by Lorrie Moore
Theatrical, that is, because characters interacted with one another. In director John Doyle’s production they by and large do not. This is for two reasons. One is that they are busy playing instruments—cellos, violin, accordion, guitar, triangle, clarinet, trumpet, flute, and even tuba. This makes it difficult for one character to look another in the eye, even if that character is pleading to be kissed. As a result, the ardent if fearful young lovers are played as real buffoons as well as real cellists, surely a first. But such a dramatic sacrifice, once the whiff of stunt evaporates, is a convenience to the second reason, the Brechtian staging—stylized alienation—that emerges at first as if by default, then later by insistence. The performers are detached in their stances, in their deliveries, and in their charmless stares out over the ticket holders’ heads. They mean to cast a spell over no one, and if this Brechtian idea fails to communicate itself completely, the costumes—pulled from some Weimar cabaret trunk (much leather and fishnet) and a businessman’s suitcase (white shirts and ties)—indeed do help. Yet the characters’ instruments sometimes succeed in plaintiveness or the suggestion of a momentarily tender heart. And to hear this Demon Barber of Fleet Street (fiercely performed by indie rock star Michael Cerveris), who slits the throats of his despised customers but nonetheless strums hauntingly on an acoustic guitar, is to witness a previously elusive side of Sweeney Todd, the man and the show, which is like a secret (brief and contradictory amid the standoffishness): tenderness contiguous with ferocity. Just as the exquisitely flatted note in the tenor aria “Johanna”—“even now I’m at your window”—takes the victory out of “win,” the performance of the music has its own language, stealing past the acrobatic words.
This is the genius not just of the composer but of the simplified arrangements by the British orchestrator Sarah Travis. It is astonishing how little feels left out in this grand reduction to only nine instruments, how much is accomplished in her adaptations, how much intimacy is gained, even if one glimpses the microphones on the cellos. The singing and playing are of a piece—organic, economical, clear. The same cannot be said of the arbitrary thrift of the abstracted stage design, which substitutes a ladder, a coffin, an apothecary’s shelving for the original barber’s chair and bakehouse chute. A simple red light screams on overhead while downstage something resembling cabernet sauvignon is poured portentously from one bucket into another. The victim stands up and walks away (something done also in the San Francisco version). This particular staging may have more narrative meaning for those who know the story already. The evening I saw it, women in line for the ladies’ room at intermission were shaking their heads and exclaiming, “I don’t know what’s going on—I can’t follow it! Can you?” The self-explanatory lyrics, which assist a more literal set, are witty and crisp, but quick as mice, and some will escape an unfamiliar ear. “He shaved the faces of gentlemen / Who never thereafter were heard from again” is written to be sung like a brisk tumble down the stairs. Doyle’s bold expressionism is probably best appreciated by someone with one other production under her belt (a forthcoming film version by Tim Burton will helpfully star Johnny Depp). Nonetheless, for those lucky enough to have seen it here or in London, Doyle’s is as inspired and audacious a presentation of one of the twentieth century’s great works of art as one is likely to encounter. Its tricky casting (“Can you act, sing beautifully, and play two instruments every night for weeks on end?”) will make it difficult to reproduce.
