Mrs. Lovett’s inconspicuous pie shop is nestled in the dark shadows of Fleet Street in 1780s London. With its barely palatable pies, the shop can hardly attract a single customer. Then, Sweeney Todd’s barber shop returns for business upstairs.
Suddenly, business is booming. Touting the “closest shave in London,” the vengeful demon barber coats his steel with his customers’ warm blood — only to send their bodies downstairs to be baked into the town’s new favourite meat pies.
With proper execution, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has the potential to be a stand-out theatrical experience. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical thriller layers quick-witted lyricism on top of a dense, operatic score in a complex tale of love and revenge.
However, Paper Moon Theatre’s execution of this Sondheim classic largely stood out for the wrong reasons. While exceptional lead vocal performances and orchestrations carried the production, a lack of technical consistency and professionalism plagued the show.
Sondheim scores are synonymous with brilliant leitmotifs and musical intricacies, and Sabrina Tang’s orchestra expertly embraced the challenge. Screeching strings and an eerie church organ churned and seethed to evoke horror while maintaining a strong, guiding pace for vocalists.
In the show’s titular role, Peter Graves’s booming voice added horrific allure to the already dark score, particularly in “Epiphany” as he captured the demon barber’s descent into madness with a controlled, brooding growl.
Joy Mwandemange’s vocal prowess as the conniving Mrs. Lovett was another treat to watch, as she commanded the stage with wicked charm. In the fast-paced “A Little Priest,” she bounced off Graves with vocal precision and giddy movements to create a dynamic back-and-forth dripping with bloody humour.
However, other vocal standouts were difficult to discern as the show’s myriad technical flaws distracted from the talented cast.
Most frustratingly, members of the tech crew stationed in a curtained booth two rows behind my seat were engaged in an audible conversation for the majority of the show. Not only did the constant chatter lack professionalism, but it also made it immensely difficult to focus on the performance, prompting several other audience members to look over their shoulders in shared irritation.
Perhaps lessening the chatter would have also lessened the high number of technical hiccups that plagued the production.
A consistent delay in microphone timing meant vocalists only became audible as their mics spurred to life several seconds after they started singing. The consistent delay particularly disrupted any sense of cohesion in the ensemble renditions of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” where many pertinent lines of context were lost amid the several seconds of inaudibility.
Consistent issues with sound volume and balance were also prevalent, with microphones frequently popping during actors’ more powerful plosives. Audible heavy breathing was also a distraction when inadvertently layered underneath other actors’ vocals.
While lighting was cleverly designed to set the mood and to block scenes simultaneously occurring in the pie and barber shops, it also suffered from subpar execution. Pale lights sometimes lit up the wrong portion of the stage as the actors began delivering their lines elsewhere in the darkness.
Paper Moon Theatre’s rendition of Sweeney Todd did not suffer from a lack of passion — the cast displayed a mastery of the overlapping vocal and symbolic complexities embedded within this Sondheim brainchild. With more polished technical components, this show would have undoubtedly soared.
Instead, the result was a passable rendition of this classic musical thriller, where the tech stumbles were unfortunately more memorable than the talented and passionate cast.
Paper Moon Theatre’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ran at the National Arts Centre from Oct. 3 to 5.
Featured image provided by Paper Moon Theatre.
