Sweeney Todd at Talk is Free Theatre
Photo by Roman Boldyrev
If anyone but Mitchell Cushman pitched this concept, you’d laugh them out of the room. Talk is Free Theatre’s new production of Stephen Sondheim’s iconic operatic horror musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is a gigantic affair. Like many productions of the show, it’s set in a church. But, less conventionally, it’s also an immersive, promenade-style production — the audience, which is capped at 44, follows the actors up and down stairs to different rooms around the church.
The show’s basic concept is fairly well-known, but let me remind you anyway: Benjamin Barker (Michael Torontow), a barber exiled on false charges, returns to London under the name Sweeney Todd. He visits Mrs. Lovett (Glynis Ranney)’s Fleet Street pie shop, where he used to be a tenant, and Lovett recognizes him as Barker. There, he swears revenge on the men who got him exiled, Judge Turpin (Cyrus Lane) and his servant Beadle Bamford (Andrew Prashad). To add insult to injury, Turpin has also become the legal guardian of Todd’s daughter, Johanna (Tess Benger). Eventually, Sweeney starts murdering people with his razor, and Lovett suggests baking the corpses into pies.
Theoretically, the show doesn’t seem to especially lend itself to an immersive production like this. Yet, it undeniably works. I think it might be the score — Sweeney has such a specific sound that there’s no need for literal demarcations of place: its booming organ and eerie choral harmonies already build up the setting precisely and evocatively enough. So although the production’s staging doesn’t make logical sense, it makes a perverse metaphorical sense. This isn’t a production of Sweeney to understand, but to feel, deeply and instinctually.
It’s not easy to craft a production like this. Sweeney’s score is difficult enough as it is, and music director/Pianist/Organist Dan Rutzen has to make it flow seamlessly across several different rooms; as we slowly walk to our next destination, he sneaks ahead so he can get there before us. Despite this added layer of difficulty, the S-tier cast executes the score so cleanly that it almost fades into the background in service of each scene’s dramatic situation. That is, until, the show’s booming choral motif — “Lift your razor high, Sweeney! — hits. Then, the music overwhelms. In the tiny rooms a lot of the show takes place in, these choral refrains ring off the walls, creating a transcendent sea of resonance and overtones.
And then there’s the question of lighting. Somehow, lighting designer (and frequent Cushman collaborator) Nick Blais has given life to every room in the church. In a space like this, it’s difficult enough to light the actor’s faces, but we are way beyond that, here — each lighting look builds the play’s atmosphere in a dramatically appropriate way.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder exactly who this production is for. Although there are apparently more accessible audience tracks available, with all the walking, the show’s default experience, which clocks in at three and a half hours, seems created for young, able-bodied people. So that’s the audience… except the tickets go for $80. With the show’s tiny capacity and top-level talent, I’m sure this price makes financial sense, and it’s par for the course for immersive theatre (standard tickets for The Burnt City, Punchdrunk’s newest immersive outing, go for ~$140 CAD), but how many young people can afford that? This isn’t meant as a call-out, but as a genuine question: is there enough overlap between the people who can afford to see this show and the people who would want to see it? I’m not sure. But I certainly hope so.
For my part, though, I give the show my highest recommendation. I had a near-spiritual experience in there, and even cried during the song “The Worst Pies in London”. This is a moment of comedic exposition, so it may seem random to cry, but the vividness of this Sweeney’s storytelling made me that emotional. This is a perception-shifting production: like the best theatre, it will ever-so-slightly change how I see the world and the role of storytelling within it.
I used to hold the (unpopular) opinion that Sweeney is one of Sondheim’s lesser shows. Cushman & Co. have proved me very, very wrong.