On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage SLICES " OF LIFE BY DEAN VALENTINE Qweeney Todd is a Broadway musical with a difference, and the difference is that it's good. There is one problem, for writer Hugh Wheeler seems not to...
...Strangers also suffers from an ugly set...
...These are puppets, not people...
...He absently picks up a pie, and in the midst of munching finds a hair and then a thumbnail...
...the last person to do it successfully, I believe, was Sond-heim in West Side Story...
...Lovett stock up on supplies...
...Worse, the episode is useless...
...There is very little sentimentality and a great deal of biting wit...
...Thompson, as played by Lois Nettleton, is the dullest, most innocent globe-trotting foreign correspondent imaginable...
...Angela Lansbury has never been a favorite of mine...
...she seemed to me, like Carol Charming, an actress who got by on the strength of a ready-made persona...
...The two men split, the sailor to wander through London (where he meets the girl of his dreams?Sweeney's daughter it turns out, now a ward of the evil judge), and Todd to seek revenge...
...But here she injects a sneaky, comic element into Mrs...
...No, that's not quite right: He analyzes only one protagonist...
...There is one problem, for writer Hugh Wheeler seems not to have quite figured out what he wanted to do: Is this musical—subtitled "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"—a parody of George Dibdin Pitt's 1847 melodrama, "whose admirable objective," according to the program, "was to stun its audience with a holocaust of thrills, horrors, and shocks...
...The stage becomes a charnel house, as Sweeney and Mrs...
...Is it a straight musical thriller...
...You simply can't scare an audience out of their seats and at the same time have them mull the minatory onslaught of the Industrial Revolution...
...Unfortunately, it is precisely as a thriller that the show is weakest...
...As an organist off on the side strikes low chords, a corrugated metal backdrop lifts to reveal London's buildings, painted in Moby-Dick white, with small, mean black windows—the eyes of the bourgeoisie—scattered about...
...Not many tune-smiths can write a show song with social commentary...
...He has but one wish: to get the judge into the barber's chair, the better to slit his throat...
...Nonetheless, gruesome as all this is, it never becomes chilling because it happens too fast...
...There is a single truly frightening scene in which Mrs...
...He is a heavy drinker...
...Maybe it's all true, but there must be a better way of rendering suffering than by dusting off every linty cliche in the dramatic and psychological repertoire...
...A mood (macabre and angry) and a theme (exploitation) are thus successfully established...
...Hence, Lewis' motives alone come in for scrutiny...
...The evil in the world appals her to the point where she looks to the Soviet Union to right matters...
...An angry band of ragged beggars assembles and launches into "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd...
...At any rate, when Sweeney gets his chance to do in the judge at the end of the first act he blows it, and we are back to Brecht: He decides that if you can't kill the one you want, kill the one you're with...
...and of her abduction by the judge...
...It merely takes up time...
...she is wholly absorbed in her career...
...He can't write anyway because he drinks and no longer has faith in his power...
...For the next two hours—it seemed longer —playwright Sherman Yellen analyzes his protagonists and their relationship...
...But when the plot proper begins, Brecht is thrown to the Broadway wind and we find ourselves for the next hour and a half—until the end of the first act—watching fairly standard fare, a thriller...
...Actually, Sweeney tries to be all three and is wholly successful at none...
...He has done it again here, only better...
...The first few minutes are the most devoutly Brechtian...
...Ah, what a gal...
...He drinks —we discover late into the play, as Lewis is strapped into a strait jacket after going berserk because his father hated him, never believed in his work, always loved Claude (Sinclair's brother) best...
...no gestures are thrown away...
...It is constantly being side-tracked...
...Sweeney, having escaped his banishment, returns to London with a young sailor friend who plucked him from the vicissitudes of the sea...
...In his most inspired moments —when the sailor, for example, rescues his love from a lunatic asylum and escapes with her through the London streets—Prince manages to evoke the feeling of a society convulsing in the grip of an evil it has generated...
...If her singing is rather thin, the acting compensates...
...Todd wins because his rival is busy singing and forgets to apply the blade—a solecism of musical stage language that Walter Kerr has remarked on...
...This is clearly intended to be a metaphor—but of what...
...of Sweeney's wrongful imprisonment and exile...
...He mistreats his child because the brat bawls too much and keeps him from writing...
...The ballad ends, appropriately enough, with Sweeney himself rising out of a freshly dug grave center stage—a symbolic prefiguring of his role as the death bringer...
