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.
While I expected to enjoy Quad City Music Guild's Mary Poppins on Friday, I didn't anticipate being as mesmerized as I was by this stage adaptation of the Disney film. The movie's songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are there, with additional tunes by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, and a book by Julian Fellowes that adds elements from P.L. Travers' children's-lit classic. And the result, while three hours long, is an improvement on its cinematic inspiration, with the additional material even more interesting than the familiar story elements.
