Sondheim's usual knish: overrated, leaden and tasteless

Rating: 1/10 (12 May 2013)

No, despite Sondheim's ambition, this offering of empty calories will never make it to a gourmet menu. A humble barber loses his pretty partner and daughter. He seeks revenge on the world with a low-life malheureuse. The serial killing and cannibalism that follow seem emotionally out of place. You never feel Todd's motivation is authentic. His suffering is not really on the level of Job, Spartacus, Karl Childers or even the Count of Monte Cristo. Unfortunately, like all of Sondheim, the emotional context here is about as authentic as one of the whinier episodes of Love American Style. The music is derivative and not really good, though the creator no doubt considered it to be ground-breaking. Rejected by his mom, Sondheim went after big-time approval from critics and audiences. The Former he usually gets from the parochial Miss Daisys of the New York Times. But the theaters staging his works usually end up empty. No one considers Sondheim a legend as much as Sondheim. When Follies was revived last year on Broadway, I overheard a priceless sales pitch on the half-price tickets line. The officious hawker was trying to convince a tourist to see it with the following guarded praise: "It's really great, well anyway it's like a museum piece...well, in any case, the performances are certainly worth seeing." And I said "save your money and look for a real museum piece in a museum. You're too late for the real Follies, which at least had spectacle in their favor." Sweeney avoids the endless kvetch-fest of Follies, but not a note of it rings true. Just one example to illustrate how emotion is just wallpaper to Sondheim: how on earth does Mrs. Lovett end up singing "Not While I'm Around"? Schizophrenia? For it is the only thing of its kind in the whole show, so you can't believe it. Bizarre. That being said, the acting here is fine, even Sacha Cohen as the macassared mountebank . Too bad the actors had such mediocre material to work with. An interesting Sondheim anecdote: I was at the Met for a brilliant performance of an opera about another ne'er-do-well. I can't besmirch the composer by stating his name in the context of this debacle. Suffice it to say, the character he created, unlike Sondheim's, is richly ambiguous, not a stereotype, with interesting motivation and ingenious music. Sondheim was in the first row and at the curtain got up and scurried out without applauding in the midst of tumultuous appluse. Jealous much? My advice: write a musical about a Broadway songsmith with towering ambition and puny talent. That's a story I'd believe and I think this time he'd get it right.