SWEENEY TODD   Role: Tobias Ragg   Production Info: Feb. 20 - Apr. 11, ’04 @ Center Stage (MD) Director: Irene Lewis Choreographer: Willie Rosario Musical Director: Milton Granger

Playing the role of Tobias in Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller Sweeney Todd was a dream come true. Tenors don’t often get the most interesting roles in musical theatre, but this is one plum part. Homicide, love, lust, corruption and cannibalism are all covered in this masterwork about London barber Benjamin Barker and his quest for revenge, and young Toby gets to run the gamut (including delivering the final death blow while going mad...how can you beat that???). This particular production of Sweeney Todd, with its metallic sharp-edged set and “crime-scene”-painted floor, was a departure from the expected, but most audience members enjoyed this deconstructionist re-envisioning of a Sondheim classic.     Click on this link to visit the Center Stage website.

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The Men of London: Steven F. Schmidt, Jay Lusteck and Osborn Focht.

The Women of London: Alecia Robinson, Nicole Halmos, Rebecca Robbins and Mary Jo McConnell.

The Boys: James E. Bonilla and Reed Cahill Vicchio.

Green Finch and Linnet Bird: Johanna (Maria Couch) asks her avian friends for advice on how to retain sanity while in the bonds of captivity.

Johanna: Anthony Hope (Aaron Ramey) falls in love with Judge Turpin’s ward, Johanna (Maria Couch).

Wayne W. Pretlow as Beadle Bamford, the Judge’s right-hand-man.

Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir: Tobias (that’s me) tries to drum the crowd into a frenzy over his master Pirelli’s new hair tonic.

Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir: Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett sabotage the well-laid plans of Pirelli and Tobias (RD), and the crowd demands their money refunded.

The Contest: Adolfo Pirelli (Michael Brian Dunn) accepts Sweeney’s challenge and agrees to a shaving/toothpulling duel.

The Contest: Pirelli (Michael Brian Dunn) gives Steven F. Schmidt the royal treatment during the shaving competition.

Johanna: Judge Turpin (Ed Dixon) battles with himself. Which will win: his piety or his pedophilic love for his ward?

After Pirelli (Michael Brian Dunn) attempts to extort money from Sweeney (Joseph Mahowald), Sweeney slits his throat and hides him in the tonsorial chest.

Kiss Me: Anthony Hope (Aaron Ramey) and Johanna (Maria Couch) decide to escape from London and elope.

Epiphany: Sweeney Todd (Joseph Mahowald) decides that no man should be safe from the swift justice his razor can provide.

Epiphany/A Little Priest: Sweeney Todd (Joseph Mahowald) and Mrs. Lovett (Nora Mae Lyng) devise a plan to exterminate the denizens of London AND dispose of the remains.

Johanna: Mrs. Lovett (Nora Mae Lyng) relishes the task of making pies flavored with Essence of Pirelli.

By the Sea: Mrs. Lovett (Nora Mae Lyng) dreams of the new life she’ll have at a seaside resort (with her Sweeney by her side, of course).

Not While I’m Around: Tobias (RD) sees Pirelli’s purse and begins to figure out the secrets of Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor.

Not While I’m Around: Tobias (RD) pledges to protect Mrs. Lovett (Nora Mae Lyng), no matter what the cost.

Rebecca Baxter as the Beggar Woman, a mysterious remnant of Sweeney’s past.

The Ballad of Sweeney Todd: Tobias (RD), with hair whitened by the shock of revelation, begins recanting Sweeney’s story for the audience.

   

