By Roy Proctor Special correspondent
So who says Broadway is Broadway and opera is opera and never the twain should meet?
Obviously someone who has never looked and listened long and hard at Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” a powerhouse rendering of which is launching Virginia Opera’s 2014-15 Richmond season this weekend in the Carpenter Theatre at Richmond CenterStage.
Sure, “Sweeney Todd” has spoken interludes, but so do “Carmen” and any number of other masterworks in the universally acknowledged operatic repertoire.
In every other respect — huge themes, larger-than-life characters, goads to overpowering emotion, vocally challenging music — “Sweeney Todd,” which originated on commercial Broadway in 1979, is as grandly operatic as opera ever gets.
No wonder “Sweeney Todd” is becoming a staple in opera houses around the world.
So much is going for Virginia Opera’s “Sweeney Todd” vocally, instrumentally and acting-wise that it’s not curmudgeonly to cite up-front the glaring flaw in this production that originated two years ago at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
“Sweeney Todd,” as you’ll recall from its numerous stage, film and television revivals, involves a London barber who is unjustly sentenced to a penal colony by a wicked judge. After disposing of the wife, the judge takes the barber’s beautiful daughter Johanna as his ward.
The barber, who assumes the name Sweeney Todd to hide his identity, returns to London seeking revenge.
He teams up with the sexy, murder-minded Mrs. Lovett, whose meat pies are universally condemned as the worst in London.
Now what if Sweeney were to slit the throats of his clients as they sit in his barber’s chair, then dispatch the corpses through a trapdoor into the bake shop below, where Mrs. Lovett can bake them into the best meat pies in London?
It’s all quite gruesome, to be sure, but enormous fun if the set is ingeniously designed.
The original 1979 Broadway production situated the barbershop on a level above the bakery, which turned the dispatching of those bodies into a heart-stopping delight.
So what happened when Richmond’s Barksdale Theatre staged “Sweeney Todd” in 1982 in its low-ceiled house at Hanover Tavern? To immense audience delight, director Randy Strawderman and company devised a meat hook-and-pulley system guaranteed to get those corpses where they needed to go.
Sad to say, director Ron Daniels and company are thrown for a loss at the Carpenter Theatre. Exactly how the victims reach Mrs. Lovett after their throats are slit is a confusing mystery. And that’s a shame because the stark scenery and costumes and oh-so-dramatic lighting could hardly be more apt.
Baritone Stephen Powell and mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella share a chemistry as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett. Andre Chiang as Anthony, Amanda Opuszynski as Johanna and Jake Gardner as Judge Turpin are other standouts in the cast.
Adam Turner, Virginia Opera’s new principal conductor, draws all the Industrial Revolution screeches anyone could want out of his on-target Virginia Symphony-derived pit orchestra.
Friday’s opening-nighters exploded in cheers at the final fade-out. Don’t be surprised if you do, too.