I'll chalk up some of the thin spots in last night's performance to it being the end of the current production's seven-performance run. There's the one staying put in his proper place, and the one with his foot in the other one's face. Lovett (an absolutely fantastic Stephanie Blythe) has an industry-disrupting idea: Her meat pie business has been struggling, so why not feed London on its own? And thus, The Best Pies in London are born! Todd slices the throats of his customers, then drops them through the musical's trademark trap door into Lovett's bakehouse, where they're sent through the grinder three times, then fed to patrons waiting in endless, hungry lines. The history of the world, my love.Is those below serving those up above. Punctuated by the familiar-to-any-San-Franciscan cries of a homeless woman begging for "alms," (Elizabeth Futral, who seemed to struggle with the ragged vocal demands of the role) a manically despondent Todd seeks vengeance against those who stole his life - and, seemingly, against everyone else in London who crosses his path. It's a far more traditional telling of the penny dreadful tale of Sweeney Todd, a falsely-imprisoned barber (an appropriately-dark Brian Mulligan) who fights his way back to his family in Victorian-era London, only to find his wife (he believes) dead, and his daughter raised by the judge who sent him away.
Maybe I was, too?ĭirector Lee Blakeley’s production, which closed at the SF Opera last night (sadly, press ticket availability prevented our attendance before then) premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2011 and was staged at Houston Grand Opera last spring. I don't know why I never saw this in Sondheim's work before - I haven't seen Todd performed since 2007, when director John Doyle’s spare production of Todd hit ACT. There's no need to fear the likes of her, she's only a half-crazed beggar woman.London's full of them. My esteemed colleague Cedric recently suggested that SF Opera's recent staging of a production detailing "the evil scheming of a morally corrupt upper class against the noble instincts and the steady moral compass of the simple peasants" was intended to tell their well-heeled audience "Oh, you want some Verdi? Here's what Verdi thought of you." If he's right, then the choice of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 grand guignol musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street seemed a continuation of that comment, a warning of what San Francisco seems just steps from becoming.
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