Sondheim’s brilliance shines in ‘Sweeney Todd’

Director Robert Kelley, who also directed the company’s 1992 production, has updated the setting from Victorian London to 1940 during the Blitzkrieg. The action takes place in an abandoned factory leading to a subway station, which served as a bomb shelter.

Sweeney Todd (David Studwell) is a barber whom a judge banished to Australia on a trumped up charge 15 years prior. Judge Turpin (Lee Strawn) wanted Sweeney out of the way to seduce his wife.

The story opens 15 years later as Sweeney returns to London to find his wife and daughter. He visits the pie shop of his former landlady, Mrs. Lovett (Tory Ross), who has saved his razors.

Now he can go back to work as a barber. Along the way, he kills the fraudulent Pirelli (Noel Anthony). To dispose of the body, Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett cook up the idea of using it for her meat pies. Sweeney wants to get rid of the judge the same way.

In the meantime, a young sailor, Anthony (Jack Mosbacher), who befriended Sweeney on their voyage to London, falls in love with Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna (Mindy Lym). She is a virtual prisoner as the ward of Judge Turpin, who intends to marry her.

Complications ensue. Not everyone survives.

Director Kelley uses a small cast with most of the characters serving as the chorus.

The production is blessed with outstanding singers who deliver Sondheim’s songs with the appropriate emotions.

Perhaps the most beautiful song is the haunting “Johanna,” sung by Mosbacher as Anthony after he hears Lym singing Johanna’s “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” in a high, lilting soprano.

Ross as Mrs. Lovett has the show’s most amusing songs: “The Worst Pies in London,” “A Little Priest” (sung with Sweeney) and “By the Sea.” Ross has terrific comic timing and sings well.

Playing Tobias Ragg, who becomes Mrs. Lovett’s assistant, Spencer Kiely sings the sweet “Not While I’m Around” to and with Mrs. Lovett.

Then there’s the show’s anthem, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” sung by the company at the beginning and several times thereafter.

Besides those already named, other characters are played by Mia Fryvecind Gimenez as the Beggar Woman and Martin Rojas Dietrich as Beadle Bamford, Judge Turpin’s sidekick.

Although Studwell makes a menacing Sweeney, he sometimes strays slightly off pitch, as in “My Friends” and “Epiphany.”

Taken as a whole, though, this is an outstanding production. People seeing it for the first time were bowled over on opening night, while those who have seen it several times before found it as stirringly impressive and exciting as ever.

It’s a major landmark in American musical theater.

“Sweeney Todd” will continue at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Castro and Mercy streets, Mountain View, through Nov. 2. For tickets and information call (650) 463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.