directs

Feb. 12 (UPI) — President Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to purchase coal-fired electricity to boost domestic coal production, a move that has drawn staunch criticism from energy and environmental experts.

Trump issued the directive via an executive order that he signed Thursday at the end of a White House ceremony attended by coal executives called “The Champion of Coal Event.”

“We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now,” he said. “And it’s going to be less expensive and actually much more effective than what we have been using for many, many years. And again, with the environmental progress that’s been made on coal, it’s going to be just as clean.”

The executive order directs the Department of Defense to approve agreements with coal-fired power facilities to serve its installations and other mission-critical facilities.

The order aligns with Trump’s domestic policy focus of reinvigorating the U.S. coal industry, which has declined over recent years due to environmental concerns.

“Kentucky coal is BACK — and it’s because President Trump fights for American energy,” Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., said in a statement.

Barr was at the White House for the ceremony, and said in a recorded statement that the Trump administration was ending the “war on coal” waged by the previous Democratic presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“We’re putting our coal miners back to work to make America energy dominant again,” he said in a recorded statement, while describing Trump’s executive order as “great.”

During the ceremony at the East Room of the White House, Trump was given a trophy inscribed with the words “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal” by the Washington Coal Club lobby group.

After receiving the trophy, which is shaped like a miner, Trump signed the executive order.

While the Trump administration and Republicans champion the resource as “beautiful clean coal,” energy economists and environmental advocates broadly describe coal as a costly and highly polluting power source.

“Rather than helping people with their crippling electrical bills, Donald Trump is illegally bailing out his coal industry buddies with precious taxpayer dollars,” Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said in a statement.

“As energy bills and hospital bills stack up for everyday families, Americans have one man to blame: Donald Trump — the undisputed champion of expensive energy and deadly pollution.”

Julie McNamara, associate policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, lambasted the executive order as a wast of time, money and opportunity.

She said there are cheaper, cleaner and more efficient options at the president’s disposal, but he chose coal while ending development of new solar and wind projects and stopping investment to build out a modern grid infrastructure.

“Reality doesn’t lie: coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future,” McNamara said in a statement.

“The Trump administration’s failings come with real consequences,” she said, adding that forcing the use of aging coal plants risks power outages and will increase electricity costs.

Former Environmental Protection Agency scientist and vice president of federal policy Matthew Davis similarly said this plan risks driving up energy prices for Americans.

“Coal power not only has one of the highest costs of any energy source, but also has the worst reliability record of any form of energy, with twice as many unplanned shutdowns and interruptions in generation as wind power,” he said in a statement.

“Instead of forcing the government to waste taxpayer dollars on dirty outdated coal, we should be focusing on increasing access to clean, reliable energy sources like wind and solar that are the fastest, cheapest way to deploy energy onto the grid.”

They don’t make musicals like “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” anymore.

The ambition on display is awe-inspiring to an almost alarming degree. Consider the lyrical and orchestral complexity of Stephen Sondheim’s score, the way Hugh Wheeler’s book (from an adaptation by Christopher Bond) blends horror and comedy as if the two were natural bedmates and a production concept that views the material of a fiendish penny dreadful through a Brechtian lens.

Could the American theater ever again pull off such an outrageously brilliant musical experiment? Harold Prince’s 1979 Broadway premiere, starring Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, seems like eons ago in terms of creative possibility.

This is the reason revivals, such as the solid one that opened Saturday at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts under the direction of Jason Alexander, are so important. They remind us not only of the richness of our theatrical past but they also challenge our artists and producers to dream bigger in the future.

Will Swenson stars as “Sweeney Todd” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

Alexander, the beloved “Seinfeld” star who made his Broadway debut in Sondheim and George Furth’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981, knows a thing or two about American musicals, having served for a time as the artistic director of L.A.’s bygone Reprise Theatre Company. His direction has grown in sophistication and ease since he staged Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” for Reprise in 2007.

Alexander’s production of “Sweeney Todd” has breadth and heft, but also intimacy and lightness. The scenic design by Paul Tate dePOO III savors the show’s Grand Guignol flavors while leaving plenty of flexibility for antic comedy.