But Doyle’s production should not be praised exclusively for its originality and daring. As it was presented in New York there were smaller, more conventional decisions to admire as well. The direction of Patti LuPone away from her more flibberty, Angela Lansbury–style interpretation with the San Francisco Symphony better suits the hard, belting quality of LuPone’s voice (LuPone’s wavy stringray of a mouth is an expressive, brassy creature all its own). Here is a Mrs. Lovett whose affections for Mr. Todd are perfunctory at best. She is in business with him for the new and untorn stockings she will get to wear in the second act. When she sings to him, “Always had a fondness for you. I did,” LuPone is dead in the eyes, as directed; her mind is chewing gum. Unlike in San Francisco and elsewhere, where Mrs. Lovett’s emotional, not just her economic, desperation is felt, her union with Todd reveals how sentimental plans, however hollow and shameless, once articulated can temporarily build a rickety alliance, a kind of honor among thieves. In “By the Sea,” LuPone not only hilariously mimics the scary sound of a seagull (as if dispelling the breathless squawk of Lansbury, which haunts any production of this show) but sings in her beat-up satin voice of a romantic idyll with Todd (she always refers to him as “Mr. Todd,” in the same way the Dustin Hoffman character in The Graduate always refers to “Mrs. Robinson”: formality politely conveying tarnish and impossibility). In Mrs. Lovett’s fantasy cottage by the sea they’ll “Have a nice sunny suite / For the guest to rest in.” Once in a while Todd can “do the guest in.” They’ll be “married nice and proper.” But Todd should bring his “chopper.” Here Mrs. Lovett is more completely the Cockney Lady Macbeth she is only partially in other productions. The comedy of her best bits, however, is never lost. When we first see LuPone on her own, in “The Worst Pies in London,” she is flicking invisible flies from invisible pies. She lures Todd in with her own tales of woe:
Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop.
Does a business but I notice something weird—
Lately all her neighbors’ cats have disappeared.
Have to hand it to her—
Wot I calls
Enterprise
Popping pussies into pies.
Wouldn’t do in my shop—
Just the thought of it’s enough to make you sick.
And here the old pro’s deliberate slowing as she continues: “And I’m telling you them pussy cats is quick.”
When she hints at her plan for human meat pies, LuPone’s Mrs. Lovett is less coyly cajoling with Todd. Her voice is deadened with pragmatism.
With the price of meat what it is
when you get it
If you get it—
…Good you got it.
Todd joins in with controlled but visibly demented glee. “The history of the world, my sweet, / is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” This, the operetta’s signature song, “A Little Priest,” is a rollicking waltz that satirizes all of society and honors not just Verdi (and his favorite meter), or Ravel’s La valse, which grows similarly minor and ominous as it proceeds (as if into the twentieth century), or the oom-pah-pah of LuPone’s own ballyhooed though minimal tuba playing elsewhere in the show, but self-references the immortal lyricist himself (“The trouble with poet is how do you know it’s deceased?”), as Mrs. Lovett tries to outwit Sweeney, offering various imaginary pies. “Tinker?” He’d like something “Pinker.” “Tailor?” He’d prefer “Paler.” “Butler?” He replies “Subtler.” “Potter?” He says “Hotter.” Finally, in cool triumph, she suggests, “Locksmith?” And he is, of course, stumped. It’s a poet’s joke, and places the songwriter right in the song, but the characters take it up with energy and relish.
LuPone may be gradually taking ownership of this role from its originator, Dame Angela. It is possible that the rouged and pigtailed Lansbury’s eccentric, sharp-pitched twittering will someday seem a peculiar preference in light of LuPone’s cool and sultry alto. A Broadway sacrilege to say, but that is the power of this, LuPone’s most iconoclastic rendition. It may lose its iconoclasm (LuPone is laying late claim to another Sondheim role, too—Mama Rose in Gypsy, which she sang this past summer with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, although she was perhaps cast too true to type—“the role she was born to play,” boasted the advertising—and her performance there contained few surprises).
Other moments of Doyle’s direction constituted intriguing improvements. Judge Turpin is complicatedly less grotesque, played by the handsome Mar
k Jacoby in a business suit, instead of the usual white wig and judicial robes. Moreover, Jacoby’s voice complements the rich sureness of Cerveris’s in the gorgeously ironic death knell “Pretty Women.” The duet, not overpowered by any orchestra and aided by Travis’s sensitive arrangement, particularly her plangent use of the ordinarily harsh and recalcitrant accordion, is a wonder, fascinating, combing out its hair—one of the best on record. And although it is hard to improve upon that singing chameleon Victoria Clark and her San Francisco rendition of the deranged beggar woman, Lucy (Clark has been mesmerizing Lincoln Center audiences as a rich southern matron in The Light in the Piazza), a delicately prolonged moment, when Doyle’s Lucy as played by Diana Di Marzio lays her cheek lingeringly on Todd’s arm, still not looking at him, while singing her recurrent “Don’t I know you?” is startlingly good. Director Doyle holds the moment for several extra beats—he knows what he has. A piece of physical memory is registered there more movingly than I’ve seen in almost any Sondheim musical. Such freeze framing assists the story well, for it is part of the ghostly marital memory of a self-described “naïve” man—an odd adjective, uttered slowly, even uncertainly, in Todd’s own autobiographical ballad—which finally if belatedly breaks the barber down.
