Petite Guignol

[rhu]

We saw the current Broadway production of Sweeney Todd on Saturday night.

If you at all love theater, go see this show.

If you are a performer, director, or producer, go see this show NOW.

What makes this production unique is that the ten actors are also the orchestra and stagehands. With a few trivial exceptions, they are all onstage the entire time. Thus, the production is pared to its essence: only those props that are absolutely necessary are used. The audience's imagination supplies most of the scenery and props, as well as some of the blocking.

Similarly, the music has been reduced -- in the sense of reducing a sauce -- to bring out the essential flavors, stripped of excess. Every dissonance packs extra punch in this production. Every musical gesture is magnified by being uncovered. And the choices of which actor accompanies which song add a new layer of meaning: "Nothing's Going to Harm You" is accompanied by the actor playing Sweeney on an acoustic guitar, and your heart breaks. When Turpin announces to Sweeney his intent to lock up Johanna, she's the only instrumentalist.

The end result is that the director, John Doyle, has put the innards of the machinery onstage for us all to see. And the machinery is so intricate, with the actors/instrumentalists having to be blocked in physical space, musical usage, and mental state. When pianists hand off to one another without missing a note, when Toby shifts from violin (neck held) to full voice (singing posture) in the space of an eighth note, when the Beadle plays trumpet with one hand while arranging stage props with the other, one simply watches in awe. I don't care what else is playing on Broadway this year, Doyle deserves the Tony for pulling off this coup d'theatre. (And this show demonstrates for me, once again, the need for a Tony category for best performing ensemble. Remove any one of these actors and the show would fall apart.)

About ten minutes before the end of the show, when all the pieces started clicking into place for the finale, I started getting goosebumps, the chill up my spine, every muscle tensing -- not because of the tension of the plot, which I already know, but because they pulled it off, because I realized that I was witnessing one of those productions that changes the way the audience sees theatre forever. This is why live theatre exists. This is why Broadway exists.

Sure, there are a few nits I could pick. For exapmle, the symbolism surrounding the small white coffin seemed forced.

But Doyle and his performers have taken a work in danger of being produced so often that it loses its artistic freshness, and reframed it so that it becomes an exciting, challenging, new theatrical work. Zero kvetches. See this show.