Theater review: 'Sweeney Todd' sates appetite for both horror and ...

On Friday night at Portland Center Stage, if you were hungry after the performance, you could have a fitting little snack at the opening-night reception in the lobby: meat pies.
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Whether you ate them or not -- having just watched a show in which random 19th-century Londoners are murdered, ground up and baked into savory pasties -- might say a little about how you view the main thematic concerns of ?Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street?: How we respond when confronted by the cruelty and injustice of the world. How we sate our appetites. And how we can find humor even in horror.
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If you?re hungry for entertainment served rare, a delectable blend of the macabre and the playful, the sensationalist and the serious, the grisly and the gristly (sorry), ?Sweeney Todd? is a fabulous feast. Staged with a sure hand by PCS artistic director Chris Coleman, sung with gusto by an impressive cast, the production strikes a fine balance of the dark and light tones (well, more like black and grey) in the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler classic.

Sondheim, the legendary composer/lyricist, has called the work a ?musical horror story? and a ?dark operetta,? and indeed it marks a stark departure from the lighthearted expectations of most musicals.

Coleman, along with scenic designer William Bloodgood and lighting designer Diane Ferry Williams, has created a shadowy world of grimy, industrialized squalor, a dehumanizing society in a setting that practically reeks of teeming humanity.

"Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street"

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, plus various additional times and days through Oct. 21

Where: Gerding Theater, 128 N.W. 11th Ave.

Tickets: from $39 (student discounts and rush seats also available), 503-445-3700, pcs.org

Sweeney Todd, an escapee from an Australian prison colony returns to this great, callous city bent on avenging his 15 years in unjust exile, and the ensuing story involves rape, murder, cannibalism and a variety of tense machinations. But the spoonfuls of levity, mostly delivered by the engaging Gretchen Rumbaugh as opportunistic pie-maker Mrs. Lovett, make it all go down more easily.

At once brooding and brisk, this production gathers dramatic momentum with a relentlessness that?s enhanced, not thrown off, by the short detours into romantic balladry and black comedy.

?Johanna,? for instance, a longing love song that becomes a recurring melodic and emotional motif, lingers poignantly in memory. ?A Little Priest,? in which Todd and Mrs. Lovett list and laugh about the varieties of meat they?ll serve (?It?s fop/Finest in the shop/And we have some shepherd?s pie/Peppered/With actual shepherd on top?) is merely the sharpest example of Sondheim?s precision craft, his mastery of wordplay and melodic form.

Aloysious Gigl gives the title character a mix of intensity, detachment and deep sadness, managing the essential trick of rendering the barber/butcher as simultaneously vicious and sympathetic. As Todd?s nemesis, Judge Turpin, Matthew Alan Smith conveys a perverse yet conflicted psyche in brief brushstrokes.

But even with those fearsome fellows around, you might find Mrs. Lovett the most ultimately disquieting denizen of Fleet Street.

After all, in more ways than one, the pies are her recipe.

-- Marty Hughley

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/09/theater_review_sweeney_todd_sa.html

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