A Rich Musical Journey: Celebrating 20 Years of Rough Guide CDs

A few years ago, I was browsing in one my favourite used CD shops in Toronto (now defunct, alas) and noticed a CD from Israel. Nothing special there necessarily, but I was struck by the fact that the disc was put out by the UK-based Rough Guide label. A British label releasing Israeli music, at a time and from a continent rife with so much anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, attitudes intrigued me – and even more so, when after purchasing the disc, I found out that the compiler of The Rough Guide to the Music of Israel was a well-travelled Torontonian by the name of Dan (or Daniel) Rosenberg. Not knowing much about how music compilers did their work and being aware that a piece on Rosenberg would be of interest to The Canadian Jewish News, a publication I wrote for at the time, I penned an article on how the disc came to be and on the man himself. And from that moment on, I continued to pick up, buy and listen to the music released the Rough Guide label. (Rough Guide is one of four labels that makes up the World Music Network record label, which also includes Introducing, Think Global, and Riverboat Records –the latter recently celebrating its 25th anniversary) Today marks exactly 20 years since the first Rough Guide CD was released on October 25, 1994, and, now, as the possessor of most of the Rough Guide discs – more than 200 of them, with many still in print – I salute a label that has introduced me not only to so much world music I would know nothing about otherwise but has also educated me on the myriad permutations of that complex genre. It has been a musical journey well worth taking.

When the Dust Bites Back: The Clash's "1977" & The Beatles Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (1962)

When Joe Strummer announced the arrival of The Clash in 1977, gleefully joining the Punk Revolution that was launched by The Sex Pistols a couple of years earlier, he did it in a song called, naturally enough, "1977." The purpose of punk was to clean house of the rock dinosaurs that no longer stood for the ideals they once claimed. For the British bands that came out of the rubble of the burst dreams of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other pretenders to the throne, they were worthy of a safety pin through the cheek. Punk proudly stood for nothing, no future, just the bare necessity of pedal-to-the-metal rock. But The Clash refused a claim towards rock nihilism in favour of a new political direction, a tabloid Marxism, to address how England's dreaming had been transformed into an expedient nightmare. To do that, "1977" set out to lay waste to the pioneers of the past who made the mistake of dreaming in the first place. "No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones," Strummer announces off the top like a Depression-era newsboy bellowing the headlines of all the papers he needs to sell. It's a bald claim, one he'd reiterate a few years later in the authoritative "London Calling," when he'd bring forth an apocalypse while telling us that "phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust."

When in Greece: The Two Faces of January

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst in The Two Faces of January

After seeing a high-concept, A-list thriller like Gone Girl, with its pushy smugness passing for sophistication and its cynical button-pushing that’s meant to make it seem like a provocative take on contemporary male-female relations—Gillian Flynn, who did the screenplay adaptation of her own novel, launched herself onto the bestseller lists after spending a decade writing for Entertainment Weekly, and it shows—the direct, elegant perversity of a trim, stylish thriller like Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January can feel like a walk in the fresh spring air after spending a week locked in the garage. This is Amini’s directing debut, but in the ‘90s he did the scripts for Iain Softley’s Henry James movie The Wings of the Dove and Michael Winterbottom’s Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude the Obscure.

More recently, he’s been credited with the scripts of such headbanging crime movies as Killshot, from an Elmore Leonard novel, and the Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive. The Two Faces of January has a best-of-both-worlds quality. It’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel that was first published in 1964, and is set mostly in Greece at the same time. It’s a trim, cutthroat story, but the touristy period settings give it some of the luxurious visual appeal that go with certain classic-lit adaptations. And with Viggo Mortensen, with his intimidatingly sky-scraping frame and Arrow Shirt profile swanking around the Acropolis in a light-colored suit and hat, with Kirsten Dunst as his much younger blonde wife, the atmosphere can suggest an episode of Mad Men where there’s no guarantee anyone will make it out alive.

Serial and the New Podcast Revolution

Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed (centre, top and bottom)

In radio and podcasting circles, the rather geeky milieu that I travel in, there is a bit of thing happening. It's a podcast called Serial, which follows the real-life case of the murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999, and the arrest and imprisonment of her alleged killer, ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. Sarah Koenig, the host and executive producer of Serial, was approached by the family of the imprisoned man to look into the conviction. We follow Koenig as she picks apart the case. Koenig claims to not know where it will end. Is an innocent man in jail for a crime he didn't commit? Is the real killer still on the loose? Tune in, or rather, subscribe to Serial, and find out.

Glass Cannon: David Ayer’s Fury

Five men operate an M4 Sherman tank in the autumn of World War II, struggling to keep themselves and each other alive. Gordo (Michael Peña), Bible (Shia LaBoeuf), Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) and their commander Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) lose their front gunner, and he is replaced by the squeaky-clean Norman (Logan Lerman), who must abandon his naïve sense of morality if he is to survive with the others. This is the setup for Fury, directed by David Ayer, which doesn’t do much of anything other than make a great deal of noise, but it does so with expertise and intensity.

Double Stoppard: India Ink and The Real Thing

Rosemary Harris, Bhavesh Patel and Romola Garai in Indian Ink  (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Indian Ink is one of the few plays by the staggeringly prolific Tom Stoppard that never made it to New York in the aftermath of its West End run, so the Roundabout Theatre’s decision to mount it in its smallest (off-Broadway space), the Laura Pels Theatre, is a happy one for theatregoers. I can’t think why it didn’t open in Manhattan in the nineties (it was staged in London in 1995), especially since Arcadia, written two years earlier, was so successful there. Perhaps potential producers thought they were too similar – though that’s not generally a reason for withholding a new play that follows a well-received one. (Quite the opposite.) In Arcadia a pair of contemporary academics try to determine the events that occurred on an English country estate in 1809 where Lord Byron may or may not have been one of the house guests, while we see what really happened, the truth that the scholars can only guess at. In Indian Ink, an English professor named Eldon Pike annotates a new edition of the work of a poet, Flora Crewe, long dead, whose younger sister Eleanor – now an old woman – constitutes her only remaining family. Hopeful about following up with a biography, he searches for one of three paintings of his subject, two of them nudes, two of them done during the few months she spent in India, mostly in Jummapur. Among the people he contacts, aside from Eleanor, are the son of the Indian painter, Nirad Das, whom Flora befriended and posed for, and the son of the local Rajah who invited her to visit him in the course of her stay. Eleanor doesn’t approve of Pike’s long-term project and in her quiet way does what she can to quietly thwart his research. “Biography,” she argues, “is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” And Stoppard confirms her analysis by – as in Arcadia – showing us what really happened to Flora in India, in a series of flashbacks that place one fragment of information on top of another until, gradually, we see it all. (We also discover chapters in Eleanor’s life that we hadn’t suspected, and that explain how she began as a Bohemian, like her sister, and metamorphosed into a conservative colonial.)

Opposition to Hitler

The compelling 1959 German film Die Brucke (The Bridge) tells the useless courage of seven German teenagers hastily conscripted into the Nazi army and assigned the responsibility of defending an old stone bridge in the last few days of the war. The High Command knew that the Americans would overrun it and the sergeant in charge of the boys was ordered to pull them back once the Americans arrived, but he was killed by the Gestapo and six of the boys died while the one survivor, who is able to tell the tale that became the basis for a novel and this film, is brutalized by the experience. The first part of this capsule summary is most people’s awareness of the final stages of the war: young men used as fodder to carry out Hitler’s maniacal order that everyone should be participate in the defence of the Volk or die. The second part, that members of the High Command only offered a token of resistance while trying to save lives, including their own, is not as familiar. Military opposition constitutes one subject of University of Toronto scholar, Randall Hansen’s new book, Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (Oxford, 2014) even though its dense military chapters can be a daunting read. Its central argument is that opposition to the Fuhrer inside the Reich during the final year of the war, that included both military and civilian resistance, was much more pervasive than has previously been known.

Neglected Gem #64: In Dreams (1999)

In Dreams is sensuously creepy and compelling. Annette Bening plays Claire Cooper, an adaptor and illustrator of fairy tales, who suddenly finds her head filled with horrifying images she can neither prevent nor interpret, though she knows they’re linked up with the disappearance of a little girl. When the child’s body turns up, she realizes that she’s channeling a serial killer. And unlike the murderers whose crimes run like private movies in the brain of the character Antonio Banderas plays in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, this one is conscious of his psychic connection with Claire – his next target turns out to be her daughter, Rebecca. When she can’t stop Rebecca’s inevitable fate, Claire tries to kill herself in her car, but she survives and grows more and more removed from the people around her – her husband (Aidan Quinn), the detective (Paul Guilfoyle) in pursuit of the killer, the surgeon (Dennis Boutsikaris) and psychiatrist (Stephen Rea) who treat her – because they don’t believe her story. She becomes unmoored, stalked by a man who’s somehow managed to worm his way into her skull and is leaving her maddening hints about how he lost his own bearings and what he’s going to do next.

Some Good, Some Less So: A Look at the New Sitcoms of 2014

John Cho and Karen Gillan star in Selfie, on ABC

Amid the high profile dramas that are debuting on the small screen this season (Gotham and How to Get Away with Murder), comedies are flying a little under the radar. Last year saw well over a dozen new network comedies launched, and a year later we've had a few heartbreaking cancellations (Trophy Wife, The Crazy Ones, and Enlisted) and one break out, consistently deserving hit, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (The Andy Samberg comedy premiered with such a strong comic voice and sense of itself that its eventual success was visible in the first 5 minutes of the pilot. So far, its sophomore season has continued in the same vein.) This fall the networks are offering only a handful of new sitcoms, and today I'll be taking a look five new comedies, in order of their relative promise: Black-ish (ABC), Selfie (ABC), A to Z (NBC), Marry Me (NBC), Mulaney (FOX).

The Dogs of Comedy: Revisiting Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000)

When you're as sick as I was this past weekend, you find yourself craving comfort food of all sorts. For comfort comes not only from good hot soup, steamy liquids and plenty of sleep, but it also arrives in choices of films to watch. Rather than turn to the dramatically complex (though I did watch the extraordinary new Blu-ray restoration of the four hour and ten minute director's cut of Sergio Leone's gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America, which I'll write about next week when I'm fully healthy), I look instead to comedy, the genre that helps us come to terms with pain and misery because we come to laugh at its absurdity. Christopher Guest's mock documentary Best in Show (2000) got the call this past weekend.

It's often been acknowledged – especially in ads – that dog owners not only have a lot in common with their pooches, they sometimes live their lives through them. You can usually size up a dog owner, too, just by watching the type of canine they have at the end of the leash. Dogs can either act out the most regal aspects of the owner's personality, or, as in the case of pit bulls, the owner's latent aggressions. In Best in Show, Christopher Guest satirizes this symbiotic and idiosyncratic alliance by casting it in the colourful arena of a dog show. Using the same spry ensemble of comic actors (Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy and Fred Willard) that he first worked with in his 1996 debut Waiting for Guffman, in Best in Show, they prove to be even more eccentric than their pets.

Bending Genres: Elizabeth Shepherd's Signal and Lily Frost's Motherless Child

Is it jazz or is it pop? In the case of Elizabeth Shepherd and Lily Frost, two gifted singers from Canada, one genre definitely informs the other. The challenge for listeners – and critics – is to dismiss the genre fencing and simply appreciate the music in and of itself. For Shepherd and Frost, whose recent releases cross-reference pop and jazz, the two have become very good at blending – and bending – the genres into music that is accessible and interesting.

The Signal (Linus) is Elizabeth Shepherd's fifth, full-length album. Originally cast as pseudo-chanteuse upon her debut, the McGill University graduate has constantly challenged everybody's notion of category. She's tread the line between straight up jazz (Start to Move, 2006) to her exceptional performance of "I Am The Walrus" on Michael Occhipini's Shine On tribute to the music of John Lennon. To some extent, her new release carries some of that musical buoyancy along with a large dose of mystery. Led by the percussive drive of John McLean, The Signal is Shepherd's funkiest release to date. The polyrhythms lead the way as Shepherd weaves her voice in between the beats. The overall sound of the album is occasionally too locked into a steady groove, but the title track breaks the pattern nicely. It's a sublime duet with vocalist Alex Samaras peppered with narration by CBC Radio host, Laurie Brown. It's the best-arranged song on the album, and arranging is a skill in itself – just consider the work of Rob McConnell or Gil Evans, two jazz legends.

Off The Shelf: Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013)

Rose Byrne in James Wan's Insidious (2010)

Before this week I only knew James Wan as the director of Saw (and producer of almost every one of its sequels), which didn’t exactly bode well for the rest of his filmography. Though Saw (2004) functioned as a mostly-effective mystery-horror yarn, the sequels quickly descended into exploitative dreck, bringing the term “torture porn” into our pop culture lexicon. Is that really an achievement to celebrate? I can’t say – but it did leave me unprepared for the quality of two of his more recent directorial efforts, Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013), films that veer away from serial-killer mind games into supernatural territory.

