Game”won the Tonythat year. But Doyle’s critical and commercial success had lasting influence: It helped persuade audiences and producers that artistic innovation was just as commanding as lavish scenery and effects, and cleared the way for shows in the same vein, many of them new works developed Off Broadway, where scarcity regularly prompts reinvention. The spartan productions that followed not only redefined what a Broadway show could be but also became symbolic of the challenges and triumphs of making art in a New York chastened by the 2008 financial crisis. Money was tight, funders were hard to secure. And as fortunes and jobs melted away, glitzy opulence, sleight-of-hand stunts and ornate effects began to seem like flimflammery, out of step with the changing times. On Broadway, like everywhere else after the global recession, people had to make do. As Mrs. Lovett sings, “Business needs a lift … Think of it as thrift.”
Doyle’s “Sweeney” also proved the enduring power of austerity. In 2012, “Once,” a modest Broadway production about two songwriters in a bar that featured instrument-playing actors,won the Tonyfor best musical. More soon followed: the Josh Groban-starring experimental ensemble production “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” — a musicalized Broadway version of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” — in 2016, and, the following year, “The Band’s Visit,” about a group of Egyptian musicians stuck overnight in an Israeli village. Last year, “Hadestown,” a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth that featured a trio of Fates playing the accordion, tambourine and fiddle,won the best musical Tony. Best musical revival went to “Oklahoma!,” which replaced some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lushest orchestrations with a single guitar-strumming cowboy, played byDamon Daunno. That production eliminated the show’s standard overture, chorus, elaborate costumes and arrangements to expose the show’sdarker undercurrentsand sexuality, transforming what could be a stodgy bit of Americana into a vital story for our times.
Doyle, for his part, often hears from people who tell him his “Sweeney Todd” was their first Broadway experience. “It introduced a new generation to something they’d never seen,” he says. Transformation, after all, is what drives theater, and these pared-down productions encouraged creators with different stories to tell and different ways of telling them to share their vision on a larger platform. That, in turn, has inspired new, more diverse audiences, as well as Broadway veterans. The cycle continues today, challenging the conceptions not only of what theater can be butshouldbe. “It doesn’t have to be big to affect an audience, it just has to be exciting,” LuPone says. “And, in our case, very scary.”
Patricia Cohen is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times, covering the national economy. She was the theater editor from 2004 to 2008. Jennifer Livingston specializes in editorial fashion photography. Photo assistants: Mike O’Shea and Matt Labarbiera. Digital tech: Matthew Willkens.
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We Are Family
Chapter 1:Heirs andAlumni
The Artists
The Dynasties
The Directors
The Disciples
The Graduates
Chapter 2:Reunionsand Reconsiderations
The Neighbors
The Regulars
Hair (1967)
Sweeney Todd (2005 Revival)
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Chapter 3:LegendsPioneers andSurvivors
The Renegades
The Activists
The Shadows
The Veterans
Chapter 4:The NewGuard
The Designers
The Beauties
The Scenemakers
Olivier Rousteing and Co.
Maria Cornejo and Co.
Telfar Clemens and Co.
Alessandro Michele and Co.
The Journalists