By now, you might think you know Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But with the dead rising from all sides, Unitiive Theatre’s immersive production of the horror-musical mainstay puts visitors to the roughly 60-seat Longmont venue right in the middle of the mayhem with its thrust stage setup. “It is very obvious there is an audience there, so we play that up,” says Kirk Slingluff, who also stage manages and performs stagehand duties at Unitiive Theatre in addition to directing the show. “Our version combines elements from interactive experiences, such as haunted houses and immersive theater, with the traditional musical theater form. It allows for some frights while also fostering a sense of community and tenderness.”
Based on the chilling pages of a 19th-century penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, the celebrated musical adaptation by Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler takes the audience on a macabre musical journey through the foggy streets of London in 1785.
The familiar story revolves around a barber who, after spending years falsely imprisoned, decides to return to London to exact revenge on the dishonest judge who destroyed his life. Upon arriving in the city, Sweeney befriends Mrs. Lovett, who owns the pie shop below where he used to live. Together, they go on a murderous rampage, with Sweeney killing victims as he shaves them and Mrs. Lovett turning the dead into meat pies for her customers.
“When Unitiive’s management team realized they had an open slot during Halloween time, this spooky show just felt like the way to go,” Slingluff says. “It’s our first Sondheim piece, and we knew it would come with difficulties, but we really wanted to go after it.”
But for Slingluff and the rest of the team at Unitiive Theatre, founded last year with a focus on education and intimate stagings of big-time shows, that meant turning down some of the play’s more over-the-top elements.
“In musical theater, you normally have a lot of lines to create these sharp, flat stage pictures; I can’t do that because the space is so tight and that would cut off visibility for the audience,” Slingluff says. “We have been focusing on black-box naturalism and how to make it feel as real as possible. The actors are too close to the audience to exaggerate anything without it becoming farcical.”
‘Explore the horror’
Slingluff closely studied the original Broadway cast album in preparation for directing the musical; however, he refused to watch any versions of the story because he didn’t want any other interpretations to influence his artistic vision for the piece. Rather than staging a replica production, Slingluff drew inspiration from the Viennese, German-language musical Elisabeth, about a woman obsessed with death.
“That show has the dead coming back to tell a story, and that’s what my concept is based on,” he explains. “In the introduction, we’re in an asylum, watching these bodies come back to life from death, so our entire cast, minus the three that don’t die, is in dead makeup. The entire program is, in essence, a horrifying recounting of how these corpses died by the people who were killed and did the killing.”
Once these corpses have been brought back to life, they surround the audience to complete the eerie atmosphere of 18th-century London. Patrons can choose to interact or place a card on their table indicating they’d rather be left alone. Additionally, there is designated “splash zone” seating where brave theatergoers can get up close and personal with the bloodshed in their provided custom ponchos.
“Table seating opens up the audience and breaks the barriers that rows of seating can put up,” Slingluff says. “In addition to the immersive elements, our biggest challenge was figuring out how we fit a show that requires so many sets into the space. We have the stage broken up into quadrants; the core quadrants are Sweeney’s barber shop up-right on a platform, down-right is the pie shop, up-left is where the oven is for those scenes, and down-left is Mrs. Lovett’s outside eating area, among other things.”
The set had to accommodate both the adult cast and the teen cast, who will be performing on select dates throughout the run. This is Unitiive’s first attempt at double-casting a production with young performers, and they have found that the junior company gives the story a fresh perspective.
“Although they do have some cuts that the adults don’t have, they are doing a fairly faithful version of Sweeney Todd,” Slingluff says. “I have added some little things to help the teens lean into the show’s comedy, while I’ve directed the adults to explore the horror in the musical.”
As the dead awaken and the living watch, Sweeney Todd at Unitiive Theatre delivers two interpretations of Sondheim’s dark odyssey about retribution in an interactive setting. By staging a well-known musical in an immersive environment, Slingluff hopes to demonstrate to audiences that theater does not always have to be a passive, complacent experience. Instead, this new production argues, it can be one that engages, excites and evolves.
ON STAGE: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Various times through Oct. 31, The Unitiive Theatre, 800 S. Hover Road, Suite 30, Longmont. Tickets here.
