Word: sweeney
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Enter, at last, Lysistrata (Kathleen Sweeney) and her horde of woman cohorts: Kalonike (Darla Christopher), Myrrhine (Nancy Boghossian), Lampito (Sarah Brown), Ismenia (Maureen Fallon) and Calipo (Chuck Marshall). Yes, that was Chuck. A male playing a female part--there must be something behind this. You keep waiting for him to reveal his identity and perhaps foil Lysistrata's master plan. When it becomes apparent that nothing of the sort is going to happen, you begin to wonder if enough women auditioned. But no, the director tells you afterwards, they thought it would be a good joke...
...women fit their parts, least of all Sweeney, who is not at all the forceful, bravura wonderwoman Aristophanes had in mind for Lysistrata. She seems intent upon getting through her lines as quickly as possible with a minimum of enthusiasm or voice inflection, and in this respect she succeeds. Despite her best efforts, Christopher's speech and actions as Kalonike more closely resemble those of Long Island than of classical Greece while Boghossian's Myrrhine, who has a crucial scene with husband Kinesias (Joe Smith), is far more coy and less brazenly seductive than Aristophanes intended. About the only female...
...virus is beginning to infect the Broadway musical and its name is opera. Last season's Sweeney Todd strained to achieve operatic style with recitatives and songs structured like arias; this season's Evita dispenses entirely with spoken dialogue...
Harold Prince directs with pile-driving force and thereby sacrifices the characters' personal emotions to visual and aural dynamics. If, as in Sweeney Todd, he has tossed away the key to the human heart, he is a master strategist of the stage. He deploys his acting troupes with brilliant precision at a crackling tempo. It is Prince, aided by a huge gray screen whose cyclopean eye brims with historic film clips, who hurls the dramatic thunderbolts of the evening. In two scenes of mass turbulence, with banners flying and the crowd in a hypnotic roar...
...Sweeney Todd. Not for the squeamish, since it is about cutting people's throats, baking the fresh cadavers without delay and serving them up as meat pies. With Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou in peak performances, Sweeney Todd is a classic example of the remarkable virtuosity and range of the U.S. musical when it is in the hands of two flamboy ant masters of the stage, Director Harold Prince and Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim. It is also the closest Sondheim has come to writing an opera, albeit dark, cynical and morbid...