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“Sweeney Todd” is probably one of the most brilliant, most demented shows to grace the stages of Broadway. Stephen Sondheim, the musical genius behind the lyrics to “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” broke and rebuilt the mold to create the dark, yet wildly popular musical.
The national tour of “Sweeney Todd,” based on John Doyle’s popular West End and Broadway revivals, visited Orono Wednesday. The tour stars Merritt David Janes, a 2004 graduate of the University of Maine School of Performing Arts.
As if the show itself wasn’t weird enough, Doyle , the director of the production off which the tour is based, stripped it to its core for the revival, discarding the orchestra and any extraneous characters. The pseudo-minimalist set, also designed by Doyle, contains just three elements: the floor, a piano-shaped table in the middle and a large set of shelves. The shelves house all the props for the show, and actors climb a ladder to retrieve articles when needed. The floor, which encompasses less than half the stage at the Collins Center for the Arts, is surrounded by walls of lights, which are seemingly the most technically advanced aspect of the show.
Instead of an orchestra, Doyle shoved the instruments into the hands of the actors, who play a chamber version of the score when they’re not acting or singing. Instead of leaving the stage, they mingle the sidelines, sometimes reacting to the action and sometimes just playing.
Ruthie Ann Miles, playing the part of Pirelli, plays accordion, piano and flute in the show. While she had played both piano and flute in high school, she had to practice hard to prepare all three instruments for her audition.
“A lot of us are primarily actors,” Miles said. “So getting out these instruments that have dust on them, that we haven’t played since high school, and then first of all learning to play them again, but secondly to play them and walk around with them at the same time took a lot of brain power.
“There were a lot of nights crying,” continued Miles. “You have to use your brain 100 percent every single night because you’re doing so many things at once; it’s like brain overload.”
The show, which is on what is known as a “bus-and-truck” tour, often plays a different city every night. The crew starts load-in at 8 a.m. for a 7 p.m. curtain – 3 a.m. for matinees – and usually finishes between 3 and 5 p.m. Once the show is over, the set is broken down in about two and a half hours. While the cast retires to a hotel to sleep, crew members board a sleeper bus that will drive them to their next location. Cast members follow the next day.
“Sweeney Todd” has few dance numbers, and therefore choreography on different stages is not a concern. The cast and crew do a sound check in each city to make sure audio levels are correct. Miles’s first national tour was of “Annie,” which contained young actors and much more choreography. “It was difficult, I think, for the younger kids, playing a different venue every single night,” Miles said. “The acoustics are different in every theatre, and sometimes the conductor . would be further away from the stage than other nights, so we . usually ran a couple of numbers to make sure that the blocking was not going to be affected, and stuff like that. With ‘Sweeney Todd,’ however, because there is no choreography really . the thing we mostly listen for is sound, so the acoustics are the thing that very much affects us.”
According to Production Stage Manager Suzanne Apicella, the show opened in September in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Wednesday night’s production at CCA was the tour’s 127th show. The production has retained some of the elements the original revival – some of the original costumes are used, as well as parts of the original set. Because the show is non-equity, meaning the crew is not unionized, local help can be enlisted for load-in. On Wednesday morning, UMaine students assisted with the load-in process.
The company started the week in Pennsylavania, and after receiving Tuesday off and playing in Orono Wednesday, will continue to Burlington, Portland and Portsmouth before the week is over.
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