Piedmont Players’ gutsy ‘Sweeney Todd’ a great achievement

SALISBURY — “Sweeney Todd,” Stephen Sondheim’s deliciously macabre retelling of an old story about a barber who slits throats and a baker who seals up the razor’s victims in meat pies, is not just another Broadway musical. It is an opera that happened to make its debut on Broadway in 1979. The story of Todd’s tonsorial skills and Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies is now in the American opera repertoire.

“Sweeney” has never been produced professionally in the Charlotte area. But we have been blessed with a few estimable semiprofessional stagings. Most recent is now in progress: the ambitious Piedmont Players Theatre in Salisbury.

Piedmont Players is a community theater, but this production qualifies as semiprofessional because the title role is sung by Dan Boye, who sings professionally with Charlotte’s Opera Carolina and the St. Peter’s Choir (he can be heard on the recent “Lo How a Rose”).

Vocally, Boye nails this role. His voice has a metallic resonance — not quite insane, but menacing enough. Boye was far more acceptable singing “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” at Davidson’s Players’ “Oklahoma!” in 1993.

Happily, however, Boye is not the only singer in the “Sweeney” cast who is fine — Rick McCollister’s barber but still naive Anthony, Mary McGill’s very professional Mrs. Lovett, John Godfrey’s lawyer-waggling Judge Turpin, John Brincefield’s sleazy Beadle, and Carolyn Myers’ wide-eyed Johanna and Steve Snarr’s Italianate Pirelli — is far better than you’d expect.

The find of the cast has to be little Anthony Napoletano of Concord, who sings Tobias, a street kid, not only with sweetness but with a vocal strength that doesn’t take a back seat to Boye or anyone else in the cast.

Director Reid Leonard does a fine job with the busy job staging this massive undertaking, manipulating the chorus to be a living frame of humanity for the action of the play.

Despite the production’s obvious strengths, however, the chorus lacks the oomph that Sondheim, the genius experimenting with choral writing, gave it. And Leonard’s set — bless him, he didn’t act and designer too — looks as if he didn’t have time to finish it.

Piedmont Players has almost as much talent at its disposal as Charlotte’s Opera Carolina. The resulting “Sweeney Todd,” while uneven, is a towering achievement for community theater.

Written by Tony Brown, June 6, 1997 for The Salisbury Post