The night I saw Sweeney Todd, Broadway’s lights were dimmed in memory of Wendy Wasserstein, who had just died. Much farther south President George W. Bush was giving his State of the Union address. At the show’s close the entire cast of ten was standing in choral epilogue, the killed had risen, as in Elizabethan drama, and the set seemed like a cross between Assassins and Spoon River Anthology. The ensemble, their throats repaired, nimbly sang,
Sweeney wishes the world away
Sweeney’s weeping for yesterday,
Hugging the blade, waiting the years,
Hearing the music that nobody hears.
Only then did I fully feel a frisson of political statement roll over the stage—a frisson that didn’t die (the trouble with poet is how do you know it’s deceased?). Somewhere President Bush was reading, “Our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.” Hell, no (we won’t go). But, Sweeney Todd seemed to say, let them harden into rhyme. At least (try the priest).
(2007)
Peter Cameron
Peter Cameron is an urban novelist with an interest in the angle and viscosity of sunlight. He is an observer of greenery—“it was impossible to walk along that gravel path by the sea and not think palm frond shadow”—and the strength and direction of a current in a river or a stream:
The sun was low in the sky and refracted in the window. He could see his own reflection, and through that, flickering in the glass, the reflection of what was ahead…coming back to the city is always nicer, in a way, because you travel in the same direction as the river.
His remarking of the natural world, as it intersects with the man-made, is not just a seeking of ironies and metaphors, though often it is also that. An observation such as “the reflection of what was ahead” is lovely in its linguistic play. But more often Cameron’s recitation of the physical world seems like a reminder of earthly sparkle and grit he forces upon himself. Human habitation of the planet, and its great pleasantnesses, is something he is interested in being grateful for without writing a novel that would express, wholeheartedly, that gratitude. There is then the strange generosity of his at least trying—of here and there defying the melancholy and ontological quibbling (his own) that impedes the enterprise. “She felt like she wanted to pray but it went no further than that.” The contemporary loss of a spiritual language is the haunting subtext of almost all that he has written.
In fact, Cameron writes with a sort of perfection of restraint that can sometimes make a first-time reader afraid the narrative may be too superficial or too precious or too English for ostensibly robust American reading tastes—according to interviews, the writers he most admires are the British novelists Barbara Pym, Penelope Mortimer, and Rose Macaulay, whose work has made brief appearances in his own. His main characters tend to be people who are in some fashion running away, so that the settings of his novels are often not where the protagonist ordinarily lives at all but a place he is observing, tentatively, for the first time.
As a result, although Cameron’s writerly predilection, as with many novelists of manners, is for long scenes of tart conversation, the narrative often proceeds with a gingerly sort of emphasis on material objects. A pitcher of amber beer, rather than any of the people in the room, is what is most likely to seem “blessedly lit from within.” “Luxury hotels are the real houses of God,” says a character in Cameron’s 1997 novel, Andorra. A mood of exile and foreignness is thus underscored (and later, climactically, dramatized). It is the civilized world Cameron ends up honoring, even in all its disarray (though his pen is repeatedly drawn to tidy still lifes of every sort). The natural world carefully steps back, like a sensitive suitor who knows he’s been toyed with. “You would get nowhere,” thinks one Cameron character, “if you were never led on.”