...When he humiliates his wife in front of friends, this caddish behavior is attributed to insecurity—what he actually meant to do was ask her to teach him "to love...
...Still, if what we have is not all we could have had, it is nevertheless more impressive and courageous than the cellophane-wrapped "entertainment" we usually get on Broadway...
...the first act spent so much time digressing that the second is forced to carry the weight of the whole horrible story...
...Grisliness, indeed, is the leitmotif of the second and final act...
...Lovett's meat pie store...
...Since, however, the ingredients are indiscriminate—rich and poor alike—and served mostly to the poor, we have here an absurdity, or simply a grisly joke...
...So far, so good...
...Lewis, as played by Bruce Dern, comes off as a whining, self-pitying neurotic—if this man could write great novels and win the Nobel Prize, so could Baby Snooks...
...If the pies were stuffed with poor people protein and fed to the rich, this ghoulish cuisine would speak convincingly of how industrialization and class society devour and destroy humanity...
...Jenkins' renditions of Stalin's Moscow and Hitler's Berlin are so garish they could have been the work of the man who draws Brenda Starr...
...It tells of a fine and handsome young barber married to a fair and virtuous maid...
...of the advances made toward his wife by a venal, decrepit old judge...
...His Todd is a monster, to be sure, but we never lose sight of the fact that he was once human, that the white face and glaring, mad eyes overlay another sort of man altogether...
...Lest I give the wrong impression, let me hasten to report that I have seldom enjoyed myself more in the theater, or been as impressed by the talent of the people involved in the production—not least of all the director, Harold Prince...
...Although the action is supposed to take place in various European and American cities, as well as in the Vermont countryside, every one of David Jenkins' creations looks like a Bowery flophouse...
...I have been dwelling on the negative aspects of this play because it is worth taking seriously artistically...
...By the Sea" is a fine send up of various '20s songs, and "Joanna" is a more delicate and moving love song than "Maria," its precursor from West Side Story...
...Broadway has rarely had it this good...
...Moreover, Yellen has a nasty habit of providing his estimation of his own characters through their mouths...
...Lovett's evil, and the result is a masterful portrayal, a devilish petty bourgeois...
...For while Thompson is sympathetically pictured as the injured party—a woman's libber before her time, etc., etc.—Yellen's imagination is fired solely by the inebriated Lewis, who is offered to us as the prototype of the Romantic, tormented artist...
...Business booms...
...The number where Mrs...
...is sure to become a classic of the musical stage...
...Eventually, he makes his way to his old barber shop, situated atop Mrs...
...don't know very much about the love affair of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson—only what I read in my program notes—so I am not in a position to judge if Strangers is an accurate account of their courtship and 14-year marriage...
...Lovett's helper, a not very bright young lad, finds himself locked in the cellar, next to the grinder...
...Thus Thompson tells Lewis what a genius he is and how great his books are, and he reciprocates by reminding her how unusual she is, how much she has accomplished, how she is the most terrific and important journalist on God's earth...
...Or is it a Brechtian parable about industrialization and capitalism...
...His customers, in other words, become his victims, and their bodies, propelled through a chute under his chair to the cellar, wind up as the filling of Mrs...
...In addition, Prince has elicited magnificent performances from his cast, particularly his two leads...
...The seeds of disharmony are already planted by the time the two meet in 1928 Berlin...
...We would never guess we were being told the story of two immensely successful writers, and that in the 1930s there were apartments and farmhouses in this world that weren't dimly lit or decorated with drab yellow wallpaper...
...It tells us nothing about the character and doesn't further the action...
...The real treat of the evening, though, is Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and semioperatic score...
...But I hope it isn't, because I would hate to think that two people who apparently led such interesting lives could be such wimps...
...Len Cariou is even stronger, a delight to watch and hear...
...Eugene Lee's set —as large as an airplane hangar and done up as a Draconian English factory, full of rusty steam pipes and girders —tells us emphatically that we are in the world of Dickens' Hard Times...
...Lovett's famous pies...
...Everyone and everything moves perfectly and crisply...
...A hefty part of the act, for instance, is devoted to a contest between Todd and another barber named Pirelli, to determine who gives the best shave and who is the most professional tooth puller...
...Lovett and Todd discuss what occupations make for the tastiest pies?The trouble with poets is you never know they're deceased/Try a priest...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 7
