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| Phoenix native stars in ‘Sweeney Todd’ | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 13, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
A little more than a year after she warbled, squawked and hilariously fumbled her way through arias — reprising her Tony-nominated 2005 role as the tone-deaf American singer Florence Foster Jenkins in “Souvenir” for Arizona Theatre Company — she’s starring in a show that’s easier on the ears. If not exactly easier on the stomach. Kaye plays the cannibal pie baker Mrs. Lovett in the Broadway touring production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” playing Tuesday night through April 20 at Tempe’s Gammage Auditorium. It’s a role Kaye understudied, under Patti LuPone, during “Sweeney’s” 2005-’06 Broadway run. (Her touring co-star, David Hess, meanwhile, understudied the title character on the Great White Way.) And she counts the gothic Sondheim show — about a mad barber, falsely imprisoned and exiled for 15 years, who returns to gritty London to slash throats in revenge only to see his victims get deliciously repurposed at Lovett’s pie shop downstairs — one of the actress’ favorite shows. After all, she has logged time in four productions of it. “I love that role,” she says. “I’d said after the first one, I’d drop anything and do it again.” Yet when it came time to hit the road on tour earlier this year, Kaye, who won a 1988 Tony for her Carlotta in “The Phantom of the Opera,” admitted to not being sure how audiences would take to the show. For one thing, there’s the grisly subject matter. (Consider yourself dared: Try to eat a chicken pot pie post-“Sweeney.”) And then there’s director John Doyle’s radical, impressionistic Broadway staging — in which 10 actors, posing as inmates at an asylum, perform more than two dozen roles and (here’s the whammy) play all the musical instruments as well. Kaye, as Lovett, tackles the keyboard, bells, triangle and the mother of all horns, the tuba. “I’m so much better (on the tuba) than I was,” Kaye chuckles. “I’m not good. But I’m so much better.” Kaye now admits she shouldn’t have worried about audiences on tour. Those who bought tickets to the live show in the wake of Tim Burton’s critically acclaimed 2007 film adaptation — starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and a river of spurted blood — have found the stage version more artful and (as those of us who caught it on Broadway can attest) satisfyingly creepier. As for the more whimsical touches, the instrument-playing ensemble, well, audiences have taken to that, too. “The crucial thing this production asks,” Kaye recalls Doyle telling his cast, “is that people be willing to use their imaginations.” Only not too much imagination. At least not if people plan on going out for a bite after the show. Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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