A superbly sharpened ‘Sweeney’

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”

New Broadway cast recording

(Nonesuch)

* * * 1/2

“SWEENEY TODD” is Stephen Sondheim’s most operatic score, and the temptation is overpowering to treat it that way. Opera companies profitably present it (unless they are in Los Angeles and DreamWorks wants to make a movie). Opera singers suit it (Bryn Terfel is an inspired Sweeney). The New York Philharmonic has recorded the score and makes it sound great.

But a proper artist with a knife has come along and cut “Sweeney” down to size. This is the cast recording of John Doyle’s current Broadway production in which the 10-member cast doubles as the orchestra. This is “Sweeney Todd” as grand Guignol chamber opera, and it has never been nastier, funnier or scarier, although it has been more musical.

This startlingly lifelike recording provides no place to hide. The accompaniment can sound thin, but all the musical lines are there, and every one stands out. The singers really stand out. As the barber who turns his customers into the ingredients for meat pies, Michael Cerveris is an intensely angry, compelling and bizarrely exuberant Sweeney, his edge sharp as his deadly knives. Patti LuPone (she plays the tuba -- an oomph here, a pah pah there), as Mrs. Lovett, who bakes the meat pies, has a killer sense of timing, so to speak.

But the rest of the cast also catches even the most avid Sweeney fan off guard. In the end, it is Sondheim himself who has no place to hide. Every word, every note hits its mark. Unlike those campy “Sondheim Sings” CDs, this recording is the purest revelation of his naked genius.

-- Mark Swed

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A tale needing eyewitnesses

“See What I Wanna See”

Original cast recording

(Ghostlight Records)

* * 1/2

IF it were up to Michael John LaChiusa (“The Wild Party,” “Marie Christine”), Broadway would be a much more adventurous, more interesting, more artistic, more relevant place. And a great big mess. Those are the kinds of musicals he writes, and it is hard not to root for him, to hope that he will someday get it right. “See What I Wanna See,” which was produced off-Broadway last year at the Public Theater in New York, is just such a mess, at least on recording.

Still, there is much to admire in LaChiusa’s concept, his words and sometimes his music. This is a show that tries hard to say something as it intricately transfers Japanese short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa to New York City. Based on “In a Grove,” which Akira Kurosawa turned into “Rashomon,” the first half is a nasty tale of rape in Central Park.

In the second half, a priest loses his faith. Serviceable music and lyrics (there is little dialogue) are straightforwardly effective. Emotion is direct and the songs dark and jazzy, with Japanese bits thrown in. But the greater nuance is reserved for an elaborate theatrical situation about the ways we deceive ourselves and see only what we want to see. This is a smart show with a talented five-member cast -- Marc Kudisch, Aaron Lohr, Idina Menzel, Henry Stram and Mary Testa -- but it is one meant more for the stage than the stereo.

-- M.S.

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Emotion with social relevance

“Billy Elliot”

Original cast recording

(Decca Broadway)

* * * 1/2

HE’S doing it again. The boy boxer who wants to be a dancer has audiences cheering him on anew, this time in a London stage production that just won the Olivier Award for best new musical. Doing what musicals do best, this one ventures deeper into the emotions of the story told in the 2000 movie. In particular, it better conveys Billy’s social context, as the landmark 1984-85 miners’ strike, of which his father and older brother are a part, tests the resolve of their community in England’s industrial northeast. The everyday world resounds with workers’ anthems and bittersweet folk tunes, while in Mrs. Wilkinson’s ballet classes, Billy finds his own special music.

For the latter, composer Elton John lets his signature blues-rock sound propel such songs as “Born to Boogie,” in which Haydn Gwynne’s Mrs. Wilkinson goes honky-tonk as she declares “Gotta move it’s a fact / You were born to react,” and “Electricity,” in which wonder suffuses Liam Mower’s Billy as he describes dancing as “Electricity, sparks inside of me / And I’m free, I’m free.” Liberation is also the theme of the music hall-style romp “Expressing Yourself,” in which Billy and his fellow individualist, the cross-dressing Michael (Brad Kavanagh), proclaim: “Everyone is different / It’s the natural state / It’s the facts, it’s plain to see.” (Lee Hall, who wrote the movie script, also wrote the musical’s book and lyrics.) The story’s scope isn’t entirely discernible on the album, but if you listen close, you’ll understand all those reports about free-flowing tears. A bonus disc contains three of the songs as sung by John, worth the asking price alone to hear him bawl the final “I’m free” of “Electricity” as a personal declaration of independence.

-- Daryl H. Miller

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Finding courage in their songs

“The Color Purple”

Original Broadway cast recording

(Angel Records)

* *

THEY’RE called the blues, but they’re imbued with every color of human emotion. When this show sings them, it conveys moods as defiant, resilient and playful as the source material in Alice Walker’s timeless novel. Too often, though, the blues, juke-joint, gospel and other sounds appropriately matched to this story set in rural Georgia, in the first half of the 20th century, give way to generic light jazz of the sort wafting from today’s easy-listening radio stations.

Faith, love and solidarity are central to this story of women who inspire one another to acts of personal courage. The challenges they face are bluntly encapsulated by the heroine’s husband when he contemptuously reminds her, “You’re poor, you’re black, you’re ugly, you’re a woman.” Celie, portrayed by LaChanze, is by then ready to stand up to him because of what she’s learned from the no-nonsense Sofia (Felicia P. Fields), who roars “Hell, No!” to spousal abuse, and from the free-spirited bar singer Shug (Elisabeth Withers-Mendes), who whispers, almost prayerfully, that Celie is “Too Beautiful for Words.”

Musically and emotionally, these songs -- by pop writers/Broadway first-timers Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray -- hit the right notes, as do Shug’s big, sexy, party-hearty number, “Push Da Button,” and the radiant duet that wraps Shug’s and Celie’s voices around each other as they ask, “What About Love?”

-- D.H.M.

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Mobile home court is in session

“The Great American Trailer Park Musical”

Original cast recording

(Sh-K-Boom Records)

* 1/2

TODAY on Jerry Springer: stereotype-abusing musicals and the audiences who love them. Composer-lyricist David Nehls and script writer Betsy Kelso aim for double-wide humor in this sendup of package-store-visiting, QVC-shopping, trailer-dwelling folk from the wrong side of the tracks. The result tickled some sensibilities and rankled others when, after an encouraging introduction at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival, it eked out a mere 10 weeks off-Broadway late last year.

The setting is a North Florida trailer park where the residents include an agoraphobic housewife (Kaitlin Hopkins) and her exasperated husband (Shuler Hensley), the new next-door stripper (the single-named Orfeh) who catches his eye, and three neighborhood chatterboxes (Linda Hart, Marya Grandy and Leslie Kritzer) who know what’s going on behind every factory-manufactured wall.

Songs reflect the presumed musical tastes of such households: country, of course, as well as old-time rock ‘n’ roll and ‘80s disco. The tunes -- delivered in Dolly Parton chirps and Merle Haggard twangs -- are too specific to the plot (what little there is of it) to be fully enjoyable on their own. Still, it’s hard to resist the humor in such lyrics as “Just like clothes from Wal-Mart / My love life’s fallin’ apart” or the parting exhortation to “make like a nail / and press on.”

D.H.M.

*

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