Swinging Todd

Maybe you’ve seen “Sweeney Todd” before, but you’ve never seen it like this.

This is the 2005 Broadway revival, in which the actors don’t merely act, they also run around the stage with their …

Well, let’s allow cast member Elizabeth Hagstedt to explain it.

“There’s one number where you’ll see Mrs. Lovett playing a tuba while striking a triangle at the same time,” said Hagstedt.

“Toby plays the violin while he’s singing. Sweeney plays some trumpet and some guitar.”

The actors, in short, play all of the instruments. There is no pit orchestra; the actors provide all of their own accompaniment.

Meanwhile, of course, they are singing those ingenious Stephen Sondheim songs about the murderous spree of a Victorian London barber and his accomplice Mrs. Lovett, a purveyor of, ahem, unsavory pies.

This actor/musician concept vastly complicated the casting process. The actor who plays Toby, for instance, has to play more than the violin. He also has to play the clarinet and the keyboard.

“They had to go all over the country looking for people,” said Hagstedt, a “swing” who covers three roles. “… It was pretty crazy. It took them a long time to completely fill out the company.”

This concept was considered avant-garde on Broadway, where it ran from 2005 into 2006. Yet British director John Doyle originally came up with the idea for a more mundane reason: It was the only way his small theater in an old watermill in Berkshire, England, could afford to do a big, complicated show like “Sweeney Todd.” (He later said that he would love to work with “25 more performers and a lot more money.”)

He soon realized this strategy borne from necessity had enormous artistic rewards.

“I come from the Highlands, where people make their own entertainment by telling stories, singing songs and playing instruments,” Doyle told the Times of London in 2004. “There is something of that tradition here.”

So when the show proved to be a hit and transferred to London’s West End, Doyle retained the original concept. He also kept it when he brought the show to Broadway in 2005, which resulted in world-famous Broadway diva Patti LuPone, as Mrs. Lovett, huffing and puffing on a tuba.

The show was a huge critical success, winning rafts of awards in both London and New York, largely because of Doyle’s other creative innovations.

This version is set in a bleak and bare insane asylum. The idea is that the character Toby has been institutionalized, because of the unspeakable things he has seen. He then proceeds to tell the story – and relive the events – as a kind of trauma therapy.

All of the action takes place on a stark stage with only a coffin, some chairs and an enormous, looming wall. It’s the only “Sweeney Todd” you’ll ever see without a barber’s chair.

Hagstedt said it “makes the audience engage their brains.” It’s more suggestive than graphic – the opposite of the recent movie version with Johnny Depp, which was filled with spurting blood.

“What we have is a bucket of red paint pouring from one bucket into another bucket,” said Hagstedt. “You have to work for it. It creates this whole eerie ambiance.”

She said that “Sweeney Todd” had long been her favorite show. Yet when she first saw this Doyle version on Broadway, she saw the production in a whole different way.

“It got at my gut in a way that I hadn’t experienced since the first time I’d seen it,” said Hagstedt. “There are no fancy trimmings to hide behind. It’s all right there in front of you.”

Critic Ben Brantley put it this way in The New York Times: “(It) draws you claustrophobically close. As they say at the entrance to spook houses, ‘Enter if you dare.’ ”

Hagstedt was a bit spooked herself, when she first showed up for rehearsals. Because she covers for several different roles, she had to know more instruments than most.

She already knew how to play the keyboard and the string bass, and had spent the previous month learning the accordion.

“But then I came in to rehearsals and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s your tuba,’ ” she said. “They never mentioned the tuba!

“But they got me lessons and made sure I wouldn’t tank out there.”