Despite having worn a beard for much of his career as a recording artist, Josh Groban knows his way around a razor. Or at least he has learned fast. In Thomas Kail’s sumptuous Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical, Groban plays the barber of the title. It’s a counterintuitive choice in that his charm resides in the curious contrast between his sweet, menschy face and a rich, rumbling baritone, as dark as venous blood. And in truth, he never goes as dark as the role requires. Sweeney is among the great villains and antiheroes the musical stage has produced. Groban seldom reveals the depths of rage, trauma and mania that make a monster of this man. It’s a close-shave approach to the role: clean and precise, it doesn’t pierce the surface.
If Groban’s partial view performance is a tear in the barber’s apron of the revival, it also shows how durable that apron is. Based on a made-up Victorian shocker, it tells the tale of a homicidal stylist and the widow who upcycles today’s victims into tomorrow’s lunch. Haunting, horrible and thrilling, the show harmonizes its penny dreadful origins with a dense, operatic score that elevates the grand guignol into something grander and more terrifying, with beauty and horror and screeching comedy fighting it out from one song to the next. It’s a nightmare of a show and in some ways a dream, pushing at the boundaries of what a musical might say and do and be.
Sweeney, however, has rarely been a crowd-pleaser. Previous productions have struggled to recoup. But at a recent preview, the audience greeted the opening notes with the demented enthusiasm of the crowd at a boy band concert. Were these Groban fans? Or Sondheim stans? Or Kail supporters who had followed him across the street from Hamilton? This is a show that confirms the worst suspicions of human nature and leaves most of the dramatis personae to bleed out. But the crowd? It was amped. And the nearly three hours that followed largely rewarded this curtain-opening ardor.
The set, by Mimi Lien, working at this immense scale, is flexible and imposing, a brick and metal evocation of an unsavory docklands milieu, illuminated by Natasha Katz’s sculptural beams. Stephen Hoggett’s expressionist choreography is a shrewd corruption of everyday movement. What an effort it takes just to stand upright in a world like this, the dance suggests. No one can manage it. This may make the revival seem severe. But it isn’t, particularly when the orchestra, 26 players strong, starts up. There had been some complaints early on about a muddiness to the music, some imprecision in the sound mix. From the middle of the orchestra, though, it sounded full and often glorious. Bloody, bold and opulent, the revival spares neither expense nor blushes.
If Groban comes across as flat, his voice, which thrums with menace, embraces every given note. As Mrs Lovett, Annaleigh Ashford, one of Broadway’s great comedians, makes soiled hay of every joke and rhyme. She doesn’t commit herself to the character’s darkness as some Lovetts do (she’s having too much fun), but she emphasizes the unrequited desire for Sweeney, which gives the absurdity the occasional rotgut kick of real feeling. Jordan Fisher is a capable Anthony, Ruthie Ann Miles a poignant beggar woman, and Maria Bilbao, in an astonishing Broadway debut, a febrile Johanna. As Tobias, the tormented errand boy, Gaten Matarazzo shows he’ll be just fine once Stranger Things, the show on which he co-stars, fades from queues.
Take just a step back – to the rear balcony, say – and it might seem funny to see all of this timbre and largesse deployed for a story of barbarous barbering and related cannibalism. But once that last note sounds, you’ll likely be moved to do what the rest of frenzied crowd does: lift your hands high. And applaud.
