Word: sweeney
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...distinction. It flounders in a pool of notes instead of gushing with passion. Only the lushness of "Pretty Woman," the dissonance of "Epiphany," and the insouciance of "A Little Priest" salvage the first act from musical banality. Even here, the Metropolitan Center's gully of an orchestra pit prevents Sweeney's blazing razor attack from terrorizing even the first...
...frustrated. Though nearly always glittering, certain lyrics seem gratuitous as Hugh Wheeler's book parcels out plot in neat bits of dialogue. With such a story-laden vehicle, tangential songs become tiresome; we yearn for songs with more plot in them. Sondheim and Wheeler sensed this tendency for Sweeney to drag and judiciously chopped out half of an appallingly dull number in moving the show from New York to Boston...
...permit his cast movement. At best, he creates the seamy atmosphere of a Hogarth woodcut. But his ingenious erector set wears thin, and his staging occasionally seems more suited to a Greenwich Village opera society. Even Prince's chillingly stark Prologue becomes cheapened in retrospect, as the Sweeney leitmotif is repeated ad nauseum. Ultimately imagination turns to calculated effect--blasting whistles, billowing smoke, showering blood--that titillate, but never deeply touch...
...bitter, cynical Sweeney Todd, Hearn is more hard-boiled in his determination for revenge than the New York Sweeney, Len Cariou. Though he's missing Cariou's subtle glee, Hearn nonetheless rivets us to Todd's obsessive mission. Failing once to exterminate the dastardly judge, his "Epiphany" is the anguished outcry of a crazed beast in its dying fury. The production's demonicism reaches its zenith in "A Little Priest", when Hearn and Lansbury combine to offer the occupants of society's beehive as ingredients for their delectable pies...
...lost on the mammoth stage, this scaled-down version of Eugene Lee's foundry set hovers overhead preventing any air from invigorating the denizens of London's sordid slums. Ken Billington's lighting generally succeeds where the score fails by sharply evoking the character's moods. Piercing spotlights heighten Sweeney's agonizing inner turmoil, while a stupefying pinkish orange haze overpowers mottled ground tones to emphasize the community's moral desolation and confusion. Flashes of sunshine intrude briefly, but the furnace's Hellish red glow settles on Fleet Street and damns it irrevocably...