The Ignite Theatre company’s production of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” does its best to be genuinely eerie, unnerving and just plain scary.
Director Bernie Cardell draws on a range of effects and approaches to bring Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s signature tale of a psychopathic barber bent on vengeance to life. From the ear-splitting siren that sounds before any actor takes the stage, to the show’s copious amounts of stage blood, the production continually pushes for a visceral and genuine reaction from the audience.
As Cardell notes in the program, the effort is, in many ways, an experiment, an attempt to “create an evening of suspense without resorting to cheap scares.” The results are mixed. The material poses challenges on every level — the music is among Sondheim’s most dense and challenging, and the story demands continual feats in terms of set design, blocking and special effects.
In their focused efforts to create a rise from the crowd, the Ignite troupe’s success in meeting the show’s challenges is hit or miss. Just as the cast makes key musical moments soar under Midge McMoyer’s orchestral direction, simple matters of set design, blocking and atmosphere fall flat at crucial moments. Those missteps make a big difference in this show, a musical that balances lyricism and gore so delicately.
The show’s titular “demon barber” is a character forged by emotional scars and driven by an obsessive desire for revenge. After his wife is raped by a corrupt judge, Barber Benjamin Barker (Travis Risner) is convicted on trumped up charges and exiled to Australia to serve his sentence. The story kicks off in 1846, 15 years after Barker’s exile. He’s taken an alias, Sweeney Todd, and returned to his native London bent on revenge. His focus is on those who put him in chains, the corrupt Judge Turpin (Shane Delavan) and his crony Beadle Bamford (Owen Niland).
But Todd’s vengeance quickly takes a broader and more gruesome form. After partnering with Mrs. Nellie Lovett (Boni McIntyre), the matron of a struggling meat pie business who recognizes Todd as Barker, he learns that his wife poisoned herself and that his daughter, Johanna (Sara Closson Metz) is the ward of the twisted Judge Turpin. Todd’s bloodlust quickly finds a dangerous channel. He takes up the razors of his old trade and sets up a barber shop in the space above Lovett’s shop. When an old pupil Pirelli (Adam Perkes) recognizes his old boss and tries to set up a blackmail scheme, he becomes the first victim of a killer who becomes more and more prodigious.
Todd slits the throats of his customers and sends their corpses downstairs, to be used in Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies. The pair take in the former ward of Pirelli, a young boy named Tobias Ragg (Matthew Gary), who helps the pair deal with the demands of a new and hungry customer base, diners who can’t seem to get enough of the new recipe. With the body count rising, Todd becomes more and more obsessed with getting Turpin and Bamford in his deadly chair, even as he seeks a way to rescue his daughter from the judge’s clutches.
The gruesome story finds life in one of Sondheim’s most complex and stunning scores, music marked by constant counterpoint and angular harmonies. Happily, the Ignite troupe consistently meets the considerable challenges of the music. He forgoes an English accent, but Travis Risner brings a moving force and emotionalism to the vocal solos of the lead role. Risner and McIntyre boast a creepy chemistry in their duos as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, and Gary meets the considerable musical demands of his role as Ragg with clarity and consistency. As Johanna, Sara Closson Metz is one of the musical standouts of the show, delivering a powerful solo during “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” that is a clear highlight.
The show is more than its music, however, and it’s in creating some of the more tense moments that the production can feel a bit sloppy. Some of the accents don’t feel consistent; missed lighting and staging cues marked the opening weekend performance; the timing during some key scenes in the first act felt sluggish. It made some of the material’s more terrifying moments much less terrifying.
Happily, a set design by Jeff Jesmer resolved some of those problems during the second act. After Sweeney Todd lured his victims to his chair and slit their throats during the tender tune “Johanna,” he pulled a lever and they disappeared down a well- placed chute with speed. It was a moment when the tricky combination of violence and lyricism worked to full effect, a moment that left a chilling imprint. While all elements of the show’s “experiment in terror” didn’t always work, the production did hit its stride at key moments.
“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
Runs through Nov. 11, the Aurora Fox theater, 9900 E. Colfax Ave.
Tickets start at $25.
Information and showtimes: 720-362-2697 or lucentperformingarts.org.
TWO AND HALF STARS OUT OF FOUR
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707