This no-frills 'Todd' takes a little off the sides

Director John Doyle's lean, mean "Sweeney Todd" flew into the State Theatre Tuesday night, a stark contrast to the lavish original staging and positively antiseptic compared to the current movie version. Doyle's concept presents a taut chamber drama that owes a debt to Bertolt Brecht's epic theater -- that is, the production acknowledges its artifice and we are given something between a concert and full staging.

It's easy to relish this "Todd" for its ambition -- as close to high art as you will find in musical theater. Ten actors double as musicians on a rough-hewn wood set that provides an ambiguous yet claustrophobic sense of place. Their spare performance of Stephen Sondheim's darkly buoyant score (yes, a delicious contradiction) is built of strings, brass, keyboards, reeds and accordion.

Largely decked in black and white, this tawdry cadre plunges into the tale of a barber who suffered twin injustices many years prior and has returned to London bent on revenge. Edmund Bagnell, who portrays the street lad, Tobias, perhaps best expresses the show's actor-singer requirement, with a creepy, gimpy character and a hot, nimble fiddle.

That's not to say Broadway veteran Judy Kaye is some slouch. Her Mrs. Lovett, the desperately deluded meat-pie merchant who falls for Mr. Todd, feels like the richest character. The glint in her eye betrays a mean and devilish mind, a history and intent that seem absent from some other performers. This internal realization gives her gestures and glances a wicked insouciance. Her musical contributions, though, are confined to percussion and a few blasts at humor on the tuba.

David Hess's Todd is more problematic. A big, thumping piece of flesh, he sings with obsessive fury and slashes across the stage. Yet, director Doyle's conceptual approach puts some of Todd's psychology in a straitjacket and Hess -- a fine performer -- struggles with that interior exploration.

For all our appreciation of this artistic accomplishment, the sheer audacity of Doyle's theatricality, this "Sweeney Todd" is oddly bloodless. And it's more than the absence of gooey, colored syrup (Todd's throat slices are symbolized by a shrieking whistle and a bath of red light). Rather, when a piece is disassembled in this way, the connective tissue between characters can get lost. The young love interests -- played by Benjamin Magnuson and Lauren Molina -- produce no sparks in a staging that has actors performing out to the audience instead of into each other's hearts.

Only in the conclusion does Doyle's production fully grip the viscera with its macabre and bizarre reality. Up until then, we admire more than feel the tale of "Sweeney Todd."

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299