[In the following review, Simon offers a negative assessment of Sweeney Todd.]

The York Theatre Company revival of Sweeney Todd, which garnered raves in its initial modest premises, has reopened at the Circle in the Square to renewed critical paeans. It strikes me as a passable bus-and-truck production, ably directed by Susan H. Schulman, but musically and histrionically undernourished and hardly worth the raptures of our loose-tongued rhapsodies. The Stephen Sondheim–Hugh Wheeler–Harold Prince show is again the best musical on or around Broadway—as it would also be anywhere from Atlantic City to Cape May—but that is about as faint as praise can get.

It should come as no surprise if I say that the two most important things about any Broadway musical are the music and the spectacle, yet it is in these very areas that the Yorkle in the Square production has grave difficulties. Sondheim's music, which had been so cannily orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick, is here fed into two synthesizers (or shredders) by David Krane, whence it emerges thin, jingly, and monotonous—hardly meat enough for one of Mrs. Lovett's pies—to reveal, unbedizened, the anorexia of the musical invention. But whereas the songs are now reduced both vocally and instrumentally, the notorious steam whistle has been intensified to a knife-grinder's stridency to make half the audience cry uncle every time it sounds.

You may recall Eugene Lee's décor for the original production: practically the whole Industrial Revolution compressed into one monumental set, seemingly peopled with the entire cast of Mayhew's London Labour in Franne Lee's imaginatively seedy costumes. There was an awful grandeur to this squalor. In its present straitened circumstances, Sweeney, despite brave efforts by the set designer, James Morgan, and rather less brave ones by the costumer, Beba Shamash, is unlikely to make you ooh, let alone aah. And this in spite of the designer's and director's handy way with making platforms and bits of scenery rearrange themselves swiftly and kaleidoscopically.

Those who saw Sweeney in its intimate York habitat were apt to praise it (though some dissented) for its immediacy: The action, like the blood from those slit throats, seemed to spill right into your lap. Personally, I've never been partial to being that close, not even at those sweaty sixties avant-garde offerings where the point seemed to be to smell the performers. Still, Sweeney is Grand Guignol, and for some, the closer they get to blades and blood, the scarier and better. With the show's move to the by no means small Circle in the Square, however, that immediacy is lost, except perhaps in the first couple of rows, without a compensatory gain in massiveness. So you may end up with neither fish nor fowl.

The performances, too, are a come-down. Bob Gunton is an accomplished musical-comedy actor, and he brings a suitable gauntness and hauntedness to the title part. But he is, in speech and manner, very much New York and now. He even has a certain exaggerated springiness in his movements—a modern show-biz strategy. I never thought the day would come when I would miss Len Cariou, but I did miss his quality of having been freshly exhumed and reanimated by some mad scientist. An even bigger loss is Angela Lansbury, whose Mrs. Lovett was congenitally funny with her batrachian face and froggy voice, and her ability to come apart at the seams without relinquishing a treasured store-bought dignity. It was a lovely, effortless performance. Beth Fowler, the incumbent, has to sweat out her accent and her whimsy, and suggests for all the world an earnest little schoolgirl trying to act old, British, and funny.

Even so, she is well ahead of David Barron, who turns the evil Judge Turpin into a diffident hobo suffering from rheumatism (or is it gout?), though it must be said that the song number cut from the original production and restored here lets him down: Why should a manifest sadist be shown as a self-flagellating masochist? Equally hopeless are the young lovers, Gretchen Kingsley (though she has a voice) and Jim Walton (though he has a creditable semi-permanent accent), with his fancy Madison Avenue hairstyling that would have landed him in a sea of troubles in Her Majesty's Navy. Nor did I care much for Sue Ellen Estey as the Beggar Woman, a performance all pasted-on attitudes.

By far the best work comes from Eddie Korbich as the waif Tobias, Michael McCarty as the Beadle, and Bill Nabel as the charlatan Pirelli. These three sing and act unexceptionably, and have the right accents to boot. I enjoyed watching them, as I also did, for different reasons, the two bored-looking keyboard players, paying no heed to either the stage or the conductor, who, however, conducted away at his two-piece band as if they were massed forces about to make the Hollywood Bowl overflow with sound.