By Harry Haun
07 Nov 2005

Truth to tell, she has taken a slide from practice in recent years. "I studied from when I was eight until my senior year in high school, and then it was dabbling with the cello off and on since then. But I picked it up for this, and now I'm enthusiastic about the cello."

Magnuson was hired a week after he graduated from Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music so he didn't even get a chance to put the cello in the case. "I love the fact that Anthony's expression is an extension of his cello. Everything he does or says is what he feels." He said he didn't have a problem juggling the acting and instrumentalizing. His reasoning was quite logical: "When you forget about one, the other kinda takes over."

Yes, agreed Mark Jacoby, "it is hard to play a musical instrument, and it is hard to do my role." He plays the evil judge—sans a beard. "The director didn't want an extreme villain type. He wanted the guy to be very straightforward and—I don't want to say `ordinary.' He wanted an ordinary man who has an extraordinary problem." In the makeshift orchestra scheme of things, Jacobs is the horn section. "I played actively as a high school person and in college, and I wanted to be a professional trumpeter, but then I got more interested in the acting, and that kinda drifted away from me so, when this job came up, I got back to it as quickly as I could." Practice got him up to professional speed.

Paul Gemignani, who conducted the original Sweeney Todd and just about every Sondheim show on Broadway before and since, was perfectly content to let the born-again tyro orchestra fight it out for themselves on stage. He was attending the opening night as the proud parent of The Beadle, Alexander Gemignani, last seen on Broadway as John Hinckley among the Assassins but here as grist for Sweeney's mill.

Since he spent more time at the keyboard than anybody else, there was a certain torch-passing sense that a Gemignani was in control. The music they made, he said, "came out of necessity when we were staging things. There is so much other stuff to worry about. The last thing you're concerned about is acting. You're so concerned about everybody else, like giving somebody a cue or moving a chair. It's like you are your own last concern. That's why it's an ensemble piece. Everyone would say the same thing: It's like `I don't want to mess this up. It'll throw him off if I do something wrong here.'"

An unforeseen asset about Gemignani in the show is that he looks the period. In fact, with the handlebar mustache, he resembles Laird Cregar, an actor he'd never heard of. Cregar's last film, Hangover Square, is said to be high on Sondheim's list of favorites. A much-used character actor in '40s films, Cregar wanted to give the demented pianist he played in that film a romantic veneer so he shed a hundred pounds, but the diet cost him his life at age 28.

Among the first-nighters welcoming Sweeney Todd back to town were three Tony-winning Texans—Phylicia Rashad, Tommy Tune and Terrence McNally. Tune, who'll start rehearsing his 22-tuned Doctor Doolittle for touring Nov. 28, was comparing notes before the show with Nancy Anderson, who just bounced back to town from a Doolittle tour that did little. McNally arrived from rehearsals with Douglas Sills, Lillias White and David Marshall Grant in Some Men, a play he will premiere shortly in Pennsylvania.

Other Tony winners: Phyllis Newman, Heidi Ettinger, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Kathleen Marshall, Daryl Roth and a pair of Master Class winners who've worked the wilds of Ravina with Cerveris and/or LuPone, Zoe Caldwell and Audra MacDonald. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz and Drama Desk Award-winning costumer Isaac Mizrahi, both currently going back for seconds (Cruz via Beauty of the Father at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II on Jan. 10 and Mizrahi via Barefoot in the Park at the Cort on Feb. 16).

Longtime LuPone fanatic John Benjamin Hickey zipped in from that other coast between Million Dollar Baby films, after finishing Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima flick (Flags of Our Fathers) and before starting Hilary Swank's L.A. riots saga (Freedom Riders). Danny Gurwin, on the arm of one of his Little Women (Megan McGinnis), took in Sweeney Todd before taking off for California to prepare for a pilot about gay thirtysomethings. It's called "Christopher Street," but—surprise, surprise—it takes place in New Orleans. "Filming is to start in the French Quarter in February," he said, "so, hopefully, everything will be squared away by that time."

Then there was Sondheim, ever the phantom at his own premieres. The most unoccupied table of the evening had the sign "Sondheim & Guests." The Great Man had taken shelter at an adjacent table where he went into an intense huddle with his frequent collaborator John Weidman. Gradually, the cast and assorted stars clustered around him and he was expansive, giving every indication that he was profoundly pleased with the evening. And that was as close as anybody go to a press statement. At one point, John Barlow, (not for nothing is he a public relations kingpin) pried Sondheim loose from his table and paraded him through a papparazzi gauntlet where flashbulbs exploded. No actual words transpired. Nothing, nada, as Cindy Adams might say.

Everything Stephen Sondheim had to say was up there on the stage of the Eugene O'Neill

The cast gives their opening night curtain call.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

View article on single page

Previous Page   1 | 2 Next Page