Marcia Talley: This Enemy Town

“Nuh-uh. It’s actually a bone crusher. I found it at an antique store in Savage Mill. I couldn’t believe my luck, I mean, who has bone crushers simply lying around the house?”

I had to agree the contraption was perfect. It had an air of menace, enhanced by that giant crank handle, a wheel eighteen inches or more in diameter. And the machine was large enough to be seen from every corner of the auditorium.

Frick and Frack duck-walked Mrs. Lovett’s meat grinder across the stage and set it in place behind the curtain at stage left. As I recalled from watching the DVD, it wouldn’t be required until the second act.

“Anderson! Toreno!” This from Professor Black, clearly eager to get started. “Places! Places everyone!” He clapped his hands. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go !”

Immediately, there was a scurrying sound, like raccoons in the attic.

I watched Professor Tracey’s long thin fingers fly over the electronic keyboard, playing arpeggios, presumably to get everyone’s attention. His wedding ring flashed as he flipped a switch on his console, and suddenly the room was filled with tortured, dissonant organ music, the lugubrious chords that Stephen Sondheim wrote to mark the opening of his remarkable opera.

Nothing else happened.

Professor Tracey leapt to his feet, upsetting the piano stool. The stage lights gleamed on the polished surfaces of both his glasses and his bald spot. “The director begins the music,” he shouted at the stage, “in the hopes that action will, in fact, commence.” He stooped to right his stool, eased his backside onto it, and, with eyes fastened on the cast members already on stage, began playing again. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, building, building, driving forward with a manic intensity that was unsettling, just as Sondheim meant it to be.

Suddenly the air was split by the piercing shriek of a factory whistle that, even though I was expecting it, made me gasp. I thought about checking my eardrums for bleeding.

The music abruptly stopped.

“Not now!” screamed Professor Black, twisting in his seat to reproach the midshipman who was in charge of the sound board at the back of the auditorium. “And turn it down, for pity’s sake!”

“From the top!” Once again, John Tracey’s hands attacked the keyboard.

“‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd…’” sang a young man in a ragged overcoat. He was helping another man drag a body bag onto the stage.

“‘He served a dark and an angry god…’” sang the second player.

“Yes! Yes!” Professor Black was pleased.

Actor by actor, the stage filled as the chorus arrived to lay out the background story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I watched as a disheveled woman poured ashes from an urn over the “body.” Dorothy punched my arm. “There’s Kevin!”

“Where?” I asked. She couldn’t have meant the woman with the urn.

Dorothy pointed a finger with a badly chewed nail. “The one in the ridiculous wig.” She turned to smile at me in the semidarkness. “I should talk about ridiculous wigs, shouldn’t I? Like mother, like son?”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I said as Kevin, dressed in a long frock coat and an unruly white wig, opened his mouth.

“‘His needs were few, his room was bare…’” sang Kevin in a clear, high tenor.

“‘A lavabo and a fancy chair…’” sang another.

We watched appreciatively while Anthony and Sweeney, fresh off the boat from Australia, made their entrances. And then the beggar woman arrived sporting a remarkable petticoat under a bundle of colorful rags. “Alms, alms for a miserable woman…”

Another elbow in my ribs. “That’s Kevin’s friend, Emma.”

I squinted at the beggar woman. She looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if Kevin’s friend was “our” Emma, Emma Kirby, one of several midshipmen we’d been sponsoring since they were plebes, providing them with a “home away from home,” particularly during their difficult first, often lonely, plebe year. That pile of rags could have been Emma Kirby, I supposed, but it was hard to tell exactly what was under all that makeup.

“‘Wouldn’t you like to push me parsley?’” Emma sang, turning to Todd pathetically. After a few more naughty but hilarious measures, Todd shooed the beggar woman away, and she scuttled to the edge of the stage, sat down on the steps and peered out into the audience, such as it was, while shading her eyes with a hand wearing a tattered, fingerless glove. She waved at me. I waved back. Definitely our Emma.

Except for sporadic e-mails, I hadn’t talked to Emma since the previous May, when she left on her summer “gray hull” cruise. I wondered why she hadn’t been by to see us. We needed to catch up, and I promised myself I’d give her a call.

On stage there was a subtle lighting change. Professor Black yelled, “Where is it? Where is it? Go back and get it!” while the midshipman playing Mrs. Lovett cooled her heels, rhythmically slapping her rolling pin against her open hand. Within seconds the tech crew scurried in with a long narrow table, set it down firmly in front of Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, and scurried away again.

Now that she had her pie-making table, Mrs. Lovett launched into the intricate patter song about the worst pies in London and I was really getting into it, until I became distracted by a midshipman, costumed like an inmate of Fogg’s Asylum, who slouched down the aisle and planted herself in the seat next to Dorothy. “Hi, Mom,” she said.

This puzzled me, until I realized she was addressing Dorothy by her nickname.

“Hi, Greta,” whispered Dorothy. “You looked good up there.”

Greta sighed a long-suffering sigh. Clearly she didn’t agree. From my vantage point, Greta was a sullen piece of work, sitting with clenched jaw and narrowed eyes, mouthing Mrs. Lovett’s lines, loudly filling in missing words. Fortunately there were few, or the actress on the stage-who seemed more than capable of handling the challenging role-might have leaped off the stage and strangled her.

Then Mrs. Lovett fluffed a line.

“What a mistake they made casting her !” Greta groused. “I tried out for the part and would have been so much better in the role. Just because she thinks she can sing…” She heaved another sigh. “Professor Black is nuts.”

Professor Black didn’t seem nuts to me. He seemed extraordinarily competent, coaching quality performances out of what were, after all, young engineering students, using firmness, tempered with humor. Greta needed to take a pill.

I returned my attention to the stage, where a new scene was beginning. The actor playing Beadle Bamford entered from stage right calling, “Mrs. Lovett! Mrs. Lovett!” crossed to the plain box that would become a harmonium-one of the projects that would soon end up on my To Do list-sat down and started singing, “‘Sweet Polly Plunket lay in the grass, turned her eyes-’”

“Stop! Stop!” Professor Black flailed his arms.

All eyes turned to Beadle Bamford, whose hands remained gracefully poised over the fake keyboard.

“Midshipman Monroe, what have you done to your head?”

The midshipman caressed his glossy, hairless scalp. “I shaved it, sir.”

“Why, pray tell, did you do that?”

“Last night was Service Assignment Night, sir,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Tell me what that has to do with you showing up for rehearsal today wearing a bowling ball on your shoulders.”

“I’m going Marines, sir.”

“I see.” Medwin Black rested both hands on the back of the theater seat in front of him, bowed his head, and seemed to be consulting the toes of his brown oxford shoes. A deathlike silence fell over the auditorium until he looked up again and said, “So, you and the other jarheads went out to celebrate, I presume.”