S.F. Opera delivers a ‘Sweeney Todd’ that’s a cut above

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim’s exuberantly sanguinary 1979 tribute to the penny dreadfuls of Victorian London, Death came calling so often he might as well have been a featured member of the cast.

Most of the corpses in this maniacally dark entertainment get dispatched with a straight razor, the chosen weapon of the “demon barber” whose quest for revenge on a couple of entirely deserving malefactors expands at midpoint to encompass the entire human race.

There’s no flinching from the extravagance of Sondheim’s creation — the ferocity of its nightmare vision, or the untrammeled verbal and musical virtuosity with which he gives that vision flesh.

Part of the genius of Sondheim’s score is the unpredictability of its tone, which can turn from chilling to farcical and back again on no more than a moment’s notice.

Blythe has always been notable for the ease with which she straddles the lines between operatic and popular music, bringing vigor and vocal heft to the latter and a rare degree of communicative ease to the former.

[...] even by those standards, Saturday’s performance was a landmark, at once dominant and wide-open, and as nimble as one of the cats used as pie filling by Mrs. Lovett’s leading competitor.

Both Mulligan (who memorably sang the title role in the company’s 2012 productions of John Adams’ “Nixon in China”) and Blythe are primarily opera singers, as is the rest of the cast.

[...] there is a healthy cottage industry devoted to pedantic fretting about whether works such as “Sweeney” really belong in an opera house.

On the strength of the piece itself, there’s scarcely any question that “Sweeney” — with its intricately theme-driven score and brilliant libretto — can take its place alongside many of the theatrical works the War Memorial has witnessed.

The broader and more symphonically ambitious the music got, the more richly the performance emerged (organist Simon Barry helped things out with an attention-grabbing opening flourish); but lighter, more rhythmically dexterous ditties such as “By the Sea” tended to sag.

The individual members of Ian Robertson’s Opera Chorus suffered especially from the amplification glitches, but the ensemble sang robustly while milling around the darkened streets of London looking as if they were waiting to become Sweeney’s next victims.