Consuming Humans :: Amelia Broome Plays Mrs. Lovett

The tale of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" has been a British urban legend since the Victorian era, though many a raconteur has sworn the story of a homicidal barber and his accomplice, a baker that uses his victims for her pies, is based on reality.

The story first appeared in print in the Victorian pulp serial "The String of Pearls," then became a staple of the 19th Century melodramatic stage. In 1973, Christopher Bond wrote a stage adaptation that recast the "demon" as a victim who loses touch with his senses. This more sympathetic view of Todd is the basis for the celebrated musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, currently at the Lyric Stage.

"Don't you think, for Twentieth Century musical theatre, we're talking about one of the great works of art?" Amelia Broome asks me.

We sit in the alcove beside the box office of the Lyric, just outside the theater. In an hour, she'll begin the day's rehearsal of this show which opens the company's season and runs through October 11.

Broome plays Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd's twisted accomplice in the musical. Though the actress has lived in Boston for "a good long time," there's still something Southern in her accent. (She originally hails from Georgia.)

She continues: "I don't believe that it's farfetched to have ["Sweeney Todd"] in the same breath as something by Shakespeare or something in the finest opera. I really don't. I'm careful about using words like 'genius,' but this I think this is in that same category."

This musical was Sondheim's second collaboration with Hugh Wheeler (the first being "A Little Night Music.") What distinguishes these pieces from the rest of Sondheim's cannon (post-1970) is the use of a conventional narrative structure. Not only do "Night Music" and "Sweeney" have Sondheim's remarkable songs and intricate lyrics, they have complex characters, compelling plots and involved stories.

"Sondheim worms his way into our subconscious minds with these musical motifs," Broome explains. With the same musical phrases, Sweeney Todd sings about the very human sorrow of never having known his daughter and then about the psychotic desire to regain his life through the random slaughter of his customers.

It's Mrs. Lovett, Todd's former landlady who lets him know what happened since he was wrongfully imprisoned 15 years ago: The judge who sentenced him then raped his young wife, causing her to take poison. All is not lost; Mrs. Lovett has saved Todd's razors, so he can return to his profession.

When Sweeney's plans for revenge against the judge go wrong, he decides to slash his customers' throats instead. Mrs. Lovett sees the carnage as an opportunity and uses the barber's victims to make the meat pies she sells in her shop.

Amelia, who has performed in opera, operetta and plays throughout New England, Georgia, Florida, and Canada, became a well-known name to Boston theatre audiences in Speakeasy Stage Company's production of "The Light in the Piazza" (2008). She emerged from that show with an IRNE Award and went on to be cast in a number of notable roles with many of the finest professional companies in in the city.

"[Acting] is a huge effort to learn everything and the physical endurance to bring it to life," Amelia tells me. "And then there's a - hopefully - moment when you let it all go. You let the work work through you."

"It's nuts and bolts," she describes her theory of acting. "You learn it. You learn the notes, you learn the text, you learn the rests. Get the structure of it so you have a sold place to stand on, and then you go directly to your fellow actors. Sharing each new discovery [your character makes] with the other actors on stage brings the text to life."

"Spiro tells us this story," Amelia retells an anecdote her director, Spiro Veloudos, is fond of relating: During a production of the musical in London an audience member became quite involved in the show. Sweeney is about to commit one of his final executions without understanding the full implications of what he is about to do.

The audience member actually jumped up and yelled at the actor on stage, "Stop! She's [spoiler withheld], you git!"

"We want to involve our audiences in the story so immediately and so necessarily that they will have that same kind of revelation," Amelia laughs. "That's the hope. That they jump up and say, 'Stop! She's... you git.'"

The title character became sympathetic when Bond told Sweeney's tale as a revenge tragedy, but the character of Mrs. Lovett is not a victim. She's manipulative, opportunistic and betrays her friends as well as her enemies. Therefore, whether or not an audience relates to Mrs. Lovett is largely in the hands of the woman playing her.

It's not an impossible feat, but it's challenging. That's why some of the best actresses are proud to put Mrs. Lovett's name on their resume.

"People play it differently," says Amelia. "I've read and watched lots of interviews with Angela [Lansbury, the original Lovett on Broadway] and Sondheim. And I don't mind doing that because people apprenticed in theaters for years, standing and holding a spear and watching the best people onstage, imitating and taking notes."

"It's not unlike business in America," I say to Amelia. "Like any good businessperson, Mrs. Lovett sees a bountiful resource and a population clamoring for a product that she can produce inexpensively. Mrs. Lovett becomes enormously successful selling meat pies, but is her success the happy accident it seems or a deeply calculated plot?"

"People have called Mrs. Lovett amoral," says Amelia. "I suppose that is one aspect of her character," she finishes in her understated way.

To answer this question Amelia describes a video she watched where Sondheim directed a college student to perform the song "My Friends." In this number, Todd sings a robust, almost operatic love song to his razor blades. Though this sounds absurd, he is absolutely passionate and completely sincere.

Then Mrs. Lovett emerges almost from the background and with "the most banal" whisper, and without his recognition, she turns Sweeney's solo into a duet:

"I'm your friend too, Mr. Todd," she sings, "If you only knew, Mr. Todd."

Mrs. Lovett's adoring refrain is far more heart breaking and human than Sweeney's symphony, but it murmurs within shadows of the barber's ballad. "How calculating is Mrs. Lovett?" Amelia repeats the question. "There's a simplicity to her nature. That is the key."

"When did she first fall in love with Sweeney Todd?" I ask.

"Ages ago. She's been carrying the torch, saving his razors. She could have gotten a lot of money for them, but they're something of his. Everything I do-Mrs. Lovett does-is only for you-only for him. I say, 'It's only for you. It's all for you.' From the moment I see him, it's all about my love for Sweeney."

At the end of act one, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd sing the notorious song "Little Priest," where they compare the qualities of pies to the people that are in them. Angela Lansbury called this song "marvelous, original and terrific nonsense."

But Amelia does not use this song to show the audience how funny she is, but as a means to seduce Sweeney. What most would look on as a series of bad puns about eating different types of people, Amelia uses as a game to charm the man she loves by calming his rash temper and making him laugh with her. The experience is seductive and so much deeper than what is on the surface of the song.

"I wouldn't say that Mrs. Lovett is a chess master, overseeing everything, but there is this satellite vision, keeping everything in place," Amelia says. "I want his love. I want him. Every tactic I take is aimed at that. And I'm not getting it. I'm failing every single time. In the music we don't harmonize, except for a few times when we're like a single note away from each other. We come so close, but we never quite make it."

In spite of all the talented women who've played Mrs. Lovett (and the list goes on and on), in Amelia's experience, most people know this musical from the film that Tim Burton directed in 2007. She refers to the Mrs. Lovett in that production. "I liked Helena Bonham Carter," says Amelia. "Many don't, but..."

"It's all about hope," Amelia sighs. "I have a friend who didn't like the movie because you couldn't invest in the characters dreams and desires."

But this is a must.

"In order to make shifts in the audience's perception, she continues, "we need these stories and their catharses. But all I can do is the craft. All I can do is follow the structure [of the story] and the art takes care of itself."

"Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"
Through October 11 at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston
140 Clarendon Street, Boston
For more information visit the Lyric Stage website.