THE WASHINGTON POST, 2/26/2004 by Peter Marks   ...DeStefano [as] Toby, the easily duped young man cruelly passed from one criminal’s hands to another’s, breathes fire into his performance. DeStefano, in fact, may be the best Toby I’ve ever seen; he’s vocally secure and emotionally arresting in every scene, and his poignant lullaby, “Not While I’m Around,” is a welcome, affecting palliative in the musical’s nerve-fraying second act.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 3/5/2004 by Jayne Blanchard   Center Stage artistic director Irene Lewis daringly eliminates most of the Victorian era and music hall trappings that dominate many a production of Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol masterpiece, Sweeney Todd. She opts instead for something darker, sleeker and altogether more vampiric. With its queasy yellow fluorescent light casting sickly shadows on the actors’ faces, the stripped-down and mobile set and the slashes of scarlet and yellow paint splashing the floors and walls of the Head Theater, Miss Lewis’ Sweeney has a Goth-punk edge that owes as much to The Cure as it does to Bertolt Brecht. The emphasis on blood and sex and gnawing need puts you pleasurably in mind of novelist Anne Rice’s purplest prose. Sondheim purists might squawk, but those with open minds are in for a show that puts over the gorgeous material in electrifying and prickly ways.   ...Desire wins out when the Judge, egged on by his henchman Beadle (played with twinkling malice by Wayne W. Pretlow), decides to marry Johanna. However, this being a melodrama, there is a handsome young hero on the horizon, the sailor Anthony (Aaron Ramey, possessor of a shimmery tenor voice), who strives to be united with Johanna no matter what.   [Mrs. Lovett’s] thwarted affection is transferred to her helper Toby (the excellent Ron DeStefano), a street urchin who knows nothing but abuse, and the pair form a demented family unit, as expressed in the wrenchingly lovely ballad, “Not While I'm Around.” Miss Lyng [as Lovett] . . . is a Broadway pro, and she adeptly handles the tricky lyrics and the score's myriad swoops and swirls. She gives us a warm and ghoulishly motherly Mrs. Lovett.   Nearly everyone in Sweeney Todd, even the ingenue roles of Johanna and Anthony, are damaged goods, and so they operate out of misshapen emotions. Mr. Sondheim takes these emotions to even higher and more deranged extremes, but no matter how crazed and ghastly things get in the musical, its humanity shines through. The same goes for Miss Lewis’ take on Sweeney Todd. It is a brash, expressionistic approach to Sondheim, but never once do you feel the production is all concept and no heart.

THE BALTIMORE SUN, 2/26/2004 by J. Wynn Rousuck   For many theatergoers, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has never been an easy show to swallow. It is, after all, a musical about cannibalism. One of its trickiest elements is to get audiences to care about the protagonists - a 19th-century barber, who slits the throats of his clients, and his accomplice, a baker who turns the victims into meat pies.   At Center Stage, director Irene Lewis has cast a young, handsome Broadway actor named Joseph Mahowald as Todd. A homicidal barber may not be the most likable character, but in Mahowald’s portrayal, there are glimmers of the decent man Todd was before he was grievously wronged. And when Todd gets a chance - two chances, in fact - to get revenge against the evil judge who wronged him, well, it’s difficult not to root for the razor-wielding barber.   Todd’s co-conspirator, Mrs. Lovett, the baker, is played by another Broadway veteran, Nora Mae Lyng. The actress has mastered her character’s bizarre combination of unbridled cheerfulness and ghoulish pragmatism, but equally important, she plays Mrs. Lovett as a woman who just wants to settle down and be loved.   Part Grand Guignol melodrama, part revenge tragedy, part Broadway musical, part opera, part social commentary and, in no small part, over-the-top horror story, Sweeney Todd is probably easier to stage in excess than to rein in. Yet without downplaying the blood and gore, Lewis’ production in the Head Theater has a human scale that ultimately makes Hugh Wheeler’s libretto all the more horrifying. And beginning with Mahowald and Lyng, it has a cast whose stirring voices make Sondheim’s incredibly complex score soar. (The assured musical direction is by Milton Granger.)   Consider, for example, the way Lewis handles the chorus and secondary performers. When these actors aren’t directly involved in a scene, they frequently haunt the periphery of the action. They, like the audience, are witnesses to Sweeney Todd’s murderous deeds. At other times they are unwitting accomplices, handing Todd paper and pen to write a letter to entrap the judge, for instance.   The plot of Sweeney Todd is adapted from a Christopher Bond play that gave its legendary penny-dreadful characters motivation and social context. Todd has lost his wife and daughter to a judge who condemned him to an Australian prison on a trumped-up charge. Escaping and returning to London, he teams up with his former landlady, Mrs. Lovett, who not only gives the show ample doses of much-needed comic relief, but also gives Todd a chance to try to redress some of society’s inequities.   The score’s wittiest and most antic number, “A Little Priest,” is a glorious display of the show’s humor and its politics. The humor takes the form of Todd and Lovett speculating on the culinary qualities of humans in various professions. The politics come in when Todd sings: “The history of the world, my love ... is those below serving those up above. ... How gratifying for once to know ... that those above will serve those down below!” Mahowald and Lyng crack each other up performing this number, and the audience cracks up right along with them.   Sondheim has described Sweeney Todd as a show about obsession, and this theme is ably conveyed by Center Stage’s splendid supporting cast as well as by the leads. Villainous Judge Turpin (Ed Dixon) has a sordid obsession for his young ward, Johanna, the daughter he stole away from Todd. A sailor named Anthony is also obsessed with her, but in a healthier romantic way; “Kiss Me,” the love duet Aaron Ramey’s Anthony sings with Maria Couch’s Johanna is the evening’s most vocally lush moment.   Meanwhile, a mysterious, crazed Beggar Woman (Rebecca Baxter) seems obsessed with Johanna, Todd and anyone who has anything to do with them. Even Tobias (Ron DeStefano), the boy who works in the bake shop, seems over-the-edge obsessive in his affection for Mrs. Lovett.   ...Center Stage has mounted a production whose clarity of purpose is as well-defined as that of Todd himself. Furthermore, though no one could ever call Sweeney Todd a subtle show, director Lewis deserves credit for toning down certain scenes, a rape scene and a self-flagellation scene chief among them. Instead, she has focused on keeping the audience involved with the characters, and her success can be measured by the surprising degree to which the audience’s sympathies are roused by the musical’s murderous partners in crime.

