Title: Background info for discussion
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:22 AM (GMT)
Macktheknife posted this on 12/11/06 at 11:28 AM
Sweeney Todd - Man or Myth?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressrele...dd_making.shtml
Sweeney Todd - Man or Myth?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressrele...dd_making.shtml
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:23 AM (GMT)
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:25 AM (GMT)
Posted on 12/02/06 at 08:04 AM
About the Wheeler - Sondheim production
12/02/06 at 08:04 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While I found this on the Amazon site for the book, this review and bit of discussion about the Hugh Wheeler - Stephen Sondheim version is very interesting and provides some great insight and points to think about without being too "theater oriented." LOL
Amazon.ca: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Books: Hugh Wheeler
Musical theatre is the special gift of America, and Sweeney Todd is one of the best gifts from that nation. The Todd legend concerns a barber who, in revenge for the wrongs committed against him and his family, turns into a serial killer in London. He slits the throats of his victims while they are in his tonsorial chair and shuttles their corpses through a trapdoor into the cellar of his shop, where his female accomplice turns the flesh into stuffing for her pies. The crimes are eventually discovered by accident, but though Todd is himself killed, his legend survives.
Besides broadsheet ballads, there was a melodrama by George Dibdin-Pitt in 1847 and then at least six subsequent stage versions of Sweeney Todd. But all these were the stuff of penny dreadful horror and shocks that encouraged actors to "ham" up the passions and to burlesque romance and pathos. The Todd legend received a more sophisticated treatment only in 1977, when English playwright Christopher Bond expanded its scope and turned Todd into more than just a homicidal maniac. Bond's criminal begins as a sympathetic character who is understandably jolted into seeking revenge. Bond's version illuminates Todd's maniacal fascination with his own sudden power in determining who lives or dies.
Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim, however, show a much larger scope for such a thriller by adapting it into an opera that combines bloodiness and bawdry, horror and black farce in ways that are not simply intrusive bits of incongruous diversion but which are woven into the drama in such a way that they enrich its significance. In other words, Wheeler's libretto and Sondheim's score show how murder and madness can have an astounding scope in musical theatre. Their Sweeney Todd refuses to be what Eric Bentley calls "commodity theatre"—theatre that appeals to the lowest common denominator in its audience by excluding the subtlety and depth of dramatic art. While Wheeler's libretto is a disciplined, streamlined adaptation of Christopher Bond's stage play, it is larger than life, as are many of its characters. It is thrilling melodrama in the best sense because its terrors are the demons within human beings, and Sondheim's score has a rich bravura.
Wheeler and Sondheim seize on two key images to set their tale in motion. One is of death; the other of machines. The script calls for organ music, but not just any music. The Dies Irae is what is sounded in funereal fashion, and the opening ballad is about violent death and the possible lack of salvation. Todd is represented as a ghost of a man, but as the story proceeds, he becomes an efficient killing machine. The machine image is linked, of course, to the essence of the 19th century Industrial Revolution—a point best realized in the theatre where set, costuming, and lighting can build a metaphor of social oppression. The libretto allows Todd to express a dark, pessimistic vision: "There's a hole in the world/Like a great black pit/And the vermin of the world/Inhabit it/ And its morals ain't worth/What a pig could spit/And it goes by the name of London." Part of his hate has evidently grown out of the despicable English class system, for after all, it is the Judge who had raped Lucy Todd, Sweeney's pregnant wife, and who is able to take full advantage of his elevated social status to exploit young Johanna, the Todd daughter, whom he has made his ward.
Even the comedy of Mrs. Lovett and her disgusting meat pies, and of Tobias, her apprentice, owes a great deal to the social corruption of London. Mrs. Lovett's rancid humour about her culinary fare could only exist because of her desperate attempt to cope with squalid deprivation.
The social context is important, but the play is really about the genesis and deepening of Todd's psychosis. Once a naïve young man, he is evidently been dealt hard blows by life. He never forgets who or what have victimized him, and his hate and violence are chilling, especially when he fondles his razors like long-lost friends or when he turns into a Titus who exults with barbaric gaiety over "who gets eaten and who gets to eat." His is a hallucinatory rhapsody of murder.
Wheeler and Sondheim gamble dangerously with farce and satire. They pit a camp barber, Pirelli, against Todd in a tonsorial contest, and give this faux-Italian a rollicking, rhyming song. Their Mrs. Lovett is cheerfully deranged in her rapid patter songs, and they whip up a wickedly giddy duet in which she and Todd sing of the ideal cannibalistic fare for her meat pies ("Little Priest"). Such macabre comedy fits the story which is itself grotesque. There are flaws of course: the social layering is simplistic; Anthony Hope and Johanna are cardboard lovers from stereotypical romance; and true art sometimes seems to be hovering too close to cheap Grand Guignol. But the libretto allows room for Brechtian alienation as well as powerful emotion. Ultimately, Sweeney Todd reveals a sardonic nihilism that is eerie, wickedly funny, and savagely chilling.
Keith Garebian (Books in Canada)
About the Wheeler - Sondheim production
12/02/06 at 08:04 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While I found this on the Amazon site for the book, this review and bit of discussion about the Hugh Wheeler - Stephen Sondheim version is very interesting and provides some great insight and points to think about without being too "theater oriented." LOL
Amazon.ca: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Books: Hugh Wheeler
Musical theatre is the special gift of America, and Sweeney Todd is one of the best gifts from that nation. The Todd legend concerns a barber who, in revenge for the wrongs committed against him and his family, turns into a serial killer in London. He slits the throats of his victims while they are in his tonsorial chair and shuttles their corpses through a trapdoor into the cellar of his shop, where his female accomplice turns the flesh into stuffing for her pies. The crimes are eventually discovered by accident, but though Todd is himself killed, his legend survives.
Besides broadsheet ballads, there was a melodrama by George Dibdin-Pitt in 1847 and then at least six subsequent stage versions of Sweeney Todd. But all these were the stuff of penny dreadful horror and shocks that encouraged actors to "ham" up the passions and to burlesque romance and pathos. The Todd legend received a more sophisticated treatment only in 1977, when English playwright Christopher Bond expanded its scope and turned Todd into more than just a homicidal maniac. Bond's criminal begins as a sympathetic character who is understandably jolted into seeking revenge. Bond's version illuminates Todd's maniacal fascination with his own sudden power in determining who lives or dies.
Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim, however, show a much larger scope for such a thriller by adapting it into an opera that combines bloodiness and bawdry, horror and black farce in ways that are not simply intrusive bits of incongruous diversion but which are woven into the drama in such a way that they enrich its significance. In other words, Wheeler's libretto and Sondheim's score show how murder and madness can have an astounding scope in musical theatre. Their Sweeney Todd refuses to be what Eric Bentley calls "commodity theatre"—theatre that appeals to the lowest common denominator in its audience by excluding the subtlety and depth of dramatic art. While Wheeler's libretto is a disciplined, streamlined adaptation of Christopher Bond's stage play, it is larger than life, as are many of its characters. It is thrilling melodrama in the best sense because its terrors are the demons within human beings, and Sondheim's score has a rich bravura.
Wheeler and Sondheim seize on two key images to set their tale in motion. One is of death; the other of machines. The script calls for organ music, but not just any music. The Dies Irae is what is sounded in funereal fashion, and the opening ballad is about violent death and the possible lack of salvation. Todd is represented as a ghost of a man, but as the story proceeds, he becomes an efficient killing machine. The machine image is linked, of course, to the essence of the 19th century Industrial Revolution—a point best realized in the theatre where set, costuming, and lighting can build a metaphor of social oppression. The libretto allows Todd to express a dark, pessimistic vision: "There's a hole in the world/Like a great black pit/And the vermin of the world/Inhabit it/ And its morals ain't worth/What a pig could spit/And it goes by the name of London." Part of his hate has evidently grown out of the despicable English class system, for after all, it is the Judge who had raped Lucy Todd, Sweeney's pregnant wife, and who is able to take full advantage of his elevated social status to exploit young Johanna, the Todd daughter, whom he has made his ward.
Even the comedy of Mrs. Lovett and her disgusting meat pies, and of Tobias, her apprentice, owes a great deal to the social corruption of London. Mrs. Lovett's rancid humour about her culinary fare could only exist because of her desperate attempt to cope with squalid deprivation.
The social context is important, but the play is really about the genesis and deepening of Todd's psychosis. Once a naïve young man, he is evidently been dealt hard blows by life. He never forgets who or what have victimized him, and his hate and violence are chilling, especially when he fondles his razors like long-lost friends or when he turns into a Titus who exults with barbaric gaiety over "who gets eaten and who gets to eat." His is a hallucinatory rhapsody of murder.
Wheeler and Sondheim gamble dangerously with farce and satire. They pit a camp barber, Pirelli, against Todd in a tonsorial contest, and give this faux-Italian a rollicking, rhyming song. Their Mrs. Lovett is cheerfully deranged in her rapid patter songs, and they whip up a wickedly giddy duet in which she and Todd sing of the ideal cannibalistic fare for her meat pies ("Little Priest"). Such macabre comedy fits the story which is itself grotesque. There are flaws of course: the social layering is simplistic; Anthony Hope and Johanna are cardboard lovers from stereotypical romance; and true art sometimes seems to be hovering too close to cheap Grand Guignol. But the libretto allows room for Brechtian alienation as well as powerful emotion. Ultimately, Sweeney Todd reveals a sardonic nihilism that is eerie, wickedly funny, and savagely chilling.
