BY BEN WINTERS
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is meant to terrify and entertain, not inspire musings on the nature of art. But that’s Stephen Sondheim for ya. Sweeney Todd, the composer-lyricist’s gothic and witty melodrama, is currently being performed at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, and the occasion has got everyone wondering about the difference between musical theatre and opera.
Wynne Delacoma, the Sun-Times’ classical music critic, took up the case on Nov. 17, pointing out that though Todd is most often classified as a musical, "the story couldn’t be more operatic. Most of the dialogue is set to music, and Sondheim’s score is intricately crafted and ambitious…like Wagner, Sondheim creates snatches of recurring melody and rhythm that tell the audience much about his characters and their state of mind."
To judge by Delacoma’s feature, the major differences between musical theatre and opera have to do with logistics and technical specs. She notes that "[o]n Broadway, sets, lights and amplification for any play or musical go up and stay up for seven performances a week until the audience stops buying tickets," while opera houses "present several different works in any given week, requiring sets that can be dismantled and reinstalled quickly." Also there’s the issue of amplification. Opera singers pride themselves on voices that carry to the rafters, Delacoma points out; in musical theatre there’s all this annoying dialogue that audiences probably want to hear, meaning you need to mike the performers.
Delacoma runs through some of the major cross-over pieces (besides Sweeney) that have forced opera houses to wrestle with the opera vs. musical theatre issue. "In works that combine dialogue and singing like Sweeney Todd, Candide, Porgy and Bess and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, opera companies must use amplification so that audiences in their very large theatres can hear the spoken words."
Delacoma’s colleague, Sun-Times theatre critic Hedy Weiss, is optimistic and enthusiastic about the subject matter as she wonders in her own Sweeney-related piece what other musical theatre hits might find their ways into opera houses’ repertoire. "Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George could easily make the leap to the opera house," Weiss figures, "Along with his Follies and Passion. So could Bernstein’s West Side Story. But what about the Schonberg-Boublil works–Les Miserables and Miss Saigon…And what should the verdict be on the recent Flaherty-Ahrens musical Ragtime? In terms of size, subject matter and scoring, all might qualify. The future is an open score."
Sondheim has weighed in on the issue in the past. According to Mark Horowitz at the Library of Congress, quoted by Stephen Kinzer in the New York Times, "Sondheim himself has said that the biggest difference is often not with the work itself but with where it’s performed and what’s the expectation of the audience."
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Terfel
as Sweeney
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Most of Kinzer’s article (published Nov. 18), however, is about bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, the world-famous opera star singing the lead in the Lyric’s Sweeney Todd. Kinzer, who chats with Terfel at the downtown McDonald’s across the street from the Lyric, focuses his piece on the idea of Terfel "descending from the world of grand opera for the first time." But is it a descent at all, or rather a lateral move from one grand and expressive form of music to another?
Kinzer finds his subject "energized by the challenge." Terfel says, "'Opera it’s not. But I was desperate to do it because it’s such a glorious vehicle. I’m totally engulfed in it. This piece has 20 tunes you can go out whistling.’"
Terfel’s assessment is a bit overstated. Though there’s plenty memorable in the show, anyone who can leave Sweeney Todd whistling 20 of the numbers is either a Sondheim fanatic or just a world-class whistler.
Among Terfel’s big fears, he says, is that "he will now be expected not just to sing but to speak, sometimes at length." One wonders if the theatre snobs, so quick to slash at film actors for their uneven stage acting, will be as quick to similarly judge an opera star for his attempts?
On the opera vs. musical theatre issue, the Kinzer piece gives the final word to Timothy Nolen, an opera singer now playing Judge Turpin in the Lyric’s Sweeney. He notes that "the best of entertainment becomes elite…and the best of opera becomes entertainment."
And He Makes Good Popcorn
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Paul
Newman in Our Town
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Strategies in picking a formula for creating a Broadway hit: If Andrew Lloyd Weber is busy and you can’t afford to license the ABBA catalog, you might try picking a favorite American play and combining it with a favorite American actor. Judging by what’s going on now at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, it’s a surefire method.
"You’d better hurry if you want to purchase tickets for the Broadway revival of Our Town, starring Paul Newman," reported Newsday on Nov. 20, well before the show’s Dec. 4 opening. "The show…already is 91 percent sold out."
Playbill.com reported the same story, noting in a piece by Robert Simonson that, "The producers of…Our Town have already recouped their entire $1 million capitalization–days before the show begins previews." Simonson floats the idea that the revival might extend, but as of yet it’s sticking to the announced nine-week schedule.
Buffyphilia–It’s All the Rage Down Under
On Nov. 19, Melbourne’s The Age offered a marvelously dry report of an academic symposium on a rather unorthodox subject matter: the American television program "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The article runs through a lengthy summation of the shows’ characters and themes, offering an examination of the worldwide phenomenon that is Buffyphilia.
"Intellectuals around the globe are deconstructing, dissecting and extrapolating from 'Buffy,’ across disciplines, in journals and at conferences too. The Melbourne University Symposium…follows fast on the heels of a two-day international Buffyfest at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK," quotes The Age article.
Organizers of the Melbourne conference say it won’t be an entirely intellectual event. Besides the usual seminars and presentation of papers there will be "Buffy look-alike competitions, screenings, a Buffy board game, fan fiction-writing, door prizes, an 'installation piece’ and a free set of fangs on registration."