Peter Cameron began as a short-story writer. Throughout the 1980s his stories appeared with some regularity in The New Yorker, where they were exemplary of a certain spare and elegant minimalism then associated with that magazine. Soon he was writing a serial novel for the short-lived periodical 7 Days (these chapters were later published as Leap Year, 1990), and after that, despite two story collections, he became primarily a novelist, his most admired books being The Weekend (1994) and Andorra. The latter, set in the tiny principality of that name tucked in the Pyrenees between Spain and France (and given a seacoast and a marina the real Andorra does not have), is something of a murder mystery, and proceeds with a Mr. Ripley–style narrator less talented than Patricia Highsmith’s but more interestingly contemplative, even if we recognize his debts and in advance suspect his charms.
The Weekend, with its elegiac pun on weakened, touches on the subject of illness and grief in the gay community but is simultaneously a kind of romantic frolic over a single long night, a Midsummer Night’s Dream in upstate New York. In the book’s title Cameron slyly puts forward what turns out to be that novel’s most haunting metaphor: What idea better sums up life’s brief strain at happiness (jammed between two eternities) than the idea of the weekend? Cameron has fashioned a living trope that sustains the entire book: life is a weekend, a hinge that joins the long nothing before and the longer nothing that follows. Between the bookending emptinesses sits existence, which in Cameron’s world consists of loving, dying, and visiting. There is also usually some alfresco dining, a dabbling painter or two, and, alas, croquet.
If Cameron’s focus seems a bit too trained on privileged travel, grand houses, slight and decorative employment, artistic wannabes, and effortlessly eccentric socialites, as if every society he examines were an indolent one of nineteenth-century dilettantes—“back when the world had a certain elegant order,” says one character, oblivious to whole portions of history—or if his fictional world resembles perhaps a twentieth-century artists’ colony, well, all of his books were written in part at Yaddo or MacDowell. A large house filled to the rafters with lonely creative types seems to be a kind of muse for him. Sometimes his characters quite literally live and work in turrets and attics. His novels have thus far featured—to name only a few—a rich murderer writing his memoirs; a closeted gay man at work on an opera based on Gide’s The Immoralist; and several visual artists, the most recent being one who decoupages garbage cans with pages of the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud. (Cameron arranges to have this last reviewed in Artforum under the title “When Is Garbage Just Garbage? When It Stinks.”) “I’m going to write a book about a perfect country where it’s always the nineteenth century” says a character in The Weekend. And although his main characters are full of doubt and yearning and intelligent observation, they also may be surrounded by fatuous Lillet drinkers who make such speeches as this:
Poor
them! I’m afraid Ibiza is ruined. Although I haven’t been there in years. Perhaps it’s been unruined. That can happen to places, but it takes a while. You see, a place is found, then it’s lovely for a while, and then it’s ruined, and then if you’re lucky it’s forgotten, and if it hasn’t become too, too ruined, it can start again—unruin itself. It’s what’s going to happen to the planet eventually, I’m sure. It’s only natural and we shouldn’t resist it. We’ll ruin it with concrete and garbage and hairspray and blow ourselves up, and it will all lie fallow for a millennium or two, and then it will start all over again, the fish crawling out of the sea and eventually painting the Sistine Chapel. Mark my words.
It is all bleakly amusing, and Cameron has a light hand: he lets his characters satirize themselves. In his last novel, The City of Your Final Destination (2002), travel to a half-real country, psychic claustrophobia, large, old-world houses, and dubious creative and intellectual projects persist—though this time the story includes the world of literary scholarship and mines it for its spinning moral compasses and thwarted and futile figures. A University of Kansas graduate student named Omar travels to Uruguay to seek authorization for a biography of a dead writer, and spends the rest of the novel among the dead author’s literary executors. He is not in Kansas anymore. But the ivory tower looks like harsh reality—dusty Kansas indeed—compared to the lives lived by this reclusive expatriated group. They—not unlike many of Cameron’s characters—speak if not like actual Munchkins, then like fey, childlike residents of some wonderland or other:
