The University of Georgia Department of Theater and Film Studies will open Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on April 14 at 8 p.m. on the main stage theatre in the Fine Arts Building. This dark musical tells the tale of Sweeney Todd, a wrongfully exiled barber who returns to London to exact his revenge on the unfortunate souls who dare to come in for a shave. With the help of Mrs. Lovett, a struggling baker, he finds solutions to his problems in a meat pie.
The music of Sweeney Todd is composed by Stephen Sondheim, who also composed the wildly popular musical, Into the Woods. The script is written by Patrick Quentin. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has won eight Tony’s since its opening on Broadway in 1979. A show as prestigious and as beloved as this one could create a challenge for any director to produce an original and fresh take on the bloody classic. George Contini, the UGA director of Sweeney Todd, thinks that playing to a specific audience will differentiate his version from any of its previous performances.
“Knowing that this was primarily a college age audience, I wanted to capitalize on young people’s love of horror and thriller movies and gory stuff like Walking Dead,” he says. “In doing research on the Penny Dreadful papers in which the original story appeared in the 1800s, I discovered that those stories were meant to appeal to 14- to 18-year-old young men who wanted cheap and gory thrills.”
Contini further researched cannibalism on stage and in literature and thought about how Sweeney’s revenge made him literally eat away at himself in despair. “That idea of inverting upon oneself made me think of M.C. Escher drawings in which the worlds seem to be folding in on one another,” he says. “I thought that was a great image for Sweeney’s state of mind.” Contini’s vision of a classic horror film can be seen in the performance, which features fog, horror screams and lots of blood.
Isaiah Fenken, a second year vocal performance master’s student, will play Sweeney Todd. Accustomed to performing in operas, Fenken says that the most difficult part of performing is “getting into the character.” “The characters [in opera] are a bit more fantastic,” explains Fenken. “So you get to approach it from less of a real angle, but I think one of the goals…is finding the real human elements, not just blood and gore. So in order to have a real arch I had to figure out how Sweeney went from being a normal guy to being who he was. I’ve had to invest a lot more in this character than I had to in the past.”
Contini thinks that having both music and theatre majors in the production of Sweeney Todd is “terrific.” “They all recognized the huge task before us and worked so hard and with such commitment,” he says. “Watching them learn from each other the varied types of processes people used in preparing for the show was really exciting. You could see the music majors watch the actors and be thinking ‘oh…look how they approached playing an objective in that scene’ and you could see the theatre majors listen to the music majors sing and be like ‘wow…that’s discipline’.
One thing Contini hopes the audience will take away from the show is “a Pouch meat pie.” The musical has paired with Pouch, a local meat pie shop in downtown Athens, to promote the show. Ali Olhausen, the assistant director and dramaturg of Sweeney Todd, had the original idea to partner with the restaurant. “Pouch has a monthly specialty pie,” Olhausen said. “They were originally just going to make one specialty pie for Sweeney, but they got so excited they created five!” The Sweeney themed pies include the Piety pie, Mrs. Lovett’s Signature Steak pie, the General pie, The One that Got Away and the Kate and Sydney Pie. “They’re all really good pies. They are better than [Pouch’s] regular pies and their regular pies are great,” Olhausen gushed. “When you buy a Sweeney Todd pie, you get a voucher for a discount on your tickets to see Sweeney Todd, and once the show opens, if you take your ticket from the show to POUCH you can get a discount on your pies.”
Pouch and the musical are also collaborating on a drawing. “If you take a picture with your Sweeney pie and post it to social media with the hashtag #sweeneyuga, you will be entered into a drawing for very special prizes,” Olhausen says? Participants can be entered more than once by posting their pictures to multiple social media platforms. The actual drawing will take place on April 18. The special Sweeney Todd pies will also be sold in the lobby of the theatre during the run of the shows.
The meat pies aren’t the only delicious part of this show. “[Sweeney Todd] is a rare treat where the design, actors, music, all came together in a beautiful focused whole,” says Contini. “I hope the audience recognizes the extremely superior skills and talents of all the people involved in making this production. I hope they leave having entered a dark and weird theatrical world for a few hours and yet find that this darkness and weirdness radiates with an odd beauty that both entices and repulses them. And of course, I want them to hear this amazing score sung by a top notch cast.” Fenken, with similar ideas, hopes the audience will realize that “Sweeney Todd can be anybody…Anybody when put in an extreme situation and is pushed to their limits could become something horrific.”
Sweeney Todd will run for two weeks from April 14 to 24. Purchase tickets at the box office in the Tate Student Center or order them online at http://pac.uga.edu/ .