Theater News

Murder, Murder

Blood is everywhere as Sweeney Todd with Hearn and Lansbury is released on DVD and the cast recording of Thrill Me arrives.

Today is the release date of a DVD and a CD of two shows that are similar in some ways but very different in others. One is a modern classic written by a certified genius, with a world-renowned star of stage and screen playing opposite a highly respected Broadway veteran. The other was a tiny Off-Off-Broadway show by a composer with no high-profile credits, featuring two performers whom almost no one has heard of. Yet anybody who’s interested in musical theater will want to own both of these recordings.

The first is the premiere DVD release of the Harold Prince production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn. First broadcast on Showtime in early 1982 and released on VHS not long after that, this performance from the show’s first national tour has been one of the most-requested DVD transfers among musical theater enthusiasts, and it’s not hard to understand why. The disc was well worth the wait.

The most recent video of Sweeney Todd documented the Lonny Price-directed concert staging with Hearn and Patti LuPone. That version, good as it is in many ways, doesn’t fully communicate the greatness of one of Stephen Sondheim’s best musicals. Now we have something better — and, for those of us who missed the original Broadway production, this DVD is indispensable.

Lansbury’s devilish Mrs. Lovett is a remarkable creation — funny, nurturing, sweet, but also demonic in her gleeful baking of Sweeney Todd’s victims into meat pies. Hearn, who replaced original star Len Cariou during the Broadway run, sings superbly and offers a broad yet compellingly frightening portrayal of the title character. Joining them are Edmund Lyndeck and Ken Jennings, recreating their original roles of Judge Turpin and Tobias Ragg to wonderful effect. Cris Groenendaal and Betsy Joslyn were also in the original Broadway company and they eventually graduated to the roles of the young lovers Anthony and Johanna, which they play here. Groenendaal is very good but Joslyn is perhaps the recording’s most problematic performer. Her acting and singing are patchy: She’s frightening (for the wrong reasons!) when singing “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” but she’s much better in the “Kiss Me”/”Ladies in Their Sensitivities” sequence. Sara Woods (the Beggar Woman), Calvin Remsberg (the Beadle), and Sal Mistretta (Pirelli) are all fine in their roles.

Even more impressive than the almost impeccable casting of the production is Prince’s direction. If you saw Sweeney Todd recently at the New York City Opera, you have an idea of the staging you’ll see in the video, but everything’s crisper and sharper here. The musical tempi are hot, and Eugene Lee’s sets — while still considerably scaled down from his Broadway originals — are more impressive. Prince’s touch is present in every element of the show. The cameras capture every scene beautifully (Terry Hughes, who directed the show for television, did his job very well), and any post-performance dubbing of the singing is very difficult to detect.

It’s a bit disheartening that there are no special features on the DVD. Beyond that, the sound is not exactly perfect; my memory may be hazy but I recall that audience laughter and applause were more audibly a part of the experience than they are here. Still, the transfer is beautiful, with a crisp, clean picture and enough chapter markings to play any or all of your favorite scenes with ease. This DVD is a must for any musical theater lover’s library.

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You’ve never heard of Stephen Dolginoff’s Thrill Me? That’s not very surprising: The show ran for only a few weeks at the Midtown International Theatre Festival in July and early August 2003, and it was sold out almost before performances began. It was an unforgettable evening of theater, a taut chamber-musical character study unlike almost any other show I’ve ever seen.

Although it deals with two murderers in 1920s Chicago, Thrill Me could not be more different from the Kander and Ebb musical that we all know and love. Dolginoff didn’t attempt to replicate Chicago‘s showbiz-like method of dealing with dark matters; rather, he tackled the story straight on and met the characters on their own creepy turf. Retelling the tale of “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who murdered a young boy, Thrill Me offered little release for its theater audience: no buttons at the ends of songs, very few breaks between those songs, and almost no jokes. This made the show a suffocating, spine-tingling experience.

That experience would have been difficult to replicate on the CD, so Dolginoff and his company didn’t even try. There are 15 tracks here, adding up to a running time of 37 minutes; the actual show ran more than twice as long. But if the handful of missing songs and the large amount of missing dialogue are unfortunate casualities, what did make it to the disc nicely represents Dolginoff’s perfectly integrated score.

The show’s two actor-singers, Christopher Totten and Matthew S. Morris, have a definite chemistry with each other — and they sound even better on the CD than they did in the theater. Totten gets the lion’s share of the material and handles it very well, from the soul-searching “Way Too Far” to his provocative performance of the title song. (Dolginoff depicts the pair as ever-sparring, co-dependent lovers; Loeb, played by Morris, kills for the thrill of it, while Leopold, played by Totten, kills for the thrill of Loeb.) It’s fun to listen to Totten’s tracks in succession and hear how he slowly moves from unwitting victim to power player. Although Morris doesn’t have quite as much to do, he imbues Loeb with just the right sort of desperate arrogance and he scores with the show’s creepiest, most memorable entry: “Roadster,” in which Loeb uses the appeal of a car to lure his victim into his clutches. When Leopold and Loeb come together — well, just try listening to “Superior” or to the show’s climactic number, “Life Plus 99 Years,” without getting the chills.

A concept recording of Thrill Me was released in the late ’90s, starring two different actors and featuring a synthesized orchestra. The new cast album has only piano accompaniment, provided by Gabriel Kahane, but that’s more than enough to communicate the dark, unusual nature of Thrill Me. The disc represents Dolginoff’s final version of the score and it’s a highly collectible item.