Welsh National Opera will be visiting Liverpool Empire Theatre on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th November to perform Sondheim’s musical masterpiece, Sweeney Todd, as part of the launch of WNO’s 70th birthday year.
This production promises a musical with all the emotional impact of opera and will be a rare opportunity to hear Sweeney Todd with the celebrated WNO Chorus and Orchestra. This production is set in the late 1970s/early 1980s and provides a fresh take on the story with echoes of Thatcher’s Britain. It emphasises Sondheim’s message that it’s not just Sweeney who is insane. Through its corruption and inequality, society is totally mad. See Sweeney Todd and you’ll find that it buries itself in your consciousness and refuses to leave. Sweeney Todd has all the emotional impact of the greatest operas.
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
He shaved the faces of gentlemen,
Who never thereafter were heard of again…
Sweeney Todd fills a void with a bloody and blind quest for vengeance. Those who enter his shop get more than a close shave. The unlucky ones ending up in Mrs Lovett’s rather unsavoury pies, proving you are what you eat. Sondheim’s masterpiece is by turns hugely funny, terrifying and deeply sad. It works on a number of different levels, is complex but always engaging. In a scene of high comedy, Mrs Lovett explains why hers are ‘The worst pies in London’. In another, Sweeney is reunited with the razor blades he left behind when he was wrongfully imprisoned. There are few scenes like it. On one hand it is disturbing – he regards the razors as his friends and begins to be distanced from the real world – but it is also strangely moving. The musical’s finale is devastating but also hugely cathartic.
A co-production between Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre and West Yorkshire Playhouse in association with Royal Exchange Theatre, Sweeney Todd will be directed by WYP Artistic Director James Brining and conducted by James Holmes in a staging adapted for WNO. This is the first time that WNO and Wales Millennium Centre have worked together as co-producers.
The cast will feature opera and musical theatre singers with German baritone David Arnsperger as Sweeney Todd and Scottish soprano Janis Kelly as Mrs Lovett. Anthony will be sung by Jamie Muscato, with Soraya Mafi singing Johanna. Welsh tenor Aled Hall will sing Beadle Bamford and Charlotte Page will sing Beggar Woman. Also joining the cast are Steven Page as Judge Turpin and George Ure as Tobias Ragg.
WNO Artistic Director David Pountney says: “The paradox of music is that it is a highly rational means of expression, much more logically organised than the language of speech for instance, and yet it is at the same time the supreme means of expressing all kinds of extreme emotional states. Among these, madness has been a constant inspiration to composers eager to test the ability of music to penetrate the most radical states of mental disorder. Our season presents a fascinatingly wide range of musical expression dedicated to this phenomenon including the raw craziness of Sondheim’s gruesome barber.”
To book visit the Liverpool Empire box office, call 0844 871 3017* or buy online at atgtickets.com/Liverpool*
*Fees apply to online and telephone bookings