After more than two months of memorizing, rehearsing, directing, staging and creating, Whitman Drama is prepared to kill it at this year’s annual musical.
Over 150 students, along with director Christopher Gerken, will present “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Nov. 19–21 in the auditorium from 7 to 9 p.m.
Gerken said the musical is about the art of storytelling and, particularly stories about love.
“That may be a weird thing to say, but I think Sweeney Todd is all about love—the different dynamics of love and what love can motivate you to do,” Gerken said.
The musical follows Benjamin Barker, a barber who has been wrongfully imprisoned for 15 years in Australia by the corrupt Judge Turpin, who lusts after Barker’s wife Lucy. Barker escapes prison and returns to London under the alias Sweeney Todd, vowing to take revenge on Judge Turpin and the neighbors who stood by and let him be taken. He ends up in a disturbing relationship with Mrs. Lovett, the owner of a meat pie shop below Todd’s barber shop. Together, Lovett and Todd kill Todd’s clients, grind them up, and mix them into Lovett’s pies.
While the musical is originally set in Victorian England, Gerken decided to set the Whitman production in the early 1980s punk era.
“The juxtaposition between the punk aesthetic and the epic classic opera nature of the play is such a weird yet perfectly fitting juxtaposition,” he said. “This isn’t your parents’ “Sweeney Todd” at all.”
Gerken said “Sweeney Todd” has always been on his list of musicals to direct and this year he knew it was time.
“This year I felt pretty confident that I could have a group of actors that would be willing to get out of their Bethesda bubble in terms of aesthetic and really go for something punky-edgy and embrace it,” Gerken said.
Characters will make the punk theme come alive by displaying mohawks, piercings and flashes of neon-colored hair. In the past, musicals have been centered on one character, but this year’s musical is ensemble-baseda.
Gerken and tech director Harry Cash designed the set to look like the interior of CBGB, an iconic punk club in New York.
“The technical effects add a level of realism and they allow the audience to further suspend their disbelief,” Cash said. “There are certain elements to the show where not having special effects would actually take you out of it [the story.]”
To encourage the community to come to the show, there will be a red carpet banner for people to take pictures and several food trucks available before the musical. The food includes a crepe and meat pies truck, to fit the musical’s theme.
Actor Eli Wasserman said Sweeney Todd stands out because it’s like nothing Whitman has ever performed before.
“We don’t usually do horror and gruesome stuff,” Wasserman said. “This is a lot more in-depth, conceptual and psychological than past years’ musicals.”
Gerken said the show is not going to be as bloody or gory as some might anticipate from other productions.
“I think this is going to be the type of thing where it’s scarier in their mind’s eye with the idea I put in front of them,” Gerken said. “I let their imagination take them to wherever it’s going to take them.”
