Leigh Munro might have simpered just a little less annoyingly, but her soprano voice triumphed over the amplification problems here and there. The two young lovers, who are meant only to be cardboard cutouts, do not disappoint. Nolen, a well-known American baritone who also was appearing for the first time with the City Opera, displayed only a couple of push-button attitudes and emotions to go with his adequate voice, but he handled the razor and the trap door to the baking oven with professional aplomb. Miss Elias, the longtime Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano who was making her City Opera debut as the baker of male pies, showed a nice antic touch, especially while wooing Sweeney in ''By the Sea.'' Hers, if it may be said without blushing, is the meatiest role in the show and with her experience as a comedian she should make more of it as she goes along. Sondheim tries to give all this a pinch of philosophic seasoning (''man eats man,'' Sweeney sings), but the tooth-and-claw metaphor is not pursued beyond the freshman level. Lovett, who uses the bodies as meat-pie ingredients. Todd, as you may recall, is the vengeful Demon Barber of Fleet Street who slices his customers' throats for his landlady, Mrs.

Sondheim's music is mostly declaimed or half-spoken and probably was meant to be sung by actors trained to ignore pitch and quality in favor of word clarity.

Moreover, the voices had to battle to make themselves heard, let alone understood, because of the antivocal, unsympathetic orchestration and an eccentric amplification system.īy the end of the evening, the sound was improved, but its very presence forced the listener to question the score's presumptions. Sondheim's sing-song score than was good for it. The operatic setting served chiefly to focus more attention on Mr. That hope would seem difficult to justify based on the new production of ''Sweeney'' unveiled last night by the New York City Opera. THE decision to transfer ''Sweeney Todd,'' the Broadway success of 1979 to the opera house must have been based on the hope that with trained voices in the leading roles Stephen Sondheim's gory argument in favor of vegetarianism would reveal itself as a work of real musical substance.

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