A swellSweeney

Brown's winning Todd

by Bill Rodriguez

SWEENEY TODD, by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Don B. Wilmeth. At Brown University's Stuart Theatre through March 14.

Paul Simon can blame it all on Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. If it were not for the 1979 smash success of a musical with such a macabre subject -- the Demon Barber of Fleet Street -- the recent $11-million fiasco The Capeman, which is about a convicted gang murderer, would never have gotten past the crazy idea stage. (Cannibal chic. What's next?)

Sweeney Todd was a Broadway triumph despite its bizarre material because its brilliance blazed right through audience disbelief. Sondheim's music was compelling and his lyrics have never been more polished or clever. Harold Prince directed the premiere like Brecht on steroids. The Tony-winning set by Trinity Rep's Eugene Lee incorporated a massive, clanking backdrop of malevolent Industrial Age machinery.

Directed by Don B. Wilmeth at Brown University Theatre, the Sock and Buskin production is also a success on every level. The power of the piece is hardly diminished by being performed on the Stuart Theatre proscenium stage rather than at the lordly Uris on West 51st. In fact, the set design again is by Providence-based Lee, who is now at Brown on the visiting faculty. His less-is-more style of recent years is perfectly served by the opportunity, and necessity, to scale down here. As chilling as an empty heart, the enormous black space is open to the rear brick wall, so the lighting doesn't localize the action. Dominating the stage most of the time is the customary centerpiece: a room-sized box emblazoned "Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pies" on one side, with stairs leading up to Sweeney's barber shop.

The tale is pure, rickety 19th-century melodrama, cranked up at moments to a painful clatter. Sweeney (Adam Arian) is an escaped convict who has just arrived back in London from Botany Bay. He is actually Benjamin Barker, shipped off for life to Australia 15 years ago on fabricated charges. It seems that a certain judge named Turpin (Tom Balamaci) took a fancy to Sweeney's wife Lucy (Rebecca Bellingham) and raped her, which drove her to take arsenic. The judge raised their daughter Johanna (Bellingham) as his ward, but as we enter the story she is a nubile 18 and he has plans to honor her with marriage to him. All is not as grim for us as matters are for

them. Black comedy elements expand our perspective against

the dark background. There is an entertaining dueling-barber contest, a Shave Off, between Sweeney and his rival Pirelli (Joseph M. Pinto), who claims patronage in the court of Italy. Early on, Mrs. Lovett (Shana Harvey) sings unabashedly of making "The Worst Pies In London," although those of the lady down the street are suspected of containing cat.

Of course, the usual comical high point in most productions of this musical is the Act I closer, Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett singing "A Little Priest." It comes at the a-ha moment when she realizes that disposing of Sweeney's first, impromptu, murder victim can be turned to gustatory and financial advantage. Harvey is hilarious, a delight to behold, playing off of Mrs. Lovett's chalky faced partner, who is slow to catch on. Sondheim takes a gloomy matter ("It's man devouring man out there") and sends it through the prism of his grim whimsy ("So who are we to deny it here?"). Throughout the musical, Harvey pumps Mrs. Lovett to bursting with sly personality. And here she outdoes herself. As she chirps about shepherd's pie "peppered with actual shepherd on top," Harvey does quite well by the song that made Angela Lansbury's career.

In the title role, Adam Arian delivers a solid performance. It's no small limitation to be in your early 20s when your role asks for someone haggard with age. But Arian keeps Sweeney embittered rather than enraged, an emotional level he convincingly maintains on a steady simmer, so that when it boils over into fury it seems to have been building forever.

The deadly duo get fine support. As Johanna, Bellingham's voice can rise to beautiful peaks, a fitting contrast in this dark story. As a young sailor who befriends Sweeney and falls in love with Johanna, John Lloyd Young provides the right balance of innocence and black determination. As Judge Turpin's henchman, the Beadle, Matt Garrett gives the villain a fey twist that works. As an all-too-trusting boy and a life-addled beggar woman, Noam Katz and Alison Hlavaty Cimmet each find ways to round out their simple characters.

Under the baton and musical direction of Paul Phillips, the 30-member Brown University Orchestra is crisp and first-rate. The costume design by Phillip Contic also rises to the occasion. This may be an undergraduate production, but thoroughly professional work by all contributors has made Brown's Sweeney Todd must-see theater.