Word: barbers
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Sweeney Todd is, as the many reprises of the opening number tirelessly remind us, the infamous nineteenth century "demon barber of Fleet Street." Back in London after serving 15 years of a life sentence in Australia for a crime he did not commit, Sweeney (Jonathan Tolins) seeks revenge on corrupt Judge Turpin (Adam Wolman), who framed him in order to steal away Sweeney's wife. He starts up his barbershop again above the pie shop of his old landlady, Mrs. Lovett (Rhonda Edwards), who tells him that shortly after his exile, Sweeney's wife poisoned herself, and his infant daughter...
...reflected in his choice of subjects, far weightier than the heft of the average straight play on Broadway, let alone the merry moonshine of past musicals: the birth of pointillist painting (Sunday in the Park); Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like Picasso, who painted...
Like Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie is a unlikely comedy set in an early '80s London of racial tension and random sexuality. Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) and Rosie (Frances Barber) live in a neighborhood that is the site of race riots and police brutality. They find no contradiction in basing their marriage on both "freedom and commitment." They do "get laid," but not together...
...performances are all excellent. Din and Barber manage to be bored without being boring. They create a sweet, if abstracted love that still exists between Sammy and Rosie, despite their lukewarm marriage. "Sometimes I need a little passion," she explains. Without sarcasm, he smiles, "Don't let me stand in your...
...guests of honor are three odd couples: Sammy (Ayub Khan Din), a Pakistani-born accountant, and his American photographer client Anna (Wendy Gazelle); Rosie (Frances Barber), Sammy's wife, a "downwardly mobile" English social worker, and her beau of the evening Danny (Roland Gift), a young black; and Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), Sammy's father, and his old flame Alice (Claire Bloom), a romantic Englishwoman. Is that all clear? No? Don't worry; these lives are not meant to be sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire...