[News Culture] The razors are coming back out.
The Korean production of Sweeney Todd has assembled its company for a 10th-anniversary season, bringing longtime performers and new cast members into the rehearsal room ahead of a Dec. 4 opening at D-Cube Link Arts Center.
Cho Seung-woo, Kang Pil-seok and Kim Joo-taek will alternate as Sweeney Todd, with Jeon Mi-do, Kim So-hyun and Park Ji-yeon sharing Mrs. Lovett. Seo Young-joo, Kim Dae-jong and Ji Hyun-jun play Judge Turpin, while Yoon Seung-woo and Choi Jae-woong take on Anthony.
Hwang Soon-jong and Kang Byung-hoon will appear as Tobias, with Sung Min-jae and Jang Hye-rin as Johanna.
Director Eric Schaeffer and the full creative team joined the cast for the company’s first gathering and script reading.
RETURNING PLAYERS MEET A NEW COMPANY
For performers who have already spent time in Stephen Sondheim’s dark Victorian world, the first meeting marked a return to roles and relationships they know well. New cast members, meanwhile, entered a production whose reputation and demands are already firmly established in Korean musical theater.
That mixture was evident in the first reading.
The company moved quickly into the score’s shifts between menace, black comedy and emotional volatility, testing the rhythm between characters whose desires collide almost from the moment they meet. The reading also offered an early glimpse of how different combinations of actors could alter the temperature of the familiar material.
The 10th-anniversary season is being positioned not simply as a revival of previous stagings but as another attempt to push the Korean production further.
Producer Shin Chun-soo described Sweeney Todd as both a source of pride for OD Company and a production that has demanded a higher standard with each return.
He said the anniversary season would be built around giving the company the conditions needed to focus fully on Sondheim’s score and the dramatic precision it requires.
ERIC SCHAEFFER RETURNS TO THE ROOM
Schaeffer, who has maintained a long association with the Korean production, recalled sending footage of the Korean cast performing the opening number during the 2016 season directly to Sondheim.
According to Schaeffer, Sondheim developed a particular affection for the Korean production.
Schaeffer also pointed to the fearlessness of Korean performers as one of the reasons he continues to value working on the production, praising the way actors commit themselves to the material without holding back.
That quality is particularly important in Sweeney Todd, a musical whose impact depends on performers being able to move between brutality, grief and grotesque humor without softening any of them.
At its center is Benjamin Barker, a barber whose life is destroyed after Judge Turpin takes away his family. Returning to a London gripped by poverty and fear under the name Sweeney Todd, he turns his search for revenge into something far more indiscriminate.
Mrs. Lovett becomes both accomplice and catalyst, transforming Todd’s violence into the musical’s famously macabre business proposition.
Sondheim’s score gives that descent its structure. Dense ensemble writing, recurring musical motifs and sudden tonal shifts keep the story moving between thriller, tragedy and vicious comedy, demanding as much precision from the company as raw dramatic force.
The anniversary production arrives with considerable box-office momentum. Its first round of tickets topped rankings at major ticketing platforms immediately after going on sale.
For this season, however, the more revealing question will be what changes inside a production audiences already know.
With experienced Sweeney Todd veterans returning alongside actors entering the material from a different angle, the anniversary run has the opportunity to make familiar relationships feel newly unstable—and to find fresh tension inside one of Sondheim’s darkest scores.
Sweeney Todd opens Dec. 4 at D-Cube Link Arts Center in Seoul.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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