Attend the Tale

Sweeney Todd – North Riverside Players

In what is becoming a familiar, but happy, refrain in my reviews, another show cut short in 2020 by the pandemic is finally getting its time on the stage. This time, North Riverside Players prove both resilient and ambitious in mounting Stephen Sondheim’s classic Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. A London barber, falsely convicted and imprisoned in Australia has returned in secret to find his family and revenge himself on the corrupt judge who sent him there. Returning to his home, he finds his neighbor, Mrs. Lovett running a failing pie shop. Together they will find a novel, if nauseating, solution to both their problems.

To say this is a challenging show is an understatement. The music is technically challenging to even the most experienced singer. Both the music and the story are intentionally told in a heightened style out of another century. This show depends on being fully immersed in it, and if any part isn’t working, the whole thing can fall apart. This is all to say nothing of the fact that Sondheim is my favorite composer and I have seen this show several times, both Broadway and local productions, so I can be pretty picky. I am happy to report that the show was a delight.

The cast is fantastic. Danny Parrot as the titular barber shows that not only tenors can play the lead. The standout of the cast is Meaghan Hurley as Mrs. Lovett. Her voice was amazing and she effortlessly breathed life into a character that has be scheming, funny, cruel, and loving sometimes all in the same song. Even at her worst, you have to, if not root for her to win exactly, certainly like watching her try. Other highlights in smaller roles were Jim LaPietra as rival barber Adolfo Pirelli and Kim Jargsdorf as the Beggar Woman. Both parts are among the more purely operatic in the show, and both actors absolutely nailed them, flawlessly executing the material and fleshing out the world of the story.

The show is being staged in a converted gymnasium and I bring that up to applaud the clearly herculean efforts that were taken to build a theater space in it, but also to say I think the less luxurious space actually suits the material. The sources that Sondheim was intentionally referencing are in the same world as penny dreadfuls and the Grand Guingol, and I think having a few of the seams showing helps rather than detracts from a sense of immersion. You always know you’re watching a show, but for such heightened material, I think that helps. Realism really can’t be the point when you’re watching one corpse after another go down a slide. One scene in particular that stood out for me was Mrs. Lovett’s fantasy “By the Sea.” I won’t spoil it, but the way the show incorporated simple props was fantastic and really nailed the tone of the scene. If anything, I think the staging overall could have leaned even more into ‘gleefully macabre pantomime.” I have a few small complaints, but I think they mostly fall in the category of opening night hiccups. A few of the chorus members felt out of balance with the group during some scenes, and some of the prop work (plates scraping a table, for example) was getting picked up by the microphones too strongly. But overall, accounting for degree of difficulty, the show came off quite nicely.

North Riverside Players set a high hurdle for themselves returning to the stage, and I think they safely cleared it. Both the friend I saw the show with and I are huge Sondheim fans, and fans of this show in particular, so we were primed to be a pretty picky audience. Both of us walked out having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Even without two self-appointed Sondheim snobs in the audience, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ‘adequate’ production of Sweeney Todd. It’s just too big, too stylized, and too complex a show for “just okay” to really work. It succeed or it fails, and there just isn’t really a middle. North Riverside Players’ production succeeds.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented May 5 – May 15 by North Riverside Players at Scheck Village Commons 2401 S. Des Plaines Ave., North Riverside, IL.

Tickets can be purchased at nrplayers.com/tickets.html or calling 708-512-7015.

More information on this and other shows can be found at theatreinchicago.com.