review

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.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says ex-envoy Peter Mandelson should no longer hold a seat in the upper house of parliament.

Police in the United Kingdom have announced they are reviewing allegations of misconduct in public office following revelations that London’s former ambassador to Washington leaked confidential government information to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The announcement by the Metropolitan Police on Monday came after investigative files released by United States authorities revealed that Peter Mandelson shared government plans with Epstein while serving as a UK minister.

Mandelson, who served as business secretary under former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told Epstein about asset sales and tax changes under consideration by London in 2009, as well as plans for the 500 billion euro ($590bn) bailout of the single currency in 2010, according to emails released by the US Department of Justice on Friday.

“Following this release and subsequent media reporting, the Met has received a number of reports relating to alleged misconduct in public office. The reports will all be reviewed to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation,” Metropolitan Police Commander Ella Marriott said in a statement.

“As with any matter, if new and relevant information is brought to our attention we will assess it, and investigate as appropriate,” Marriott added.

The Metropolitan Police did not name Mandelson, but its statement came after the leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party said he had written to the police commissioner urging him to investigate the former ambassador for alleged misconduct in public office.

Earlier on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an inquiry into Mandelson’s ties to Epstein.

Starmer, who sacked Mandelson as London’s top diplomat in Washington last year after the emergence of correspondence detailing his ties to Epstein, also said the former minister should lose his lifelong appointment to the UK’s upper house of parliament.

On Sunday, Mandelson resigned from the governing Labour Party, whose return to electoral dominance he helped to engineer in the 1990s, citing his wish to avoid causing further embarrassment to his colleagues.

In further fallout in the UK on Monday, the charity launched by Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, announced that it would close “for the foreseeable future” amid revelations about her friendly relationship with Epstein.

“Our chair Sarah Ferguson and the board of trustees have agreed that with regret the charity will shortly close for the foreseeable future,” a spokesman said in a statement, without elaborating on the reasons for the closure.

Separately on Monday, the US Justice Department said it had removed thousands of Epstein-related files from the internet after lawyers representing some of his alleged victims said their identities had been exposed due to insufficient redactions in the latest release of documents.

The poster for “Send Help” advertises the film as from the director of “The Evil Dead” and “Drag Me to Hell” — and notably not Sam Raimi’s bigger hit “Spider-Man” (or its two sequels). No, the kind of Raimi movie you’re getting here is irreverent, silly and very bloody: a character study that also features incredibly goofy scares. Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, “Send Help” is a gonzo survivalist riff that works as well as it does because it features two incredibly game actors that surf the wave of Raimi’s tonal madness with a blend of absolute glee and carefully honed skill.

And if that poster were to present the star of “Send Help” in the same way as Raimi, the tagline would read “from the star of ‘Red Eye’ and ‘Mean Girls,’” because Rachel McAdams is fully in her horror-comedy mode here. It’s an excellent reminder of her range. Co-star Dylan O’Brien also proves himself once again to be one of the best actors of his generation: a former teen heartthrob who now operates more like a chameleonic character actor. Both McAdams and O’Brien move beyond expectations to deliver highly expressive, almost clownish performances — in the best way.

McAdams is astonishingly dowdy as beleaguered corporate workhorse Linda Liddle, a “Survivor”-obsessed loser who is passed over for a promotion by her slick new boss, Bradley Preston (O’Brien), a nepo baby. In an attempt to play the good ol’ boys game, she boards a private flight to Bangkok with the team, on which she bangs out memos while they laugh at her “Survivor” audition tape. One plane crash later, the tables are turned, with the injured Bradley now at the mercy of Linda and her survival skills on a tropical island.

The swap in the power dynamic thrills Linda, calling to mind Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” specifically the relationship between Dolly de Leon and Harris Dickinson. But “Send Help” is more of a psychological exploration than overt class satire, though it does explore the ridiculous notion of what it would be like to be stranded on an island with your boss.

McAdams and O’Brien deliver almost silent-film era acting with their faces (there’s one bravura long shot of O’Brien eating a bug that’s absolutely virtuosic) and Raimi’s camera playfully pushes the audience around, offering exaggerated tilts and close-ups, screaming: Look at this. There’s no subtlety, but would you expect that from the director of the “Evil Dead” movies? You’re just waiting for the ghouls and blood geysers to pop out. We don’t come to a Raimi film for its natural realism.

