Album Review: SWEENEY TODD Cast Recording Lacking Flavor

Heigh Ho, dear lovely rainbow tribe, welcome back to Bobby’s CD sandbox where we offer our broken-down breakdowns of new music releases. So, strap in and get ready, as Bobby goes on the record ABOUT the record.

This week’s album entry in the BobbyFiles comes from Warner Music Group’s Arts Music and Reprise Records label (what a mouthful!) and is the much-anticipated new Broadway cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s SWEENEY TODD.  And it’s a nice album, dear friends.   It’s certainly very well recorded - the microphone work, the mixing, the mastering, all of the technical aspects of the recording are all well executed by a team of engineers and professionals who, one suspects, couldn’t make a mistake at their work if they tried to.  This is a very well-done recording, kudos and rainbows to them.

Now, about these performances…  It is a pretty fair bet that any recording of SWEENEY TODD will have merit.  The material alone will give way to an album worth listening to.  So when the time comes to dive into a recording of SWEENEY you WILL enjoy yourself - especially with this orchestra and all of the lush, gorgeous, full arrangements that give the band such rich material with which to play.  TBH, dear Bobby readers, it is the joy of hearing Mr. Sondheim’s music by this orchestra on our noise-cancelling headphones that kept us swaying and smiling, throughout the album.  They are the winners, here, as are the listeners that enjoy orchestral work.   A-plus to the band.  The actors, though, are in need of a little, shall we say, grading on the curve.

Little Bobby will let a few raindrops fall with this rainbow and add a little critic to this critique but we should start by saying that it is more than apparent that every actor on this recording has, very clearly, gone to school, studied their hearts out, and learned the technique that puts their beautiful voices (and we mean every single voice to be heard) out there for the world to hear.  The ensemble is especially gorgeous on those dirge-filled “Sweeney Todds” and the deliciously sped-up CITY ON FIRE - the most thrilling version of the song we’ve, yet, heard.  The truth is that the cast sounds gorgeous… only, with qualifications.  Mr. Groban sings the role of Mr. Todd more beautifully than, maybe, it has ever been sung before, even though the acting is a little too heavy-handed, more than a few times throughout the album, most notably at the start of the show, which leaves little room for Benjamin Barker’s intensity to grow.  Jordan Fisher, a young man who has become a personal fave actor of this writer in the past couple of years, has such a pretty voice that you just want to melt, but it sounds like a pop singer performing Sondheim, with lots of scoops and breathy air and vocal pushing, and we found it distracting, noticeably so, as to disappoint a bit.  John Rapson is a wonderful Beadle Bamford, although we sure do miss the longer version of PARLOR SONGS that features Mrs. Lovett, but at least the track is on the album, unlike the 2006 and 2012 recordings, which removed it completely - but then, of course, maybe the number is truncated in this new production, which Bobby has not yet seen.  Whatever may be the case, it is nice that Mr. Rapson gets to document the character to this extent.  Nicholas Christopher also does nice work with Adolfo Perilli, exhibiting wonderful diction in a version of the song that is a tad slower than usual on THE CONTEST - and we really do miss the second half of the number - has it just been cut from the script altogether? We don’t know, but what a shame. Jamie Jackson is rather a delight as Judge Turpin, and in lovely voice, an admirable successor to the OG Barber of Fleet Street villain, Edmund Lyndeck, and Maria Bilbao is sheer perfection in her Broadway debut as Johanna, every note she sings is a thing of beauty, especially during the “Johanna” Quartet, Little Bobby’s favorite track on the album.  

The real acting winners of the recording, though, are Ruthie Ann Miles as The Beggar Woman and Gaten Matarazzo in the beloved role of Tobias Ragg - both actors are spot-on in every acting and vocal choice, especially Ms. Miles, whose talkie bits tell us that Lucy was not a common woman - this speaking voice and accent work is that of a more refined lady than that which we usually see from this role - an interesting choice, to be sure.  And Mr. Matarazzo is a Toby for this age, with a honey-toned, soothing, Broadway-trained voice, and acting skills that translate to the recording studio with the right balance of theatricality and mic technique, though it would have been nice to have Toby’s ultimate moment with Sweeney Todd recorded for the album - it’s not as if it would be a spoiler to anyone listening to the recording.  Give us the full and complete journey, won’t you please?
 

And since we just mentioned Ruthie Ann Miles’ accent work, we should talk about the other SWEENEY TODD accents… in the case of Annaleigh Ashford, whose accent work sounds more than a little inconsistent to this writer’s ear, with a “dropped H” here and a “sustained H” there, words where central T’s are dropped and others where they appeared, and any number of choices that make a person wonder if this Mrs. Lovett moved around quite a lot growing up, and her speech patterns are just a reflection of her mercurial geographical upbringing.  But that explanation could not possibly account for the bizarre vocal choices Ms. Ashford makes when singing the songs crafted for her character.  It feels like this great American actress and singer with pipes of gold was simply trying SO hard to get out of the shadow of Angela Lansbury that she went too far in too many other directions, and nobody thought it wise to draw to her attention how off the beaten path she had gone - a shame because there are moments on the album when her voice sounds just gorgeous… until one of those odd choices overshadows the beauty - a pity, to be sure. In the case of Josh Groban, he follows form with his predecessors, almost all of whom opted out of accent work, other than to speak with refined diction and round tones. 

In all, dear Bobby readers, we would not want to discourage anyone from listening to this recording because it is filled with beauty and beautiful sounds, thanks to the musicians, the actors, the terrific Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, the recording technicians, and Mr. Sondheim.  The truth is that any recording of this score is worth listening to, and most people do tend to love the recording that was their first - this will have been the first SWEENEY for many people.  Little Bobby’s first was the original, and that is where we will always go when we have a hankering to hear SWEENEY TODD.  It doesn’t mean that this one isn’t worth being loved for the ways in which it excels because, at the end of the day, SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2023 BROADWAY CAST RECORDING) is a good enough recording to get 

3 1/2 Out Of 5 Rainbows - Put this one in your collection/stream today.

Pick This One Up In Your Amazon Stream: HERE

You Can See And Hear Everything About The New Sweeney Todd On The Webbysite: HERE

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