Credit: Another Soup
Coming to the King’s Head after debuting in Edinburgh last year, buried in Lovett + Todd is the seed of an interesting idea: what if the infamous demon barber of Fleet Street was, in fact, a hapless innocent who was manipulated and framed by his pie-baking partner-in-crime? But instead of a fun piece of musical revisionism, what we get here just comes across as poor fan fiction.
It probably helps if you haven’t seen Stephen Sondheim’s masterful take on the legend – but not much. The prospect of delving into Mrs Lovett’s pre-Todd past is tantalising, but Dave Spencer’s book immediately squanders it on a muddled, over-complicated origin story involving a dead mother and an orphan-killing sister (guess what the kids’ bodies end up baked in).
There are some satirical jabs at profiteering from the poor, but these get lost in the convolutions of a plot that contrives to send an on-the-run Cornelia Lovett and her sister, Amelia, to London. Once there, they adopt cockney accents, Cornelia opens her pie-shop and Amelia largely drifts into the background, her story basically dispensed with after much build-up.
But if that write-up still sounds fun, the experience of watching the show is different, because you have to deal with a bunch of dangling plot threads and the messy meandering of the production (as also directed by Spencer). Scenes float disconnectedly onward, without any real sense of momentum, as Lovett decides to seduce the mild-mannered Todd (Daniel Collard, in a permanent state of ‘tortured’) into providing fresh meat for her pies with the slice of his razor-blade.
I love a juicy slab of melodrama, as well as a wink in my direction from a show that knows how to send itself up without falling apart. And when (seemingly as much by chance as anything else) Lovett + Todd’s tongue wanders into the right part of its cheek, it’s guiltily enjoyable. But the best examples of this type of show know the virtue of simplicity. They paint in broad, primary colours and keep things clear.
What’s fundamentally lacking here is even a basic explanation of why anything is actually happening the way that it is. While Todd’s revenge for being exiled and having his wife stolen from him might still just be an excuse for some funny songs and bloodshed in Sondheim’s version, they are clear, narratively meaty justifications. Here, ‘capitalism’ might be the most charitable guess at a motive for Cornelia.
The effect is actually to devalue Mrs Lovett’s character – strip away any vestige of emotional complexity, believable motivation or compelling relationships and you end up with a cackling villainess who lacks enough substance to fill a pie, let alone 90 minutes. Louise Torres-Ryan does her best with the role, but she has very little to work with – beyond ‘scheming’.
And it doesn’t help that, barring a few witty lyrics, Jo Turner’s music is a grind (another unfortunate comparison with Sondheim). The relentless rhyming of the songs is funny, initially, but by the hundredth take on ‘Cornelia’, you’ll likely want to scream. And with the exception of ‘Push it Down’, the score is pretty unmemorable, with too many clunky lyrics landing with a dull thud.
The ensemble play nicely to the audience, but the interactive bits add nothing to the show and just come off awkwardly. And that’s the main problem – from lots of superfluous songs about bawdy London life to an out-of-nowhere tango between Lovett and Todd, we’re left with a jumble of undigested ideas. In the end, there’s too much gristle and not enough meat here.