If there’s any flaw to “Send Help,” it’s that it generates such nuance and empathy for both Linda and Bradley, even within such outlandish circumstances and style, that it feels impossible to root for just one of them to come out on top. The film paints itself into such a corner when it comes to their conflict that any ending would feel too clean, too pat. As it stands, the ending is just that. But it’s to Raimi and the actors’ credit that they manage to make such an odious character as Bradley actually sympathetic — and so clear a heroine as Linda complex and thorny. Nothing’s perfect but “Send Help” is a blast nevertheless.

In “Vanished,” premiering Friday on MGM+, Kaley Cuoco plays Alice, an archaeologist, a fact she repeats whenever she’s asked about herself, without particularly seeming like one, apart from passing mentions of Byzantine caves and “one of the earliest examples of Christian worship” to make her sound professional. Sam Claflin plays Tom, who works for a charity organization dealing with Syrian refugees in Jordan; in a flashback we get to see them meet cute on a dusty Jordanian road, where he has a flat tire and no spare. Alice gives him a lift to camp; they banter and flirt after a fashion. He does something heroic within her sight.

They have been long-distance dating for four years, meeting up, as Alice describes it, “in hotels all over the world” where they “actually want to have sex with each other all the time.” Currently they are in Paris (in a $500-a-night joint — I looked it up). But Alice, now working in Albania, has been offered a job as an assistant professor of archaeology at Princeton, which would allow her to settle down with Tom in a school-provided apartment and “build a life that’s mine, not just uncovering other people’s.” After an uncomfortable moment, he signs on, saying, “I love you, Alice Monroe.”

Would you trust him? Despite the script’s insistence otherwise, Cuoco and Claflin have no more chemistry than figures on facing pages in a clothing catalog. Fortunately for the viewer, Tom disappears early from the action — ergo “Vanished.” The couple are traveling by train down to Arles, where another hotel awaits them, when Tom leaves the car to take a call and never returns; nor can he be found anywhere on the train.

This happily makes room for the more interesting Helene (multiple César Award winner Karin Viard), a helpful Frenchwoman who steps in as a translator when Alice attempts to get an officious conductor to open a door to a room he insists is for employees only, and rules are rules. (Is he just being, you know, French, or is something up?)

They meet again when Alice gets off the train not in Arles but Marseilles; after she has no more luck with police inspector Drax (Simon Abkarian), who insists a person isn’t missing until 48 hours have elapsed, than with the conductor, she’ll turn to Helene again, who has the advantage of being an investigative reporter. (She’s also been made diabetic, which has no effect on the action other than halting it now and again so she can give herself, rather dramatically, a quick shot of insulin. Like Drax begging off because he’s late meeting his wife for an Alain Delon double feature, it’s a tacked on bit of business meant to suggest character.) Together they’ll ferret out and follow clues, as Alice comes to realize that it takes more than the occasional gauzy romantic getaway to really know a person, and Helene gets closer to nailing a big story.

Directed by Barnaby Thompson, whose credits are mostly in producing (“Wayne’s World,” “Spice World”), and written by his son, Preston — together they made the 2020 film “Pixie” — the series begins with a flash forward in which Alice flees for her life out an upper-story window, signifying action ahead. And indeed, there will be, leading to a climactic scene I don’t suppose was meant to make me laugh, but did, magnifying as it does one of the confrontational cliches of modern cinema. Many of the series’ notions and plot points (though not that particular one) may be found in the works of Alfred Hitchcock — who, you may remember, made a film called “The Lady Vanishes,” from a train yet — though they have been given new clothes to wear. But where Hitchcock never waited long to show you when a character wasn’t what they seemed, that information is held on here nearly to the end, with some added twists along the way to keep you confused.

Cuoco (unusually brunet here), has been good in many things, most notably her funny, winning turn as Penny across 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory” and more recently as the hallucinating alcoholic heroine of the “The Flight Attendant,” but she feels out of joint here. She’s not well served by the pedestrian direction and dialogue, but comes across as a person playing a person, rather than as the person she’s playing. Perhaps by virtue of their accents, the French actors feel more real; France, as usual, looks great.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before, since I’m admittedly something of a broken record on the subject, but I very much prefer Marvel’s television series, which tend to be fleet, original and unpredictable, to its movies, which tend not to be. “Loki,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Moon Knight,” “Echo,” “WandaVision” and its spinoff “Agatha All Along” — all (among others) are worth watching, even the ones that are dumped after a season.