The barber chair, the locus of Sweeney’s revenge on the heartless cruelty of a Victorian London that wrecked his life, isn’t the elaborate contraption of other productions. His murder victims don’t fall down a chute after their throats are slit during their shave and a haircut. They have to be tilted into a dumpster that is moved into position, but Alexander makes the comic most of these clumsier stage mechanics.

Will Swenson, the accomplished Broadway actor, offers an unusually sympathetic yet never sentimentalized Sweeney. He understands that Sweeney is first and foremost a victim. The lust for vengeance eventually gets the better of him, but Swenson leads us step by step to depravity through sorrow, injustice and humiliation.

Andrew Polec, right, with the company of “Sweeney Todd” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

He’s man-made rather than a natural monster. The same could be said of Lesli Margherita’s Mrs. Lovett, the proprietor of a filthy and failing Fleet Street pie shop, but it’s a shakier case. She’s the one who gets the bright idea of putting all those corpses Sweeney is intent on piling up into culinary use. Meat is in short supply, and the taboo of cannibalism is no deterrent to a woman who has taken to heart the jungle law of 19th-century British society: Eat or be eaten.

Swenson and Margherita are singing marvels, but Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s numbers set up Olympian challenges, vocally as well as lyrically. Their comically macabre Act 1 showstopper, “A Little Priest,” in which they gleefully imagine the variety of human pies, needs a little more time in the oven. Margherita, who played Mrs. Wormwood in “Matilda the Musical” on Broadway, is a deft clown. Swenson may be a step slower in this regard, but he plays it perfectly by accentuating the delight Sweeney takes in the merriment of Mrs. Lovett’s perverse rhyming game.

Swenson, who starred in the Broadway premiere of “A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical,” has a lush baritone. But Sweeney’s descent into an even lower range produces a sound that emerges from unimaginable depths. Finding the beauty in that hellish croak — something that Josh Groban was able to do in the last Broadway revival — can prove exceptionally difficult. It’s Swenson’s detailed character work as a singer that impresses most. His handling of “By the Sea,” the Act 2 duet with Margherita, forensically details Sweeney’s growing distaste for the conjugal fantasies of his partner in crime.

Allison Sheppard and Chris Hunter star in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

The romantic element of Sondheim’s score is best captured in the gorgeous singing of Chris Hunter’s Anthony Hope, whose crooning of “Johanna” provokes an epidemic of goosebumps throughout La Mirada Theatre. Allison Sheppard’s Johanna, Sweeney’s daughter under the lock and key of the wicked Judge Turpin (Norman Large), warbles as melodiously as the caged birds that mirror her plight.

Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper’s Beadle Bamford, the judge’s henchman, has a malicious ebullience all his own. He’s not as unapologetically hammy as Andrew Polec’s Pirelli, the tonsorial con man who adopts a fake mustache and an even faker Italian accent, but he lends the musical a satiric gaiety.

Meghan Andrews’ Beggar Woman and Austyn Myers’ Tobias, giving voice to the downtrodden Dickensian masses, infuse the production with the charm of their singing. Myers makes the most of one of the musical’s most beloved numbers, “Not While I’m Around,” Tobias’ duet with Mrs. Lovett that both performers bring to poignant, demented life.

Austyn Myers, center, with the company of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

Alexander’s staging occasionally overdoes the comic exuberance. The ensemble-cum-chorus, burdened with overblown asylum imagery, is sometimes called upon to inject a circus-like atmosphere, complete with acrobatics. Lee Martino’s choreography, like the production as a whole, is at its best when observing decorous constraints.

If some of the more seductive colors of Sondheim’s score get lost in the acoustic shuffle, it may have more to do with the sound system than Darryl Archibald’s music direction. Unfortunately, the shattering beauty of the music is sometimes swallowed in the devilish din.

The stark visual panache of the production, however, is an impressive sight to behold. Jared A. Sayeg’s crepuscular lighting and Kate Bergh’s humanizing costumes lend contrast and texture to the world-building scenic design.

Hats off to this Southern California “Sweeney Todd” and to La Mirada Theatre for undertaking this Herculean feat. Sondheim and Wheeler’s haunted masterpiece doesn’t need perfection to live again.