Joint Schools' Musical - Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd is one of the more macabre musicals in the canon, and Sherborne Schools have done its grisly sense of humour great justice with their beautiful and highly-moving production, performed in the BSR in December of 2015.

Ed Smith (U6c) and Alice Goodearl star as Mr Todd and Mrs Lovett, providing each other with a wonderfully-contrasting set of polar opposites in terms of characterisation: he, the dark obsessive against her tongue-in-cheek gruesomeness.  Nowhere is this contrast of character captured more aptly than in the number “By The Sea” in Act 2, where Mrs Lovett attempts to woo the uninterested Mr Todd with her vision of a retirement by the seaside, where she can saunter along the promenade while he busies himself with his cleaver in the background.  Alice really brought the humour of this character out for the audience and provided some much needed and wonderfully comedic moments not just in this song, but throughout the entire show.  Ed Smith’s Todd, his character imagined in all its complexity of hardship and sorrow, was a steely-eyed obsessive, wielding his razors with a warped love until his necessary demise at the hands of the simple but loveable Tobias, ably played by Edmund Botes (5m).

Tobias shines nowhere more than in Act 1, during the public shaving context between Mr Todd and Mr Pirelli, the Italian mountebank barber, played to huge comic effect by Harrison Furber-Smith (U6e), whose sense of timing and connection with the audience is unrivalled both in his performance in this scene and later as the rubber-gloved and demented Mr Fogg, the asylum owner.  Judge Turpin, played by the Jacob Lane (U6d) and assisted by Ed Sprague (U6e) as the wide-boy Beadle, provided a nicely-realised and wonderfully villainous double act, oppressing and bullying the two young, star-crossed lovers Johanna and Anthony, played by Flora Wordie and Bently Creswell (4a) respectively.  The latter two beautifully played the classic ‘good characters’, who, in a world of corruption and evil, battle their way through to happiness, despite the odds against them.  Theirs is the voice of hope and redemption which does somehow survive the carnage Sondheim creates both musically and through the action of the play itself. 

The only other ‘good’ character in the piece, is the Beggar Woman, who it transpires is in fact the mentally deranged ex-wife of Todd.  She dies at his hands because of  a combination of Mrs Lovett’s mendacity and Todd’s own moral corruption, and the character’s mental confusion and pathos were wonderfully captured by Flora Ramsden. This is perhaps one of the hardest parts to play in the piece for a young actor and it was realised colourfully and with some punch at Flora’s every appearance, but none perhaps more strongly than in the montage in Act 2.  In this section of the play, Todd kills one innocent victim after another, day turns to night and night turns to day, with the chronological movement punctuated by Todd’s silky tones, plaintively singing about his love for his lost daughter and the Beggar Woman’s bitter warnings to whoever will listen about the “City On Fire”.  The vocal contrast provided by these two actors, was further embellished by the superb chorus who at this point were playing the escaped lunatics from Fogg’s Asylum, and beautifully built upon the nightmare world of unfettered Victorian capitalism of which Todd and Lovett’s cannibalistic corporation is just one grisly symptom.

This was a great performance, with a series of incredibly strong, highly-menacing chorus numbers punctuated by powerful duets and solos which ranged from the frightening to the comic and to the sublime.  

By Ian Reade
Head of Drama

Photograph by David Appleby