What has an overabundance of cannibalism jokes, a Game of Thrones-esque body count, and some of the wittiest, prettiest songs youâve ever heard? Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheelerâs gory slice of melodrama Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
The 1979 musical took a 19th-century penny-dreadful monster and transformed him into the embodiment of class-based trauma, framed in a cheerily horrific story of âman devouring man.â The small but impressive Reboot Theatre Companyâs non-traditional casting upends the âmanâ while intensifying parallels to our own overheated pop culture. London bleeds, London burns, and yet London keeps chasing that tasty new morsel to slurp down.
The plot: A wrongfully convicted barber, Sweeney Todd, escapes from an Australian penal colony and returns to London with the help of a young sailor, Anthony. Sweeney finds his former life in ashes; after being raped by the evil Judge Turpin with the aid of his Beadle, his wife poisoned herself and left her and Sweeneyâs baby to be raised by her attacker. Obsessed with revenge, Sweeney makes a grisly return to his old tradeâwith the victims of his practice benefitting the ruthlessly pragmatic meat-pie shop owner downstairs, Mrs. Lovett.
At its barest, the story of Sweeney Todd pits evil male lust against the male thirst for violent retributionâabetted by an equally fiendish âfeminineâ practicality. My first thought was that by choosing non-binary people and women for key menâs roles, Reboot might subvert this dynamic. But aside from heightening the camp at times (e.g. Kylee Ganoâs hilariously bro-ey Beadle), the casting choices mainly gave excellent actors like Mandy Rose Nichols (Sweeney) and Brittany Allyson (Anthony) a crack at killer roles that would normally be denied them.
Nichols, coldly magnetic, plays up Sweeneyâs trauma, flinching when unexpectedly touched, glowering at a creeping societal rot no one else sees. Were they drawing on the idea of queer trauma, as Rebootâs poster, featuring a torso with chest surgery scars, might suggest? The possibility remained just that, a possibility, quietly undermining the trope of justified rage as the purview of cis masculinity.
The other characters donât notice Sweeneyâs horrors partly because, in Julia Griffinâs staging, theyâre as addicted to smartphones as we are. Frankly, at first, I feared this anachronism might annoyingly distract from the pitiless Grand-Guignol thrust of the melodrama. But as it turns out, our hysterical search for internet novelty complements Sweeney Toddâs grotesque spectacle of self-consumption rather piquantly. Why do Mrs. Lovettâs customers keep returning to eat mysteriously plentiful meat of unknown provenance? Why do unshaven gentlemen offer their necks to Sweeney when a bunch of their peers have vanished? Why do we keep refreshing Facebook when we know itâs guzzling our data and feeding it to ad companies?
That said, Iâm thinking about returning to Rebootâs Sweeney Todd before the runâs over. The text of Sweeney Todd is hardly understatedâyou canât be subtle while bellowing âWe all deserve to die!â and brandishing a razorâbut Iâm certain I didnât catch all the nuances of Nicholsâs performance, or Alyssa Keeneâs as Mrs. Lovett, or Karin Terryâs as the adorable urchin Tobias. Even with the (ferociously difficult) music slightly less polished than the staging, there are more great moments than I can mention here, whether from Vincent Milayâs literally dazzling fraudster Pirelli or from Cammi Smithâs lilting ingenue Joanna. So, Reboot: More Hot Pies! More HOT! More PIES!
Reboot Theatre Company's production of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street runs through June 1 at the Slate Theater.