By Claire DeRoin~
The Morningside College Lyric Theatre Ensemble presented a program of selections from Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim on Wednesday, April 18, in the Levitt Art Gallery in the Eppley building.
The gallery provided an intimate environment for the performance, and a reception afterward included slices of pie that Kate Saulsbury, a director of the group, assured that audience were “meat-free.”
The program was opened by a full-chorus piece. The wall of sound produced by the entire group was astounding. On comparison to the original Broadway cast, the Morningside Lyric Theatre Ensemble comes out on top. Every harmony in the full-chorus pieces were dead on and left the small gallery ringing with overtones.
Nolley Vereen, who played the title role, could not have been cast better. He portrayed the morbid barber with such finesse and general eeriness that several audience members recoiled as he walked towards the front row. The sinister nature of the character was unleashed in Vereen’s spectacular performance.
Autumn Knipp played Mrs. Lovett, a baker stricken with love for Sweeney Todd. A lot of Mrs. Lovett’s plays on words and humorous quips in the piece, “A Little Priest” were lost on the audience due to an overdone Cockney British accent and hysterical shrieking and laughter. Knipp did, however, capture the bizarreness of the character quite well.
Two supporting characters were Judge Turpin, played by Nick Anderson, and Tobias, played by Blair Remmers.
Judge Turpin, the man responsible for ruining Sweeney Todd’s life is a character in love, and Anderson makes that completely believable. While his dramatic death scene was performed well, his star moment in the program was in his duet, “Pretty Women,” with Vereen.
Tobias, a young boy taken in by Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, was played by Blair Remmers, who executed the role well. Remmers delivered a piece, “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” with excellent diction. He spit out syllables at a pretty rapid rate and didn’t miss a word.
Kate Saulsbury and Shannon Salyards served as artistic directors of the group.
Kate Saulsbury, director, said that Sweeney Todd was chosen as the production because it was challenging. “We knew that we had a group of students with the potential to deliver an incredible production and we wanted to give them the opportunity to do so,” she said.
Saulsbury continues, “Shannon and I are incredibly impressed with the students in this production. The Morningside College Lyric Theatre Ensemble is not an auditioned group, but a class that is offered, and we have students involved from high school age through college seniors. We demanded a great deal from these students and expected that they approach this show as young professionals would.”
The only thing that could have made the performance better was if there were more pieces that featured the entire cast. I cannot praise this group as a whole highly enough. Each time the cast joined together, the audience leaned forward, trying to watch each and every character, since the space was a little too small to be able to sit back and take in the group as a whole.
Leave a Reply