Vancouver Opera’s Sweeney Todd goes for the jugular

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      The sounds of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, with its booming horns and smashing gong, are echoing up from the bowels of Vancouver Opera’s East Side centre. The live orchestra is projecting an apt feeling of doom through the building. Something dark and foreboding is happening in the basement—as it will on the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage, when the company mounts its hugely ambitious rendition of the gleefully gruesome musical for the first time.

      These swirling strains, and the libretto’s equally sinister themes, have inspired director Kim Collier’s fearlessly supersized, contemporary take on the Demon Barber’s tale.

      “What I had were these epic massive passions and those passions being born of the music—and I felt it was really kinetic as well,” the director tells the Straight before rehearsal with the cast, talking about her initial phase of listening to and studying the musical.

      In her first stab at helming an opera, the celebrated director of such feats as Electric Company Theatre’s No Exit and Tear the Curtain!, as well as the critically lauded Saint Joan and Hamlet, then worked with set designer Robert Gardiner on her vision. She imagined a great metal machine to embody those passions, in the tale of a barber who returns home after 15 years of exile to take revenge on a corrupt judge but ends up madly murdering as many people as he can, turning their bodies into meat pies.

      Collier and Gardiner’s result is a massive bridge that towers over the production—one that not only slides forward and backward, but rotates.

      Collier describes that spinning as a metaphor for the cycle of revenge and “the centrifugal force of being caught in that passion”. “It spirals in on itself, because we know with revenge, you can never be released from it, because one revenge spurs on another. It’s not something that is a solution. So the set becomes this muscular machine, a big bridge that can travel over the orchestra and cycle around when that force unleashes.”

      On the mutlilayered set, the title character’s barbershop sits on high; below it is Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, and below that, the subterranean place where the “meat” gets ground in the “bakehouse”. The revenge-mad Todd sends the bodies down there via a pivoting barber chair that ejects his victims, sending them on a long, steep slide to their fate. In fact, the orchestra pit has been removed to enable the lower level’s gory goings-on.

      “A body can go down and land in the bakehouse right in front of the audience,” says Collier, who isn’t shying away from the work’s darker themes. “So the bodies and the dealing with the bodies is right in the palm of the audience’s hands.…There’s no hiding: the bodies are right there.”

      With the pit gone, where does that leave maestro Jonathan Darlington and his esteemed orchestra? Here, too, Collier is playing with convention, moving the musicians right onto the stage and giving the conductor a key role. When the operetta opens, he plays the creepy prelude on the organ, then, acting a bit like our host, leads us into the action.

      Speaking over the phone between rehearsals, Darlington says it’s the first time he and his musicians have appeared on-stage in a production here.

      “The action happens around us and on top of us,” he says of the set. “It’s good to take oneself out of the comfort zone every now and again. You open windows on yourself.”

      Darlington has been just as eager to sink his teeth into the intricate score. There’s a good reason opera companies have been staging the Sondheim musical from Covent Garden to Lincoln Center, he says.

      “It’s by far his most operatic and most complex score—and his most coherent in every way,” he enthuses. “It’s a fantastic score. The great strength of Sondheim is that he’s the composer and lyricist as well, and the lyrics are amazing—every rhyme counts, every broken rhyme counts.”

      Listen for Todd’s recurring ballad—drawn from the haunting Latin hymn “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”)—Darlington says, and the way the sibilant “Sssweeney” and “sssteel” can cut through beautifully curving melodies, like a swift blade to the throat. “That creates a lot of tension,” he points out, adding that the music’s darkness comes in part from three trombones and a heavy percussion section.

      That menacing element highlights themes of class struggle that Collier has found all too relevant to today—which is why she’s set this Sweeney Todd not in Victorian England but in a city of glass that could easily be New York, London, or, of course, Vancouver. And the pie shop will look familiar to anyone who’s ever stepped into a fast-food joint.

      “It’s a global economy now, and there’s the importance of your average man against the power structure,” Collier says, invoking the very contemporary idea of the “one percent”. “One of the big themes in the piece is that if you are naive, those with power can exploit you,” she adds, pointing to the judge who takes Todd’s wife.

      “You expect a culture to protect you….And if those systems betray you, you’re left with this force of emotions and anger,” Collier continues. “And we have that now. Where are our cultural systems truly protecting us, versus servicing those in the seats of power?”

      Just as she’s not shying away from the cannibalistic plot twists—there will be blood—Collier is being brave about the cutting social commentary in this rendition.

      “Some productions go for a Punch-and-Judy and vaudeville humour,” she says. For her take, on the other hand, “I hope people are laughing, but my view is not to undercut the real. The libretto is so dense and so potent and has so much to say. It’s dramatically ferocious,” she continues, showing the pages of her own meticulously marked-up version. And then, so passionately immersed in her massive undertaking, she adds without even seeming to realize her own black pun: “Every scene is a meal in itself.”

      Vancouver Opera presents Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday and Sunday (April 25 and 26), and next Thursday to Sunday (April 30 to May 3).

      Comments

      2 Comments

      Bea Kirkwood-Hackett

      Apr 22, 2015 at 5:01pm

      And we are going to opening night, Kim doesn't shy away from the truth, never has, never will.....love your work Kim!!

      Deborah Blair

      Apr 24, 2015 at 2:05pm

      That was a most dramatic and creepy dress rehearsal I have ever seen It was amazing, visually dramatically and musically. WOW I highly recommend this production