By Kira Shannon
UCSB English student and film enthusiast Curran Seth has directed his first play, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in collaboration with the UCSB Music Department and UCSB Shrunken Heads Production Company, using his experience as an actor to drive his work.
Seth worked with many students from the Music Department who weren’t as well-acquainted with acting as they were with singing. Despite this challenges Seth guided the students to tap into their connections with their characters to bring them to life in the production, which ran earlier this month.
“Their connection to art in singing is not very different from the type of way that I think about acting,” Seth said. “They give everything, their whole person, to the performance of singing.”
English student Curran Seth, the director of UCSB’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” shares his passion for acting and the psychology behind it.
Although he had previously never directed, Seth has years of stage and film acting experience under his belt. He starred in multiple UCSB student short films, including Theater Kid (2024) and Breaking Character (2024), both of which will premiere at the 25th Annual Beverly Hills Film Festival in April. Transitioning from a skilled actor to a director of other actors was, for Seth, “incredibly exciting.”
“It just gets my blood flowing. It keeps me passionate and involved, and from your director, that’s the first and foremost thing that you need,” he said.
“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a 1979 musical by Hugh Wheeler about a vengeful barber who returns to his hometown after 15 years in order to exact bloody revenge on the judge who exiled him and stole his wife. Slit throats and a baker’s gruesome meat pies figure in the story. The musical has been performed countless times and was later adapted into a movie featuring Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Seth’s interpretation of the production involved simple block buildings that were rearranged for each scene to convey a different location in the story. The set relied on the actors to convey spatial cues in their performance.
Seth claims that his true value as a director is “getting performers where they need to be.” He started this process with three vocal lessons a week with the actors, familiarizing them with their characters by learning about them as individuals. “My approach to acting is not very technical,” he noted. “It’s a lot to do with psychology and emotional development.”
The cast of UCSB’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” underwent a rigorous process of tapping into their characters with the director, Curran Seth. Photograph by Luca Meyers
“It’s funny, it’s tragic, grotesque, very endearing, so much heart and love and soul,” Seth said about “Sweeney Todd.” Still, he said, the most important part of the play is the complexity of the characters, who push you to think about their lives, where they come from, and what people can be capable of. “After seeing it, after working on it, I know it’s a big show and it is inherently melodramatic,” Seth said. “But it’s as melodramatic as it is character driven. It is a character story. It is a human story.”
After winter break, the cast and crew moved into stage blocking and working with the orchestra in UCSB’s Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall. The cast faced obstacles such as limited time to practice in the venue and the quick pace of the soundtrack. Only a couple weeks from opening night, Seth and his team confronted their biggest challenge: During some parts of the show, the cast and crew couldn’t get to their places in time. For safety, Seth decided to reformat the stage layout, forcing a change in several major staging transitions.
“I changed the ground right under their feet, literally,” he said.
When he first took the job as director, Seth understood that he would be mainly in charge of the acting performances. But after a couple weeks, executives at Shrunken Heads developed a trust in his vision and gave Seth full creative control. He found himself asking many questions of others, especially about stage and lighting design. Seth worked with a team of experienced technicians, which allowed him to grow alongside them. “Everybody has to start somewhere,” he said.
As part of his process, Seth turned to a recording of the work’s original Broadway run for inspiration. He describes the UCSB production as a stripped-down version of the play. “I wanted to focus on a set design that just uses our audience's imagination to really color everything and make it a human-first, character-first version of the story,” he said.
“Sweeney Todd” director Curran Seth praised the hidden, character-driven choices that his actors made throughout the production. Photograph by Luca Meyers
Seth hopes audience members noticed specific choices the actors made. He found the most captivating element of their performances was seeing them think in character. “What’s really immersive is actors’ thought-to-thought,” he said. A plethora of hidden details among ensemble members, such as a mini argument or blossoming romance between characters that each cast member took the time to create, produced a lifelike feel to the story.
The show ran four times, gathering audiences of students, parents, and faculty. Many theater patrons were impressed by the talent and professionalism of the cast and crew. “This is insane,” UCSB student Alex Yong commented during the intermission of the final show.
Seth feels immense gratitude for the opportunity to have made his directorial debut with “Sweeney Todd.” He’s even more grateful, he said, for having worked with the talent involved in every aspect of the show. “Everybody there is so talented, at their own rate, that they can support and create the vision as it’s spoken into existence,” he said.
Kira Shannon is a second-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Film and Media Studies. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.