Ever more frequently, opera audiences are getting to “attend the tale of Sweeney Todd”. Welsh National Opera is the fourth British company to tackle Sondheim’s 1979 Grand Guignol thriller, after the Royal Opera (a disastrous staging whose revival Sondheim is said to have forbidden), Opera North and, most recently, English National Opera; ENO’s semi-staging, starring Bryn Terfel as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Emma Thompson as his mouthy accomplice, Mrs Lovett, brought in some badly needed greenies earlier this year.
Whether musicals are set to be a panacea for our cash-strapped opera troupes remains to be seen. WNO is following Opera North’s well-established forays into what many think should be commercial theatre territory here, but Sondheim’s musical is now so settled in the international opera repertoire that it almost counts as one. Certainly, David McVicar’s Opera North staging, unamplified during its first series of performances in 2002, made it seem more operatic than ever, as mainstream as, say, Verdi’s Rigoletto.
James Brining’s staging, a development of his West Yorkshire Playhouse production two years ago, is the first I have seen that dispenses with the Victorian setting, and in doing so brings Sweeney Todd into the lifetime of many of today’s audience. The costumes, props and furnishings suggested late 1970s, although Brining’s decision to run the show as if it were being performed by inmates of a lunatic asylum — yes, that old chestnut! — was all the rage in opera productions circa 1980. I suppose it’s all very appropriate for the Thatcherite revival we seem to be experiencing now.
The grungy asylum setting — Sweeney sets up his barbershop in an abandoned shipping container — suggests pre-development London Docklands, rather than Fleet Street, but it lends an atmosphere of decay and danger to the piece. It’s not an especially gory staging — Mrs L appears to manufacture her pies without ever touching any meat — but there’s menace in the air throughout. Like the Royal Opera House, and even Drury Lane, where the original West End production was staged, the Wales Millennium Centre is too large for the piece and, even with amplification, the sung words are not always clear (the decision not to offer surtitles backfires here); but Brining gets good performances from his performers.
Janis Kelly certainly isn’t the first opera singer to succeed with Mrs Lovett, but she’s the first in my experience not to sound anything like an opera singer. She’s one of the most creative artists in the business, a true theatrical chameleon, with plenty of rasp to her voice and a deft way with words to reveal the black wit of “Priest”. One of the joys of the staging is her appearance, after the success of the pie enterprise, as a ringer for Dick Emery’s peroxide drag persona, Mandy (readers of my age might remember her catchphrase, “Ooh, you are awful, but I like you”), which Kelly carries off with delicious aplomb.
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The German bass-baritone David Arnsperger can’t quite do an authentic cockney accent, but he brings Sweeney closer to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck — he is, quite intentionally, a serious nutter in this staging, rather than a homicidal showman — than any other I have seen. Among the smaller roles, Paul Charles Clarke is flamboyant as the rival coiffeur, Pirelli, Steven Page — McVicar’s Sweeney — makes a dourly dislikeable Judge Turpin, while the youthful parts are brilliantly taken by George Ure (Tobias), Soraya Mafi (Johanna) and Jamie Muscato (Anthony). James Holmes gets taut, punchy, idiomatic playing from the company’s orchestra. Not a classic Sweeney Todd, perhaps, but worth catching on tour, especially for Kelly’s collectible Mrs L.
English Touring Opera is now on the road for a small-scale autumn tour comprising three far from small-scale French operas: Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Massenet’s Werther and Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. These are all pieces that can benefit from intimate presentation, but of the two I’ve seen, only Debussy’s masterpiece made for a gripping evening in the theatre.
James Conway’s simple staging, in an atmospheric, adaptable set by Oliver Townsend, cuts the crucial “Grotto” scene, but it bizarrely includes the passage in which the boy Yniold counts sheep. Otherwise, this abridged version jettisons the pretentiousness of Maeterlinck’s cod-medieval drama, opting for an early-20th-century setting in which the dysfunctional House of Allemonde resembles Poe’s creepy House of Usher. Under Jonathan Berman’s musical direction, ETO has assembled a superb cast, led by the youthful Jonathan McGovern and Susanna Hurrell in the title roles, with Stephan Loges as a darkly brooding Golaud and Michael Druiett as a sonorous Arkel with more than a grandfatherly interest in Mélisande.
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The Tales of Hoffmann is difficult enough for the best-endowed theatres, but ETO makes a mess of it in James Bonas’s awkwardly blocked staging. It is given a German silent-movie framework that only a small coterie of film buffs might spot and relish. It’s no surprise that Hoffmann’s nemesis is a Nosferatu lookalike, but Warwick Fyfe’s singing is so coarse, and his acting so hammy, that it unbalances the principal casting of Sam Furness’s passionate, slightly overstretched Hoffmann and Ilona Domnich’s heroines. She is a puppeteer rather than a puppet in a clunkily staged Olympia Act, entirely devoid of humour, but she sings the other roles well.