Sweeney Todd is Welsh National Opera’s first musical, and it’s brought out the grumblers.
This blackly entertaining production should silence them. Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical thriller is as sophisticated a piece of music-drama as any opera – and considerably better-written than some of them (I’m looking at you, I Puritani).
The use of discreet microphones for a cast that mixes singers from both music theatre and opera is more controversial, though it’s simply what the composer intended.
Director James Brining has set the whole thing in a lunatic asylum during what’s apparently supposed to be the 1980s, though Colin Richmond’s grungy designs look more like the Winter of Discontent, and it’s hard to see what the concept adds to a show so firmly rooted in Victorian melodrama.
Soraya Mafi as Johanna in Sweeny Todd
No matter. David Arnsperger, pale and muscular, cuts such a compellingly strange and sinister figure as Sweeney, Jamie Muscato as Anthony and Soraya Mafi as Johanna are so bright-voiced a pair of young lovers and Steven Page (Judge Turpin) and Aled Hall (Beadle Bamford) are such a gruffly detestable pair of upper-class villains that they swiftly pull you in and under.
Add exuberant turns from George Ure as cockney urchin Tobias and Paul Charles Clarke’s fabulously overripe Scouse-Italian Pirelli – plus all the pies, blood and glinting razors you could ask for – and you’ve already got a drama that rolls merrily, gorily along.
George Ure and Janis Kelly in Sweeny Todd
Source: http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/