Developing longer stories with less money, the TV shows makers need to be inventive, creative with their resources, so they invest in characters and ideas rather than special effects and action. They focus on secondary or ensemble figures who would never be given a theatrical feature of their own to carry, are particular about culture and family and place, and are often less contingent on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its phases and stages, its crossovers and cross-promotions and long-range marketing plans. At once higher concept and more grounded than the movies, they’re interesting on their own, to the point where, when they finally hitch on to the Marvel multi-mega-serial train, I find them disappointing.

“Wonder Man,” whose eight episodes premiere all at once Tuesday on Disney+, is perhaps the most grounded of these series. Created by Destin Daniel Cretton (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) and Andrew Guest (who has written for “Community” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), the series is a (generally) sweet, disarming tale of actors in Hollywood, tricked up with picture-business details that you don’t need to be au fait with the MCU to appreciate. There are things it might be helpful to know, but you can work out everything that matters through context. (Locals will enjoy playing Spot the Locations.)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams, who as a child became a fan of a B-movie superhero called Wonder Man — not a “real” superhero, in this reality, merely a fiction. Now in his 30s, he’s a struggling actor in Hollywood, good enough to land a small part in an “American Horror Story” episode, but not clever enough to keep from slowing down the production with questions and suggestions when all he needs to do is deliver a couple of lines before a monster bites his head off. He loses the part and a girlfriend directly afterward.

Taking in a revival house matinee of “Midnight Cowboy,” he meets Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who is back from having played the Mandarin — that is, he acted the part of a terrorist called the Mandarin, believing it was just a job — in “Iron Man 3” and providing appealing comedy relief in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” The character here is more fleshed out, something of a mess (but 13 years sober, he likes to point out), serious but not a joke. Before it all went wrong, Trevor played King Lear (in Croydon), appeared in “Coronation Street” and in a movie with Glenda Jackson, was off-off-off Broadway in “The Skin Our Teeth” and briefly had the lead in a hospital show with Joe Pantoliano, who’s very funny playing himself.

Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), left, and Simon Williams (Yahya Adbul-Mateen II) team up in “Wonder Man.”

(Suzanne Tenner / Marvel Television)

Slattery tells Simon that European art director Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić) is rebooting Wonder Man, a role Simon feels born to play. He makes an end run around his unconvinced agent, Janelle (X Mayo), and wheedles an audition — where he again meets Trevor, auditioning for Barnaby, Wonder Man’s pal, or sidekick or something. There are wheels behind wheels in this setup, some of which could use a little grease, but for most of the series they do their squeaking off to the side. It’s a love story, above all — “Midnight Cowboy,” not an accidental choice, is more of a touchstone than any Marvel movie.

Simon does have powers — things shake, break or explode around him when he’s upset, and his strength can become super in a tight spot — which puts him in the sights of the Department of Damage Control, embodied by Arian Moayed as P. Cleary, who would like to contain him. But he struggles to keep them secret, especially in light of something called the Doorman Clause — its history established in a sidebar episode, a cautionary Hollywood fable with Josh Gad as himself — which prohibits anyone with super powers from working in film or television, all Simon lives for.

There is little in the way of action, and you won’t miss it. The fate of the world is never in question, but a callback for a second audition means everything. The only costumed characters are actors playing costumed characters; the only villains, apart from the bureaucracy that seeks to bring him in, are Simon’s own self-doubt and temper. As things progress, Trevor will become a mentor to Simon. As is common in stories of love and friendship, a betrayal will be revealed, but if you have seen even a few such stories, you know how that’s going to go, and will be glad it does.

Whether discussing acting techniques or the traffic they’re stuck in on Hollywood Boulevard (Trevor: “Probably the Hollywood Bowl.” Simon: “It’s too late for the Bowl.” Trevor: “It’s usually the Bowl. I remember seeing Cher there once — breathtaking. Chaka Khan, now there’s a woman”), Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley work well together; their energies are complementary, laid back and loose versus worked up and tight and, of course, each will have something to teach one another about who they are and who they could be. I was genuinely anxious for them, as friends, more so than just wondering how such and such a superhero (or team) might defeat such and such a supervillain (or team).

“Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” says Von Kovak, putting a room of hopeful actors through their paces, and essentially speaking for the series he’s in. “Too difficult to comprehend them. Let’s find the human underneath.”