High Stage for Low Brow.(musicals)

There are certain borders you mess with at your peril. Up there with the lines separating India from Pakistan and North from South Korea is the one that divides opera from musical theater. Conventional wisdom holds that operas are High Art, worthy of corporate ticket prices, a canon and a long European history, while the humble musical, with its chorus girls and tunes you can hum, is mere entertainment. So when London's venerable Royal Opera House at Covent Garden blurred the line by putting on the Stephen Sondheim musical "Sweeney Todd," it triggered a blizzard of critical tut-tutting and ponderous debate in the London broadsheets. Is Covent Garden pandering to popular tastes? Is the musical dead, now that it has to seek refuge in state-subsidized opera houses?

If any Broadway musical could hold its own with the opera crowd, it's "Sweeney Todd." Performed on opera stages from Wales to Frankfurt in recent years, it's set to open this season at the New York City Opera. Based on a 19th-century "penny dreadful," about a Fleet Street barber who slits his customers' throats, the musical's themes include cannibalism, Victorian pseudoscience, onanism and capitalism. Its gorgeous, complex score, notes musicologist Stephen Banfield, includes nods to Stravinsky, Shostakovich and a creepy homage to Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," sung by Londoners gorging on pies made from human flesh. As directed by Australian Neil Armfield, the current London production, playing until mid-January for nine performances only, bears the hallmarks of opera rather than a long-running extravaganza musical: it's visually stark, with a few cages and curtains used to create most of the stagings, and relentlessly dark.

The logistics of producing sophisticated musicals like "Sweeney Todd" means that increasingly their future may lie in opera houses. La Scala in Milan has done "West Side Story," and the New York City Opera recently did Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," which New ...