Much of Healdsburg’s Halloween energy is expressed by scarecrows surrounding the Plaza, the Dia de Muertos celebration next Sunday, Saturday’s Howl-O-Ween Pet Parade and the frightening prospect of a SMART station coming to town. But there’s plenty of dread to spare, and the Raven Players bring their fair share to town starting Friday night, with a three-week run of a Stephen Sondheim musical.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street features a large cast and a live orchestra to match. For Raven Players artistic director Steven David Martin, it’s been a long time coming.
“I first saw Sweeney Todd in London in 1980 when it was brand-spanking-new, and I walked out of the theater mesmerized by the show,” Martin told The Tribune. “I had never seen anything like it. Since then, it has been on my list of all-time favorite shows, musicals and non-musicals.”
But liking a musical and being able to stage it are two different things. Fortunately both Martin and his musical director for this production, Les Pfutzenreuter, have proven themselves more than capable.
Including at least one musical per season has been a constant in Martin’s tenure, which began 13 years ago—an auspicious anniversary when one is talking about a play like this one. “Of course, I scheduled it at Halloween because of its bloody nature and high body count,” Martin told The Tribune.
Since the play was a popular movie several years back, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter and directed by Tim Burton, it might be more well known than, say, Sondheim’s kabuki-styled Pacific Overtures of 1976. “That was a gorgeous, gorgeous score, but it just didn’t work dramatically,” Pfutzenreuter said. “And that’s why it just flopped on Broadway.”
It wasn’t Sondheim’s only flop. There have been several, but so too have there been enough hits to assure his legendary status: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, A Little Night Music and Into the Woods. And of course writing the lyrics to West Side Story.
Pfutzenreuter, 70, has been involved with the Raven since he took on the double roles of director and music director for Miss Saigon—a Vietnam-era take on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly—in 2008. While the production received good reviews and was well attended, it was his handling of the music that stood out. Which suited the trained musician just fine.
“I loved doing shows as music director because really, you know, my forte is in doing the music,” he said, adding that growing up in the Midwest he hoped to be a band director. Although he played the trumpet in high school and college, at South Dakota State University his teacher told him he might want to concentrate on orchestra conducting instead of brass.
Inspired and redirected, he earned his master’s in conducting at Northern Colorado University and spent much of his career teaching music at Mendocino College in Ukiah. He has music-directed many plays over the years, not just at the college and the Raven but at Ukiah Players Theater and the Sixth Street Playhouse among others.
But his list of credits with the Raven is extensive and familiar, including most recently Bridges of Madison County and, over the previous dozen years, many of the familiar titles in the musical theater canon: Les Misérables, Evita, Gypsy, Hello Dolly and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Sweeney Todd however, is a bit, well, different. In fact it took awhile to catch on, many early audiences finding it marginally … distasteful. But it’s got some great tunes with catchy lyrics, double-edged dialog and, in the right hands, it spells H-I-T.
Some of the talent onstage includes the semi-ubiquitous Katie Watts-Whitaker as pie-maker Mrs. Lovett, and Garet Waterhouse of Santa Rosa, long absent from the Raven stage, as the title character. Some think the show might be stolen by juvenile actor William Young as Tobias Ragg, who makes a minor part memorable.
In a play such as Sweeney Todd, the large cast and orchestra mean that during performances it’s the music director who steers the show. Continuing the lucky pattern: “We have a 13-piece orchestra with strings, woodwinds, brass and piano and drums,” said musical director Pfutzenreuter, “[as well as] a nice group of players of teachers, adults and students.”
While enthusiastically impressed with Martin’s skills as a director and his handling of the actors, once the rehearsals and the run-throughs are over and the curtain goes up, the show is in Pfutzenreuter’s hands.
“I’ve got to keep my act together through the whole show,” he said, “and so do the musicians in the orchestra, and of course the singers on stage, you know. It’s like a dance. We have to all do it together. I’m conducting it. I’m waving my arms.”
‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ opens Friday and plays weekends through Nov. 8. See the Calendar for details or visit raventheater.org.