The Country House: Chekhov in the Berkshires

Blythe Danner in The Country House (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In Donald Margulies’s new play, The Country House, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Blythe Danner plays Anna Patterson, the matriarch of a theatrical family. A famous actress, Anna has returned to the Williamstown Theatre Festival – and to her summer home in the Berkshires – a year after losing her daughter, also an actor, to cancer. The family assembles in this house of memories. Anna’s son Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange) is a difficult, obstreperous man who can’t get parts because no one wants to work with him and who has stumbled into middle age without finding a romantic partner. At this juncture he’s suddenly decided to become a playwright; he’s planning to ask his unsuspecting family to read his first effort aloud. His brother-in-law Walter Keegan (David Rasche), who parlayed a successful career as a stage director into an even more enviable one as a filmmaker, shows up with his new, younger fiancée, Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Grant) – also an actress – a beauty whom everyone is drawn to despite their discomfort with the way Walter has moved on so speedily after the death of his wife. Nell draws the admiration of both Elliot – who acted with her one summer, years earlier, and has romanticized that brief friendship into unrequited love – and another celebrity appearing that summer in Williamstown, Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), the star of a hit sci-fi TV series whom Anna, with motives that are not entirely pure, has invited to sleep on the living-room couch while his house is being fumigated. The only person in the house who isn’t charmed by Nell is Walter’s daughter Susie (Sarah Steele), a Yale student, the only character on stage without either a theatrical career or an interest in obtaining one. Susie is incensed at what she sees as her father’s disloyalty to her mother’s memory, and when Michael falls for Nell, she has even more reason to hate her stepmother-to-be, since she’s had a crush on the handsome actor since she was a little girl.

A Streak of Light through Damascus: Samar Yazbek’s Cinnamon

Author Samar Yazbek (Photo: AFP / Joel Saget)

There are novels about revolution, and there are revolutionary novels. Both kinds of novels have their own appeal; novels about revolution allow us to feel like we are a part of contemporary or historical events, and their fictional frame introduces a human and subjective quality to events that history texts are often lacking. Novels about revolution, at their best, allow for greater ambiguity than reportage, and they are incredibly valuable as such – one such example is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. Revolutionary novels are not the same thing – they are ‘revolutionary’ not necessarily because they depict a revolution, but because they change the way we think about a person or a place, or because they illuminate individual people in ways that cause us to question or rethink what we know either about certain places, certain classes, or certain figures. Samar Yazbek’s Cinnamon is a revolutionary novel, set in a Syria before the current revolution began, but which is enriched by our recognition that the world of Cinnamon may be one that no longer exists.

Yazbek is a remarkable figure in her own right. Born into an upper-class Alwaite family (the same religious sect as the notorious Syrian ‘President’ Bashar al-Assad), Yazbek grew up being conditioned to support the regime, which is often credited with dramatically improving the social and economic status of the Syrian Alawi community, and with ensuring their safety (Alawites have historically been persecuted by other Muslim groups). Yazbek broke with her family when she began to protest against the regime in 2011, a political stance that initiated a cycle of social ostracization and military detention that she could only break by leaving Syria for Paris with her daughter. Her most famous work is a non-fiction account of her experiences as a protestor and dissident, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, but Yazbek has a pedigree in fiction as well. She belongs to that small group of writers who deserve to be classified as both a writer of revolution, and as a revolutionary writer.

Fan's Folly: Jennifer Tarver's What Makes a Man?

I went to the theatre expecting a play but got instead a cabaret, and with bad acoustics. Talk about dashed expectations. I also went hoping to see what Jennifer Tarver would do to establish further her credentials as one of the most innovative theatre directors working in Canada today, but ended up walking away disappointed if not decidedly under-whelmed. What Makes A Man?, an original piece of theatre used to launch her tenure as director of Toronto’s Necessary Angel Theatre Company, is a great idea gone wrong. Known more for her incisive interpretations of Samuel Beckett, Tarver has radically changed tack in sourcing the prodigious songbook of living legend Charles Aznavour to shape a production that is about, well, who knows what.

The 70-minute performance, which opened at the Berkeley Street Theatre on Thursday night with performances continuing through Nov. 2, lacks a clear focus so it is hard to tell what the message is. The medium itself is also fuzzy. It’s a piece of theatre and yet it’s not a play. There is no storyline. Aznavour, himself, could have provided one – born in Paris in 1924, the son of Armenians who had fled the Turkish genocide, a multilingual and multitalented singer-composer with an uncanny knack for turning people’s stories into gripping, narrative driven songs. But no, his life is not on the stage to admire. Tarver, who admits to not having discovered his music until three years ago (the idea boggles: dubbed the French Frank Sinatra, the man has appeared in sixty films, composed a thousand songs, many of them Top 100 hits and covered by everyone from Johnny Mathis to Elvis Costello, and at ninety is still doing concerts), has let the lyrics in the twenty-three songs selected for the occasion do all the talking. Maybe because she only recently discovered them is why she is besotted by them. At least they appear to have blinded her to a sense of purpose. What Makes A Man? is less Tarver as innovator, and more Tarver as fan.

Hearing Voices: Tom Marshall's Changelings (1991)

In the first few pages of Tom Marshall's novel, Changelings (Macmillan, 1991), we are confronted with voices. The first one we hear is that of Laird Allen Carter, a man in jail for a rape he cannot remember committing. Soon he's joined by other voices – male and female – with different names, describing memories of events involving sexual seduction, violation, incest and child abuse. These recollections build in intensity until we realize that all of these people share the same past. We soon grasp that these voices belong to two people: Laird Carter and his twin sister, Elaine. In one elliptical stroke, Marshall has plunged us into the world of multiple personalities and possession.

Of course, the subject of spiritual possession, or multiple personalities, isn't new to fiction. Edgar Allen Poe gave us a poetic nightmare about the ghost of Lenore, and Stephen King in The Shining tantalized us with the idea of not being the person we think we are, of being possessed by someone evil. But Changelings isn't about frightening the reader: it's about piecing together fractured narratives. The story takes place in 1960 as Laird tries to seek help. He finds it in a prison psychologist named Herb Delancy, a "do-gooder" who wants to believe that "there is a definite science of the workings of the mind." Herb gets more than he bargained for when he meets the many personalities within the body of Laird – including a brutal psychopath named Al, a womanizer known as Lyle, a spiritual twin sister for Lyle called Alana, and the voice of reason who comes in the form of Lou. All of these personalities are unformed, and even split off from each other. The task for Herb is to integrate them so that he can find out who the real Laird is. Running parallel to this story is that of Elaine, also plagued by voices that almost lead her to murder her children. She finds solace in the world of spiritualism, as a medium who makes the voices serve her own needs. One day, Alice Delancy – the wife of the psychologist – stumbles into her life and Elaine is forced to examine how those voices possessed her. Alice is haunted by the memory of her first love, who was killed in the Korean War. When Elaine is able to bring back the spirit of this lost love, it sets loose as obsession in Alice that pulls Elaine into the longings of this passionate, unfulfilled woman.

Learning to Fly: Bird People

Josh Charles in Pascale Ferran’s Bird People

Josh Charles glowers and pouts eloquently through his half of Pascale Ferran’s Bird People. Charles plays Gary Newman, a globetrotting Silicon Valley executive whose name, when spoken aloud, must not set off the same memory trigger for everyone that it does for English speakers of a certain age. (Every time he introduces himself to someone, I wait for him to add, “Here in my car, I feel safest of all.”) Newman is in Paris for a quick meeting with some nervous business partners before heading on to Dubai, where he has some major undertaking waiting that he hopes won’t keep him in the Middle East through Christmas. He never makes it to Dubai; after a rough night in his Paris hotel room, he decides that he’s trotted the globe one time too many, and impulsively quits his job and cuts ties with his family.

S&M: David Fincher’s Gone Girl

Ben Affleck stars in David Fincher's Gone Girl

This review contains major spoilers for Gone Girl.

“It was long. It was awkward. It had a terrible ending.” So one fellow patron declared at the conclusion of Gone Girl, the latest offering from David Fincher. I might nuance the first statement a bit. Fincher’s movie clocks in at two and a half hours, and though you don’t feel every second ticking by, you certainly sense the lugubrious pace by the second half. As to the ending, it’s insane for sure. The truth is, though, that the wheels fall off this bus well before the finale—about the same time the minutes start to hit you like a bag of rocks. And finally, some might dub the film’s feeling as awkward, the go-to adjective of we Millennials. But I would reach for a stronger descriptive. Sadomasochistic, for instance. Despite these quibbles, the tenor of the moviegoer’s opinion I’d agree with. Fincher’s taken Gillian Flynn’s novel and rendered it into a narrative that not only lacks almost any dint of crime genre thrills, mystery, and tension, but also exposes the shoddy character of the author’s writing. Not having read the book, I don’t know if these problems derive from the source material or Fincher’s direction. What I do know is that Ben Affleck’s performance as Nick Dunne saves this movie, even as it turns the filmmaker's intent on its ear.

Illusory Choice: Memory and Consequence in Gaming

Dialogue choice in Bioware's Mass Effect

High levels of graphical fidelity are not the only way to immerse the player in the virtual world of a game. Many modern games offer choices to the player that will affect the way the game plays out from that point on. Gameplay structures built around a game’s “memory” – that is, the game’s ability to take note of your actions and change outcomes based on your decisions – are the gimmicks-du-jour that are making for complex, unprecedented, and fascinating experiences that can’t be replicated in any other medium.

The most readily available example of this trend is Bioware’s Mass Effect series, in which you play as Commander Shepard (whose appearance and gender you can customize), a veteran soldier tasked with saving the galaxy from impending doom in a futuristic Star Trek-esque space setting. Mass Effect tied its morality system into Shepard’s interactions with his crewmates and the rest of the galaxy’s colourful citizenry, splitting choices in both dialogue and action into threes: a Paragon option, usually representing a kind, gentle, or open-minded response; a neutral option; and a Renegade option, usually self-serving, cruel, or curt. Selecting more Paragon than Renegade responses, or vice versa, would result in unique choices further down the line. In this way, the player could craft an experience that suited their tastes. My Shepard, for example, began her story as a hardened combat veteran, unaccustomed to polite speech and social niceties, preferring the butt of her shotgun to verbal diplomacy when solving her problems. By continually selecting Renegade options, I helped my Shepard become a ruthless and intimidating presence in the galaxy, making a name for herself as the Commander with whom you don’t want to mess. But these choices came at a cost: my bluntness alienated my crew, who came to mistrust my judgment. My rash decision-making led to the deaths of several of Shepard’s closest friends, and as the story wore on, my remorse and guilt translated into Paragon choices, making Shepard stricken by conscience and seeing her do her best to repair the wounds she’d inflicted. My ability as a player to make these choices gave me greater agency in crafting the character of Shepard, and the consequences of those choices made for a deeper emotional connection with the material.

Live from Lincoln Center: Sweeney Todd in Concert

 Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfelin in the New York Philharmonic's Sweeney Todd

At the end of September the PBS series Live from Lincoln Center telecast a concert production of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There has been no lack of Sweeney Todds. John Doyle’s brilliant 2005 Broadway revival, with Michael Cerveris as the homicidal barber and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime – who bakes the victims of his throat-cutting into meat pies – sharpened the musical’s Brechtian chops, reimagining it as a leaner, less lavish show, with the actors doubling wittily as musicians. Since the TV transcription of Harold Prince’s original version, which opened in 1979, is still available on DVD, aficionados were at liberty to compare them, and see how LuPone’s performance matched up to Angela Lansbury’s. (LuPone did superlative work in the role, but you missed Lansbury’s music-hall humor, especially in her socko first number, “The Worst Pies in London.”) Tim Burton’s 2007 movie was a misstep. He wasn’t right for the material, which is way more gruesome than his pictures normally get, and the leading actors, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, both non-singers, had all they can do just to hit the notes

The latest Sweeney is in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic – Alan Gilbert serving as musical director and conductor – and the director, Lonny Price, has had great success with several previous concert stagings, including two other Sondheims, Company and Passion. His wry, ebullient mounting of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide was a revelation. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that musical work; Price and his cast aired out the Broadway-blockbuster dust and made the wit in the lyrics (contributed by, among others, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman and John Latouche) truly glitter. And you recognize that card Lonny Price in the opening moments of Sweeney Todd. The ensemble, led by the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson, promenade up to the podia in formal dress, elegantly bound scripts under their arms, to the eager applause of the Lincoln Center audience, but as soon as the dissonant opening chords of the overture sound, they cut loose, knocking over pedestals of flowers, sending their scripts scattering to the stage floor, and even upending a piano. Thompson rips the collar of her red dress; Terfel shifts (out of camera range, so you don’t see how he pulls it off) into a black wife-beater and ankle-length black leather coat.