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| re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 02:34 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 02:28 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou - bobby2 09:40 pm EDT 08/18/17 | |
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| The onlly changes in principal roles during the run were the four you mention. And I never saw an understudy. 11 times, and never an understudy. I liked Sarah Rice, but I probably preferred Joslyn's more comic and quirkier take on the role. Sarah Rice sang it beautifully, and she was very good. Joslyn perhaps sang it a bit more excitingly if less precisely. Rice actually had a real trill. I mean, even in opera, not many people have a real trill. Of course, most people know Joslyn from the video, and she has a bad rep because of that. I think her performance changed a bit over the long time she played it. And it was a mistake to put "Green Finch" in the higher key for her. But part of the problem with her performance in the video may be that the sequence was shot early in the morning the night after a performance, or at least that's what the production's musical director, Jim Coleman, wrote years ago on Broadwayworld. Or at least I remember him writing that. I just did a search for that post, but I think it was so long ago that it was before the big crash over there, and it didn't come up. Someone else wrote there more recently that Angelina Reaux said that Joslyn had the flu when it was shot. Which is a bit odd since Reaux was long gone from the production by the time the video was shot (thanks to getting seriously hurt when the chute malfunctioned one night in D.C. and mangled her legs), but perhaps Reaux and Joslyn talked later. I thought Garber was fine, but when Groenendaal took over, it was much better. Not just his singing. I thought he was better in the role in every way. I know that people also don't like him in the video. I get why people don't like Joslyn. I don't get why people don't like him. I think he's one of the better people in the video. Yeah, I saw Loudon and Hearn twice. Loudon was so all over the place. Some of her choices were fascinating and very effective. Some were fascinating but arguably misguided. Interestingly, her performance was generally smaller than Lansbury's, but then she'd suddenly mug right out to the audience, which was so odd given that much of her performance was if anything on the small and almost naturalistic side. But her great moments were really great, and she sure was different than Lansbury. Hearn was also very different from Cariou. Oddly, years later, he said that when he first played the role, he imitated Cariou. Maybe he just meant that he imitated Cariou by playing it left-handed because he thought they wanted that. Cariou is left-handed. And then one day (according to Hearn), Sondheim said to him, "I wanted a right-handed Sweeney, and now I've had two left-handed Sweeneys." And Hearn told him that he was right-handed, but he trained himself to do it all as if he was right-handed. Maybe he thought he was imitating Cariou's acting choices, too, but everyone I know agrees: he was very different. Anyway, when I first saw Hearn, I thought he was promising in the role. Less detailed than Cariou, he seemed to push for anger in some places, although not as much as he did later. Well, I should amend that just a little. When I first saw him, he played anger very inappropriately when the Judge came in to the shop, actually yelling at him a couple of times. He played it as if he was so angry that he couldn't control it and so he'd yell at the Judge, and then he'd realize it, and lower his voice. At some point between the first time I saw him and the second, he toned that down, and then he toned it down more on the tour. But he sure went far with the anger in other places, and I just feel he's pushing for it. Cariou woulld erupt. Hearn seems very calculated, working hard to reach that anger. He lacked some of the comedy that Cariou found but Cariou took a while to find some of that. In some places, Hearn just didn't find anything very interesting and in other places he pushed, but he had some good moments. Unfortunately, at least to judge from the national tour video, his performance got worse rather than better. Still, over the years, having seen so many Sweeneys, it seems to me that he was one of the better ones (just because there weren't many later ones I liked much). But there are moments that I find silly in his performance. Maybe it's because his performance was too big for the camera, although I can't help but feel that if it was coming from someplace really connected, it could be big without seeming silly. And I never understood why he seems so sour with Lansbury in "A Little Priest." With LuPone later, he adjusted that. Really, I don't get why people love that tour video. To me, it's like Lansbury is in one theater and he's in another. Each is giving a performance that seems independent of what the other one is doing. EDIT: I'm adding something that I just found that I wrote back in January. For me, Lansbury was perhaps the most sociopathic and delusional of Lovetts. In a way, it was especially odd that she was followed by Loudon, who was the sanest of Lovetts (except when it came to her belief that Sweeney might return her love), perhaps because she didn't want to copy Lansbury. With Loudon, we got Lovett gradually breaking down through the pressure of the events of act two. It made her, for better or worse (or a bit of both), very different from anyone else I've seen. More than other Lovetts, she seemed to be really falling apart as the second act went on. Lansbury had little sanity to lose, which made it much easier to believe that she could chop up those bodies and cook them. Loudon seemed to be playing that everything, including that, was taking a terrible toll on her. |
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| re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou | |
| Posted by: bobby2 04:10 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou - AlanScott 02:28 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
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| Thank you so much for your detailed response! I've printed it out to save! One thing I'd love to hear you expand on is when you say Loudon was "Some of her choices were fascinating and very effective. Some were fascinating but arguably misguided" I'm so fascinated Loudon in the role. Mostly because we almost went to see it when I was a small kid and then my parents thought it would be inappropriate and at the last minute we went across the street to Sugar Babies instead which I didn't really like. Then as I grew up and I became to realize that Sweeney was such a classic....well I always felt damn. I could have seen it. (granted it probably would have gone over my head at the time and maybe even freaked me out so I guess my parents were right. But still......This and Carrie are my two big theater going regrets. |
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| re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou | |
| Posted by: Michael_Portantiere 10:17 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Link to my interview with Len Cariou - bobby2 04:10 am EDT 08/19/17 | |
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| This is far, far less detailed than Alan's response, but I remember there were two reasons why I really didn't care for Loudon in the role: (1) her lower-class-Brit accent sounded way off, and I don't think anyone can work in that role if she can't do the accent properly; (2) as I recall, Loudon belted ALL of the high notes -- I don't remember her going into a soprano extension at all, if she even had one -- and I didn't like the way that sounded. | |
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