POTOMAC STAGES, 3/3/2004 by Brad Hathaway   ...This production's Sweeney is Joseph Mahowald, who brings a full opera-trained voice and a striking look to the part of the barber turned butcher.... Mahowald knows how to hold forth on stage with great energy, his voice is a great instrument and his eyes are magnetic in just the way this mad man should glower.   Mahowald establishes a fine chemistry with his co-star, Nora Mae Lyng, without compromising the role's essential loneliness. Her strength in the role is as a comic actress and their work together on such delights as the incredibly inventive "A Little Priest" is a delight. She does a splendid job on her introductory number, the tongue-twisting "The Worst Pies in London." In the book scenes, she gets key plot and character points across with clarity and she creates a very interesting, very human Mrs. Lovett.   ...Ed Dixon, Wayne W. Pretlow [and] Aaron Ramey...sing the parts of the judge, the beadle and the sailor Anthony Hope with clarity and passion. Ron DeStefano gets the most out of both the comedy and the horror of young Tobias....

THE JOHNS HOPKINS NEWS-LETTER, 4/1/2004 by Marian Smith   Mahowald’s performance [as Sweeney] is outstanding -- in his tattered trousers and ripped shirt, he looks the part of the crazed character he plays. Mahowald’s Todd is strong, passionate and wild all at once.... Rogue-like with long whiskers and messy hair, Mahowald spits out Todd’s aggressive cynicism a full, deep baritone.   Lyng [as Lovett] shuffles about the stage and delivers a “Worst Pies in London” to rival those of past Broadway greats. These two characters’ chemistry on stage is evident in their interactions, from her presentation of Sweeney’s lost barbershop tools -- which he seizes lustily from her -- to their jokes about economically “disposing” of the bodies that Sweeney cannot seem to stop killing in the number, “A Little Priest.”   ...like his love for Johanna, Ramey’s strong tenor voice [as Anthony] is hopeful and persistent. Matching her complementing character, Crouch [as Johanna] flawlessly vaults her sweet, clear soprano into the audience. The two antagonists -- though one can argue that everyone in this musical is the "bad guy' -- are Judge Turpin (Ed Dixon) and his sidekick The Beadle (Wayne P. Pretlow), both of whom are commanding and casually evil.   Rebecca Baxter, who plays the Beggar Woman with a surprising past, transforms into a bedraggled hag with the help of realistic costuming and makeup; though her true “selling point,” as it were, is her perfect cockney accent and powerful voice, which is actually beautiful despite her appearance.   The last pair is that of Pirelli, the “defending” barber (Michael Brian Dunn), and his assistant Tobias Ragg (Ron DeStefano), who ends up working for Mrs. Lovett in the pie-shop. Their circus-like entrance...offers much-needed comic relief, and DeStefano emerges at the end with the brilliant performance of a tragic madman.   This CenterStage production is not to be missed if you have a strong stomach and a morbid curiosity for gore and psychologically twisted characters.

THE CITY PAPER, 3/3/2004 by Geoffrey Himes   In directing the Center Stage version of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's 1979 Broadway show,...[Artistic Director Irene] Lewis made the bold decision to reduce the band from the original 26 members to six. This was no doubt done for economic reasons, but it yields crucial artistic results. The music is transformed from orchestral background to chamber-music foreground, which proves much more suitable for Sondheim's score.... This chamber-music approach--along with the mics--encourages the actors to take a more conversational approach to the songs, which bloom under such attention....   The characters in Sweeney Todd are more important than the ideas, and those characters benefit from some terrific performances at Center Stage. As Sweeney, Joseph Mahowald reins in his classically trained baritone to reveal the subtleties of a man who uses cold rationality to camouflage an insatiable blood lust. As Mrs. Lovett, Nora Mae Lyng wins the biggest laughs of the night with her bubbly, cheerful willingness to overlook any problems--dead people who should be alive and living people who should be dead--that might derail her booming business or her romantic designs on Sweeney.   ...All the leads strike a winning balance between good singing and strong acting. Aaron Ramey boasts the cast's best voice as the earnest young Anthony.... Center Stage violates more than one rule of the Broadway musical, but the resulting contrast is more flattering to Baltimore than to New York.