Review: Jennifer Nettles’s Giulia Is a Female Empowerment Sweeney Todd

A barber slits his customers’ throats with a straight razor, and his baker accomplice turns their bodies into meat pies. The legend of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet (pause) Street, had existed for more than a century before Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler transformed it into one of the American musical theater’s greatest works. The inspiration for Jennifer Nettles’s Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo is even older, a notorious 17th-century Sicilian serial poisoner said to have murdered 600 men with a brew of her own making. But if Giulia Tofana hopes to achieve anything close to Sweeney Todd’s enduring legacy, Nettles’s debut musical, premiering at PAC NYC, needs considerable refinement to tell her story with clarity and originality.

The story of a vigilante apothecary/abortionist who develops a taste for homicide after poisoning her abusive husband, Giulia is essentially a feminist Sweeney Todd, set in a world where men are drunks, wife-beaters, and serial philanderers, and the only escape from an unhappy marriage is manslaughter because the Church forbids divorce. The city is ruled over by two loathsome antagonists, the Cardinale (Quentin Earl Darrington), who wields the power of the Catholic Church, and the newly elected Governatore (Christopher M. Ramirez), a foppish politician who has his sights set on Giulia’s young daughter, Vitoria (Naomi Serrano).

Giulia (Nettles) and Vitoria live in constant fear of Giulia’s violent husband, Carlo (Matthew Amira). When his abuse becomes too much to handle, Giulia slips him the glowing blue potion she keeps on the top shelf of her shop. Rather than stopping after she dispatches Carlo, Giulia resolves to help other women trapped in similar situations—but the Cardinale and Governatore are onto her.

A musical that’s very obviously in its nascent stages, Giulia has shades Hamilton in sound and musical style, but it’s most reminiscent of the Public Theater version of Shaina Taub’s Suffs: overflowing with ideas that aren’t fully developed. The narrative is too unfocused to communicate the drama of the story effectively, and it’s weighed down by a lack of specificity in characters who really need it.

Bre Jackson brings a compelling presence to La Capitana, a Commedia-style narrator, but Nettles’s book largely abandons the device after each act’s opening number. Didi Romero is delightfully conniving as the Duchessa, whose machinations contribute to Giulia’s downfall, but she and Ramirez’s truly odious Governatore ultimately remain stock villains. Their performances are fun in a silly way (and Nettles gives them entertaining songs that owe a debt to both Lin-Manuel Miranda and Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss), but the mustache-twirling only goes so far when there’s not much beneath it.

Fortunately, Giulia has a far more compelling foe in the Cardinale, a “do as I say, not as I do” man of the cloth who condemns her shop as a home for the devil while seeking her out under cover of darkness for a salve to cure his syphilis. Darrington is terrific, embodying the character’s contradictions with a palpable torment, practically howling his second-act showstopper, appropriately titled “The Wolf.” But if the self-flagellation scene Sondheim wrote for Judge Turpin was arguably too much even for Sweeney Todd, the less experienced Nettles has yet to find a way to convey a similar moment without outlandishness (it succeeds only because of the depth of Darrington’s conviction).

The show hinges on Nettles, and she delivers the kind of performance that invites the audience to drink it up: game, charismatic, and immensely entertaining (there’s one line that she delivers with such impeccable comedic timing that I want to hear it over and over). She attacks her score with conviction, but there’s a sameness to the material she’s written for herself, with one soaring power ballad blurring into the next. They certainly showcase her gifts as both a songwriter and vocalist, but the repetitive musical and lyrical approach begins to wear thin.

The larger issue is with Nettles’s book, which has the bones of a compelling revenge tragedy but neglects some of the most rudimentary storytelling work, like properly introducing the characters and establishing what they want. Similarly, Nettles doesn’t really commit to the perspective we should have on Giulia. Should we love her because she’s righteous in her motivation to take down bad men, or cast aspersions upon her because she’s a murderer? Nettles gestures toward both interpretations without fully exploring them, and the stakes remain undecided. This hampers Serrano’s performance: in one scene, she appears horrified by her mother’s actions; by the end, she’s embraced the path of vengeance. It’s an abrupt shift, rather than a transformation that’s genuinely earned.

Nettles should probably take a few performances off, the way Lin-Manuel Miranda and Shaina Taub did when they starred in their own shows (Hamilton and Suffs, respectively), so she can experience Giulia herself and see what’s working and what’s not. Until she does, everyone’s efforts will be stymied, especially those of director Mary Zimmerman, whose staging often amounts to a series of opening and closing doors. The doors are a compelling device—Daniel Ostling’s deep burgundy set transforms fluidly without ever actually changing—as are Ana Kuzmaníc’s sumptuous costumes, which are embroidered with different poison flowers, but an attractive visual language isn’t the same as cohesive dramatic one.

Right now, Giulia is an intriguing cocktail, but it could stand to be a little pickier about what goes into the potion.