Bryn Terfel's Sweeney Todd gives Philip Quast a close shave. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
As consumers of the arts, audiences often move easily from one form to the next. We can visit exhibitions by the Old Masters and Tracy Emin with a swift round of gigs or grand opera in between. However, I don't think I'd pay to see Eminem in Oklahoma! or Tracy Emin painting in the style of the Old Masters. After all, being good at - and trained for - one thing doesn't mean you will be good at something else.
But somehow reality shows, talent shows like Any Dream Will Do and a generalized suspicion of "elitism" and contempt for training have made many people think that anyone can do anything, if only they have a panel of experts on hand and a big enough name to fund the experiment. So I approached Bryn Terfel in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd with extreme scepticism, even suspicion. How would he feel, I muttered, if a musical-theatre star decided he wanted to sing Wotan? Pretty cross, I answered myself smartly.
Well, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only can Bryn Terfel sing Sondheim as well as he sings Wagner, but he also makes (with one notable exception) the rest of the cast at this semi-staged short run of Sondheim's masterpiece look embarrassingly inept.
To be fair, this group is clearly short on rehearsal time - they have got together for only three days of performance - and they are wildly uneven in skills and experience. At the strongest end of the range is Philip Quast, star of Evita and South Pacific as well as an impressive list of straight theatre (he was a weak-willed Trigorin in a performance of The Seagull that still haunts me). Quast has the vocal skills and acting ability to provide Terfel with an admirable foil. The Pretty Women duet shared by his Judge Turpin and Terfel's mad barber was devastating in its homoerotic undercurrent as well as in its vocal power.
But experience is not all. Maria Friedman has oodles of experience and a raft of awards, all for musical theatre, and yet her embarrassingly loony-tunes performance as Mrs Lovett may go down in history as the only known singing version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She was both inaudible and incomprehensible, as were the two poor waifs brought in for their television names. As Anthony, Daniel Boys (a contestant in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Any Dream Will Do) was simply a black hole where a performer should have been, a charisma-free zone of startling proportions. As Johanna, Emma Williams (Where the Heart Is, Four Feathers) sang as though she was coming in to land at Heathrow, madly circling each note until she made a rapid descent towards it.
I am hard on these two relative beginners, but then Sondheim is a hard taskmaster. Both Anthony and Johanna are viciously difficult singing roles - exposed, technically almost malign - and if you can't do it, you shouldn't mix with Philip Quast or Bryn Terfel. They will make you look like the newbies you are, not because they are unkind but because they have years of graft, piles of technique and amazing skills under their belts.
Audiences, like performers, gain experience through watching. If an opera singer can perform musical theatre, go for it; but if a musical-theatre actor can't sing and can't act, I think they'd be better off staying far away from those who can.
