REVIEW: Attend the Tale of Queeney Todd
Above photo by Russ Rowland.
October 29, 2026
Heartbeat Opera’s Drag Opera Extravaganza — the company’s “gateway drug for opera virgins” is a treat dispensed annually. But this intoxicating blend of high and low art ought to be a permanent fixture.
A rich history informs this whimsical tradition. With roots stretching from Victorian burlesque to modern English pantomime, from The Beggar’s Opera to La Gran Scena Opera Company, to Forbidden Broadway, Heartbeat’s recipe is irresistible: take a theme that’s ripe for satirization, add a cast of operatic and theatrical performers in drag, season with an assortment of musical numbers culled from here, there and everywhere, and serve with pizazz, and a hefty dose of camp.
Past extravaganzas have included Queens of the Night: Mozart in Space and Slaylem: The Witch Trials, but Queeney Todd: the Demon Bottom of Fleet Street, the company’s eleventh — in which creators and authors Kemar Jewel, Jacob Ashworth, Peregrine Teng Heard, and Garrett Bell, skewer gay hookup culture — surely would have delighted even Stephen Sondheim.
This hilariously absurd entertainment, directed and choreographed by Kemar Jewel, and led musically by Jacob Ashworth and Dan Schlosberg (who wrote the canny arrangements, heavy on French horn) put the “queen” in “opera queen.” Taking no prisoners, this NC-17 skit was definitely NSFW, with dildos, enemas, and simulated sex prominently featured. Sweeney Todd serves as an entry point for the broad comedy. The opening number — parlor organ and factory whistle represented — sung by the chorus (the game Stonewall Chorale), “Attend the Tale of Queeney Todd,” introduced the brilliant baritone Nathaniel Sullivan as the revenge-seeking title character.
Sullivan’s agile, muscular baritone and acidic characterization announced itself in a tease of Iago’s manifesto “Credo in un dio crudel” from Verdi’s Otello. Soon to arrive are Rosina (the illustrious mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet) a sex worker who displays her wares in Carmen’s Habañera, and the essential, Cockney-speaking Mrs. Lovedick, played in drag with joyous abandon by Matt Dengler, whose “Worst Thighs in London” had the audience in stitches.
Photo by Russ Rowland
As our hero’s Grindr app pings, and trysts are arranged, Imara Miles, a lush-voiced mezzo apparently willing to do almost anything onstage, played Queeney’s series of tricks. Miles’s spot-on caricatures of archetypal toxic tops featured impressively sung ironic snippets of “All'ambascia ond'io mi struggo,” a confrontational duet from Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux, Pinkerton’s "Addio, fiorito asil" from Madama Butterfly, and “La Fleur” from Carmen.
Just as Sweeney Todd’s customers were doomed by the barber’s razor, Queeney is out for revenge with his Gilette, and Mrs. Lovedick’s Sex Shoppe inventory is the beneficiary. Rosina sings Offenbach while shopping for the perfect phallus, and identifies her white whale: that of the elusive Barber of Seville.
Photo by Russ Rowland
Fresh from his award-winning Broadway run as Mungojerrie in Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the wily Jonathan Burke embodied Figaro, lipsyncing 1996’s “Pony” by Ginuwine and “Largo al factotum” from Rossini's Barber of Seville in a steamy, show-stopping striptease.
Romance nearly blooms, Rosina gets her prize, and Dengler’s Angela Lansbury hijacks the show, “Beauty and the Beast,” Murder She Wrote, and all. Vivid projections by Doaa Ouf transformed Judson Memorial Church, and cocktails like Barber’s Blood and Liquid Twink Death completed the journey into delirium.
