March 2, 1979

Stage: Introducing 'Sweeney Todd'

By RICHARD EDER

he musical and dramatic achievements of Stephen Sondheim's black and bloody "Sweeney Todd" are so numerous and so clamorous that they trample and jam each other in that invisible but finite doorway that connects a stage and its audience; doing themselves some harm in the process.

That is a serious reservation, and I will get back to it. But it is necessary to give the dimensions of the event. There is more artistic energy, creative personality and plain excitement in "Sweeney Todd," which opened last night at the enormous Uris Theater and made it seem like a cottage, than in a dozen average musicals.

It is in many ways closer to opera than to most musicals; and in particular, and sometimes too much for its own good, to the Brecht-Weill "Three-penny Opera." Mr. Sondheim has composed an endlessly inventive, highly expressive score that works indivisibly from his brilliant and abrasive lyrics.

It is a powerful, coruscating instrument, this muscular partnership of words and music. Mr. Sondheim has applied it to making a Grand Guignol opera with social undertones. He has used a legend commemorated in broadsheets, and made into a half-dozen 19th-century play versions; and most recently into a modern version written by Christopher Bond and shown in London in the early 70's.

It is the story of a barber, unjustly convicted and transported to Australia by a wicked judge who coveted his wife. Upon his return the barber takes the name Sweeney Todd, and takes his general and particular revenge by slitting the throats of his clients, who are then turned into meat pies by his industrious associate, Mrs. Lovett.

Mr. Sondheim and his director, Harold Prince, have taken this set of rattletrap fireworks and made it into a glittering, dangerous weapon. With the help of Hugh Wheeler, who adapted the book from Mr. Bond's play, they amplify every grotesque and exaggerated detail and step up its horsepower.

The set, a great contraption like a foundry with iron beams, moving bridges, and clanking wheels and belts, is grim and exuberant at the same time. When a back panel, a festering mass of rusty corrugated iron lifts, a doleful scene of industrial London is exposed.

In stylized attitudes, and gutter costumes, a whole London underworld appears, serving, in the manner of the Threepenny Opera, as populace and as sardonic chorus. In cut-off, laconic phrases they sing verses of the Sweeney Todd ballad; a work whose musical strength is deliberately bitten off until it swells out in the bloody finale.

Sweeney, played by Len Cariou, appears from a hole in the ground. He is lit throughout like a corpse. Mr. Cariou, his eyes sad and distracted, his hair parted foppishly in the middle, dresses and carries himself like a seedy failure; but a failure illuminated by a vision.

Mr. Cariou is to some degree the prisoner of his anguish; he slits throats with lordly abstraction but his role as deranged visionary doesn't give him much variety. He is such a strong actor, and such a fine singer, though, that he makes up for it with a kind of glow.

Angela Lansbury has more opportunities as Mrs. Lovett, and she makes towering use of them. Her initial number, in which she sings of selling the worst pies on London, while pounding dough and making as many purposefully flailing gestures as a pinwheel, is a triumph.

Her songs, many of them rapid patter songs with awkward musical intervals; and having to be sung while doing five or ten other things at once, are awesomely difficult and she does them awesomely well. Her voice is a visible voice; you can follow it amid any confusion; it is not piercing but piping. Her face is a comic face; her eyes revolve three times to announce the arrival of an idea; but there is a blue sadness blinking behind them.

Mr. Sondheim's lyrics can be endlessly inventive. There is a hugely amusing recitation of the attributes given by the different professions -- priest, lawyer, and so on -- to the pies they contribute to. At other times the lyrics have a black, piercing poetry to them.

His score is extraordinary. From the pounding Sweeney Todd Ballad, to a lovely discovery theme given to Todd's young friend, Anthony, in various appearances, to the most beautiful Green Finch and Linnet Bird sung by Joanna, Todd's daughter, and through many others, Mr. Sondheim gives us all manner of musical strength.

He has strength to burn, in fact. Two marvelous songs, constructed in the style of early 19th-century ballads, are virtually throw-aways. Mr. Sondheim disciplines his music, insisting that it furnish power to the work as a whole and not function separately. Sometimes we wish he would let go a little; the Green Finch song, so lovely, is imprisoned in its own activity.

Mr. Prince has staged the unfolding story in a series of scenes, contrasting with each other, but sharing the central tone of comedy laid over grimness. Mr. Prince's effects are always powerful, and sometimes excessively so. The throat cuttings, for example, repeated half a dozen times, are simply too bloody. They are used on us like beatings.

Besides Mr. Cariou and Miss Lansbury, Victor Garber is most attractive as Anthony, Ken Jennings is strong and touching as Tobias, a hapless apprentice, and Jack Eric Williams is funny and sings beautifully as the villainous Beadle.

There is very little in "Sweeney Todd" that is not, in one way or other, a display of extraordinary talent. What keeps all its brilliance from coming together as a major work of art is a kind of confusion of purpose.

For one thing, Mr. Sondheim's and Mr. Prince's artistic force makes the Grand Guignol subject matter work excessively well. That is, what needs a certain disbelief to be tolerable -- we have to be able to laugh at the crudity of the characters and their actions -- is given too much artistic power. The music, beautiful as it is, succeeds, in a sense, in making an intensity that is unacceptable.

Furthermore, the effort to fuse this Grand Guignol with a Brechtian style of sardonic social commentary doesn't work. There is, in fact, no serious social message in Sweeney; and at the end, when the cast lines up on the stage and points to us, singing that there are Sweeneys all about; the point is unproven.

These are defects; vital ones; but they are the failures of an extraordinary, fascinating, and often ravishingly lovely effort.