02
May
2016
"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit, and it's filled with people who are filled with shit. And the vermin of the world inhabit it, and it goes by the name of London."
No lyrics better summed up the setting for a musical than these particular lines from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Augustana College's latest production delivers in filling the Potter Theatre with the polluted gloom and human hell that was 1840s London.
I'm on record stating that I was "Les Mis-ed out" after seeing three local productions of Les Misérables, and facing a fourth, over a year-and-a-half span. Yet after attending the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's version on Friday, my love for the material is renewed, as director Jerry Jay Cranford's staging adds intimacy while still possessing the grandeur of composers Alain Boublil's and Claude-Michel Schönberg's musical masterpiece.
