George Hearn's performance is a bit over the top. Compared to Len Cariou, who created the role for the Broadway musical, and who can be heard on the Original Cast Album, he's pretty much a Warner Brothers cartoon character, and that is after you subtract the exaggerated stage makeup everybody is wearing so they can be seen clearly from 300 feet away.
The 1982 video is a good piece of documentation for the musical, but it's not really playing the musical to its strengths, since it lacks the enormous mechanical sets, the full orchestra, and the real sense that early Industrial Age England was like a huge, oppressive machine, chewing people up and spitting them out, all of which were present in the original stage production at the Uris (now the Gershwin) Theater.
The 1982 video is a good piece of documentation for the musical, but it's not really playing the musical to its strengths, since it lacks the enormous mechanical sets, the full orchestra, and the real sense that early Industrial Age England was like a huge, oppressive machine, chewing people up and spitting them out, all of which were present in the original stage production at the Uris (now the Gershwin) Theater.