| Tuesday, September 18, 2007 |
| Did you come here for a pie, sir? |
Everyone has their quirky little anxieties & phobias. Indiana Jones may have been a fictional character, but didn't his fear of snakes make him seem more real? There's a lady in our building who is afraid of dogs, and gasps in fright whenever she sees Hobie. Howie Mandel, the host of "Deal or No Deal," is famously mysophobic.
According to Wikipedia, "Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age." That is certainly true with my phobia, which is too obscure for The Phobia List. I have a real hang-up about cannibalism. Now, I realize that most people don't find it a pleasant topic, but it seems to be a subject of cultural fascination; The Encyclopedia of Cannibal Movies lists an astonishing 377 films that involve flesh-eating, from the highbrow ("The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover") to the ultra low-budget (2003's "Cannibal Hillbillies"). I plan to avoid them all. Next year's Left Coast Crime mystery convention has named its banquet after Alferd Packer.
Anyway, I know exactly why cannibalism terrifies me. When I was 9 or 10, I had a couple of gerbils. They had babies -- tiny little pink ones -- and I guess there wasn't enough room for a family in the Habitrail, because they ate them. Apparently this isn't uncommon gerbil behavior, but I literally had nightmares about it for months afterward.
Therefore, when I heard that the opening play of ACT's new season would be "Sweeney Todd," I was nervous. It's about a barber who kills people -- that part is OK; I do read a lot of mysteries, after all -- but then his landlady takes the bodies and makes them into meat pies. Mega-yuck. Joe, a big Sondheim fan, has seen the musical several times, but I've never gone along because of, well, you know. Still, I was determined to get through this because I haven't missed an ACT play in years, and it was supposed to be such a great production, with most of the cast coming straight from Broadway.
Here is the good news: director John Doyle's interpretation of "Sweeney" is so stylized that even cannibal-phobes have nothing to fear. In the original staging, Sweeney's victims were swept from a trick barber chair down a chute to be made into meat pies. Doyle dispenses with the chair altogether; once Sweeney slits a throat, the dead person puts on a blood-stained lab coat and then rejoins the ensemble. That's necessary, since this ultra-sparse staging doesn't have an orchestra; the company members play all the instruments, and all 10 are onstage throughout the show. When Mrs. Lovett offers Sweeney a meat pie, she gives him an empty plate, and he mimes eating it.
The music, of course, is excellent, particularly the catchy "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" and even "A Little Priest," the most cannibal-specific song -- darn it, the wordplay is just so clever. I particularly enjoyed Tony winner Judy Kaye as tuba-playing Mrs. Lovett; she does the voice of Kinsey Millhone for the Sue Grafton audiobooks, so she's nothing if not versatile. David Hess as Sweeney had a slightly ragged voice, but his performance didn't suffer since it seemed to complement the character's desperation.
"Sweeney" will be everywhere this Christmas, as Tim Burton is directing a film based upon the musical, with Johnny Depp in the title role. Somehow, I doubt the movie version will be as un-gory as Doyle's production, so I'll most assuredly give it a miss. But at least I can finally hold my head up and say that I endured, and even enjoyed, the play. |
posted by 125records @ 10:17 AM  |
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| 5 Comments: |
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Johnny Depp? I'm not a huge musical fan at all - but I do like Sweeney Todd, and I'm most familiar with the original cast recording, with Len Cariou as Sweeney. Depp's a fine actor, actually - but he doesn't seem as if he'd have the gravitas to do Sweeney. Depp always seems only half of this world; to me you need someone very earthbound and weighty. No idea who: my mental list of "movie actors with baritone vocals and powerful physical presence" is infinitely short (i.e., no one I can think of - lack of knowledge here). But I'll probably want to see it anyway. Actually I hope they back off on the gore: the gore isn't really the point, and I tend to think excessive gore is a chief aspect of what I'm calling "the fallacy of realism" in movies. I don't think bringing what you see in movies closer and closer to reality necessarily makes those things more powerful; sometimes it just makes them more distracting and awkward - because movies aren't life, they're movies.
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No idea who: my mental list of "movie actors with baritone vocals and powerful physical presence" is infinitely short
Russell Crowe would be an interesting choice--and he can sing, kinda.
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You know, I can see that. When/where did Crowe sing?
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I've already heard internet rumors that the film version is a little on the graphic side. We are talking Tim Burton here.
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Johnny Depp? I'm not a huge musical fan at all - but I do like Sweeney Todd, and I'm most familiar with the original cast recording, with Len Cariou as Sweeney. Depp's a fine actor, actually - but he doesn't seem as if he'd have the gravitas to do Sweeney. Depp always seems only half of this world; to me you need someone very earthbound and weighty. No idea who: my mental list of "movie actors with baritone vocals and powerful physical presence" is infinitely short (i.e., no one I can think of - lack of knowledge here). But I'll probably want to see it anyway. Actually I hope they back off on the gore: the gore isn't really the point, and I tend to think excessive gore is a chief aspect of what I'm calling "the fallacy of realism" in movies. I don't think bringing what you see in movies closer and closer to reality necessarily makes those things more powerful; sometimes it just makes them more distracting and awkward - because movies aren't life, they're movies.