by James O’Barr
Harlequin Productions, Olympia Symphony Orchestra, Masterworks Choral Ensemble
Olympia, for all of its small-town airs and suburban affectations, has a truly expansive arts scene, on display in glory during the recent Arts Walk weekend. If you missed any or all of the creative wonders being flaunted in our annual celebration of “culture, community, and the arts,” you’ll have a chance to make up for it this coming weekend. Three of our foremost musical and theatrical art makers, Harlequin Productions, the Olympia Symphony Orchestra, and Masterworks Choral Ensemble, will take the Washington Center main stage for a limited run of Stephen Sondheim’s theatre-of-revenge masterpiece, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Working from Victorian popular fiction (“penny dreadfuls) and Christopher Bond’s 1970 play, Sondheim fashioned what he originally thought of as a “musical thriller” — to be seen in a small, dark theater, the better to shock the audience. By the time it got to Broadway, Sweeney Todd had become an epic treatment of a demoralized and dehumanized society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the original production and its numerous revivals have won highest accolades and awards on Broadway and in London’s West End, and the show has found its way into theaters small and dark and spacious and grand all over the world. It has even played the occasional opera house, where the fact that it is almost completely underscored, with 80 percent of the show being sung, and Sondheim’s melodies playing constantly behind the action, making it seem right at home.
Olympia Symphony Orchestra music director and conductor Alexandra Arrieche made herself right at home in the South Sound when she arrived in 2022, with her enthusiasm for audience engagement and outreach, and a wide-ranging love of music across the spectrum, from traditional and contemporary classical to pop and rock and jazz. Not long after her appointment to the OSO, when she and Executive Director Jennifer Hermann were in conversation about collaboration with Harlequin’s Artistic Director Aaron Lamb, Lamb suggested a joint production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. The rest is sure to be history: Arrieche and the OSO, director Aaron Lamb and his cast (including Eric Jensen as Sweeney Todd and Justine Cameron as Mrs. Lovett), and Ben Luedcke’s Masterwork’s Choral Ensemble, will take the Washington Center stage — all of it — on October 11, 12, and 13. And no musical resource will go untapped: even the mighty Andy Crow Wurlitzer will play a part, a testimony to the fact that never before Sweeney Todd or later in his work did Sondheim make such full use of music to further his dramatic purposes. It might also be said that never before this Sweeney Todd has the Washington Center seen such a fully staged production, with scenic elements designed by Jeannie Beirne, costumes by Darren Mills, and lighting design by Mark Thomason.
Lamb, expressing his gratitude to Arrieche, both for her wide-ranging musical sensibilities and her eagerness to collaborate, says that, “… this collaboration will likely be more than the sum of its parts — and not just because there will be upwards of 65 people onstage!” Arrieche agrees: “Having these organizations share the stage, and the orchestra embedded in the set, will create such a powerful energy … I knew that the Olympia Symphony and Harlequin Productions would be a perfect match.” And it sounds like they’ve met their match in Sweeney Todd.
* Indicates membership in the Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
Photography by Shanna Paxton Photography.
WHAT:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
WHERE:
Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia
WHEN:
Friday, October 11, Saturday, October 12, 7:30 pm, Sunday, October 13, 2:00 pm
HOW MUCH:
Single Tickets $26 – $99
Available online at harlequinproductions.org and olympiasymphony.org, by phone at (360) 786-0151 and (360) 753-8586, and in person at the WCPA box office
LEARN MORE:
harlequinproductions.org
olympiasymphony.org