By Teresa Annas
NORFOLK
Ron Daniels looked almost parental last week as he worked through some scenes from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.”
The director stood in Virginia Opera’s rehearsal hall, low-key and inconspicuous in his black slacks and shirt, hands in pants pockets, carriage erect, eyes locked on the playing field.
Stephen Powell stars as Sweeney Todd, and Phyllis Pancella plays Mrs. Lovett, the baker of peculiar pies. “Sweeney Todd” opens the Virginia Opera’s 40th season on Friday. Lucid Frame Productions | Courtesy of Virginia Opera
It’s Daniels’ first time directing for the company, and also the first time the Norfolk-based, statewide nonprofit has presented the masterful “dark operetta” about “the demon barber of Fleet Street.” “Sweeney Todd” opens Virginia Opera’s 40th anniversary season on Friday.
Daniels was born and raised in Brazil, and started his theater career there, but has English blood. In his early 20s he moved to England and acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company before becoming a prominent director.
Through the afternoon rehearsal, he never lost his cool. His quietly delivered comments were sprinkled with a polite litany of “thank you, thank you” and “good, good” and “could you do me a favor? Could you….”
As genteel as he seemed, Daniels watched over a panorama of unutterable atrocities.
In “Sweeney Todd,” the title barber gets revenge by murdering not only the man who did him wrong in three different ways, but every other person in his path.
Overhearing the barber’s lethal plans, a baker, the comic Mrs. Lovett, sees a source of much-needed meat for her pies. The two join forces in a killing spree that’s as smooth as a close shave.
At the rehearsal, Daniels looked confident as he eyed the scenes, checking for timing and line interpretation and the choreographed movement of actors that is called blocking. He exhibited no hesitancy in clarifying the many moments that, when smartly finessed, can make a show come to life onstage.
Daniels knows the show so well – here comes the surprise plot twist – because he co-authored the play that Sondheim saw that led the celebrated composer to write “Sweeney Todd.”
The opportunity to write a play based on the centuries-old tale of a vengeful barber came soon after Daniels switched from acting to directing, around 1969 or 1970.
He was in his mid-20s and had recently returned to work at the Victoria Theatre Company in Stoke-on-Trent, southwest of Liverpool in England. (The company, noted for adventurous treatment of classics and new scripts, is now called the New Vic Theatre and has relocated nearby to Newcastle-under-Lyme.)
Daniels said he mentioned he would like to direct a Victorian melodrama comparable to one he had previously enjoyed acting in. The artistic director suggested that he find one and do it.
Rooting around, he unearthed what was called a “penny dreadful” about a murderous barber called Sweeney Todd. These were 19th-century British tales crafted as sensational, often violent serials; each part sold for a penny.
Speaking on a break between rehearsals, Daniels recalled enlisting an actor to help him turn the serial into a non-musical play. That was Christopher Bond, who had just played the title role in Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” directed by Daniels.
The director said that their transformation of the story into a play entailed “justifying” the characters’ behavior. “We found motivations for it. We found a more psychological anchor.”
They analyzed the action and filled in the blanks. “Why was Sweeney Todd sent away? What happened when he was sent away? What happened to the judge?”
In Daniels’ play, Todd is jailed in Australia on a trumped-up charge, so the judge could get his hands on Todd’s pretty wife. When Todd returns, he learns that his wife was raped by the judge, and she later poisoned herself and died. He also discovers that the dirty old judge plans to marry his daughter, who became his ward but had been housed in an asylum.
The creators wanted “everything rooted in reality,” which was not true of the penny dreadful, he said.
Daniels had never written a script, but he was “very used to putting plays together and working with new writers.” Together, they shaped the story and established reasons why all the characters behave as they do. And they created moments, such as a self-flagellation scene with the perverted judge.
Then Bond wrote the dialogue, and for that his name alone is on the script, Daniels said. Daniels directed that first production, which he said was “well received.”
Daniels was then and remains immersed in Shakespeare and the classics. “Sweeney Todd” is similar to the Bard, he said, in that “it continually spins on an emotional dime,” moving from comic to serious to tragic and back again.
“It’s not as good as ‘Hamlet,’ but it’s full-blooded. The stakes are very high, and that’s always good for a story.”
Because Bond owned the rights to the play, Daniels said he does not know how often or where the show got produced. But somewhere along the line, Sondheim saw it, and something clicked for him.
Certainly, Sondheim, who acquired the rights to the play, saw a story he could set to music. In 1979 he premiered a show that would cause debate: Was it a musical? An opera? Opera bouffe?
In Sondheim’s book “Finishing the Hat,” he wrote that no category suited him. “Dark operetta is the closest I can come, but that’s as much a misnomer as any of the others. What ‘Sweeney Todd’ really is is a movie for the stage.”
Nonetheless, Adam Turner, Virginia Opera’s principal conductor and artistic adviser, who will conduct, said he has “arrived at the conclusion that it is full-blown opera, without a doubt.”
He said it’s an extremely complex score that demands trained singers “with athletic vocal abilities, enormous range and a lot of rich colors and depth. It’s very difficult music.”
The play’s plot and psychological underpinnings are mirrored in Sondheim’s version, Daniels said.
Turner read the play over the summer. “It resembles the Sondheim score incredibly. The story and the lyrics are very close,” Turner said.
“An opera composer’s job is to expand on that. And so it’s expanded, obviously, and very cleverly captured.”
Turner said the story makes him think of the TV show “Breaking Bad.” Its focal point, chemistry teacher-turned-drug dealer Walter White, like Sweeney Todd, is an antihero, a complex character with both good and bad traits. “I think we all have inner demons we wrestle with,” Turner said.
Daniels never saw “Sweeney Todd” on stage or in film before directing it for the first time in 2012 for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, a job he took in part “for nostalgia reasons,” he said.
For Virginia Opera, he is using the same costumes and sets, but has a mostly new cast.
He said he doesn’t view other directors’ versions because he doesn’t want to be influenced. To prepare, he listened to the score on a CD.
“It’s a story of a man who has suffered a great injustice, and he feels impotent and enraged, and he lashes out at the world,” he said.
“The reason it has survived is not because of the story. I think it’s all to do with the music. His genius is what has lifted the play, absolutely. Sondheim’s musical genius.”
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If you go
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What: Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” produced by Virginia Opera
Where: Harrison Opera House, 160 E. Virginia Beach Blvd., Norfolk
When: Opens 8 p.m. Friday; more shows at 2:30 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday Cost: $19 to $99
More info: 623-1223 or 866-673-7282, www.vaopera.org
Teresa Annas, 757-446-2485,teresa.annas@pilotonline.com