Keith Garebian (Books in Canada)
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:26 AM (GMT)
Bringing Mrs. Lovett onto the front burner
12/02/06 at 07:47 AM
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PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
In all of the early versions of the Sweeney Todd story, including the Dibdin Pitt melodrama, the depraved acts of murder and mayhem are Sweeney's twisted plot alone. Mrs. Lovett is a secondary character, an unfortunate neighbor and reluctant accomplice whom the barber intimidates into helping him. She is greedy, no doubt - she expects half of all the profits from their evil trade - but she is no mastermind. In fact, in Prest's original String of Pearls, Sweeney cuts up the bodies himself, a pieman who never leaves the basement kitchen does all of the cooking, and Mrs. Lovett is simply the oblivious sales force. She is a business partner and has no romantic interest whatsoever in Sweeney Todd.
In later versions of the story, Mrs. Lovett is a collaborator in Sweeney's dreadful business. But though she enjoys the notoriety brought on by her delicious pies, she is plagued by a guilty conscience, which causes her to "seek solace" in the occasional glass of brandy. In these tales, Sweeney poisons Mrs. Lovett's drink, and she conveniently drops dead just as the secret ingredients of her pies are revealed to the gobbling public.
In Dibdin-Pitt's melodrama, Mrs. Lovett turns out to be one of Sweeney's early victims. When she tries to collect her share of the profits and get out of the business, Sweeney stabs her in a rage and throws her into the bakehouse fire. In fact, Mrs. Lovett is disposed of before the halfway mark of the play - she dies in the second act of a four-act production.
Christopher Bond fleshes out Mrs. Lovett in his retelling, giving her a sneaky intelligence. It is she who preserves Sweeney's barbering tools after he is sent away, and she is the one who informs him about the fate of his family upon his return. And it is Mrs. Lovett who is the architect of the devious pie-making plot. Bond also gives her an open romantic interest in the barber, which better explains her willingness to cook up his victims.
12/02/06 at 07:47 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
In all of the early versions of the Sweeney Todd story, including the Dibdin Pitt melodrama, the depraved acts of murder and mayhem are Sweeney's twisted plot alone. Mrs. Lovett is a secondary character, an unfortunate neighbor and reluctant accomplice whom the barber intimidates into helping him. She is greedy, no doubt - she expects half of all the profits from their evil trade - but she is no mastermind. In fact, in Prest's original String of Pearls, Sweeney cuts up the bodies himself, a pieman who never leaves the basement kitchen does all of the cooking, and Mrs. Lovett is simply the oblivious sales force. She is a business partner and has no romantic interest whatsoever in Sweeney Todd.
In later versions of the story, Mrs. Lovett is a collaborator in Sweeney's dreadful business. But though she enjoys the notoriety brought on by her delicious pies, she is plagued by a guilty conscience, which causes her to "seek solace" in the occasional glass of brandy. In these tales, Sweeney poisons Mrs. Lovett's drink, and she conveniently drops dead just as the secret ingredients of her pies are revealed to the gobbling public.
In Dibdin-Pitt's melodrama, Mrs. Lovett turns out to be one of Sweeney's early victims. When she tries to collect her share of the profits and get out of the business, Sweeney stabs her in a rage and throws her into the bakehouse fire. In fact, Mrs. Lovett is disposed of before the halfway mark of the play - she dies in the second act of a four-act production.
Christopher Bond fleshes out Mrs. Lovett in his retelling, giving her a sneaky intelligence. It is she who preserves Sweeney's barbering tools after he is sent away, and she is the one who informs him about the fate of his family upon his return. And it is Mrs. Lovett who is the architect of the devious pie-making plot. Bond also gives her an open romantic interest in the barber, which better explains her willingness to cook up his victims.
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:27 AM (GMT)
PUTTING HIM ALL TOGETHER
Posted on 12/02/06 at 07:43 AM
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This is a short piece of info about how Sweeney Todd came about.
PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The barber himself was a long, low-jointed, ill put-together sort of a fellow, with an immense mouth and such huge hands and feet that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and what was more wonderful considering his trade, there was never such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd's. We know not what to compare it to; probably it came close to what one may suppose to be the appearance of a thick-set hedge in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled.
- The String of Pearls by George Dibdin-Pitt
Up until Christopher Bond's 1973 retelling of the story, Sweeney Todd was a cartoonish, outrageous monster, slashing his way through customers with the exclamation "I'll Polish Him Off!" In early versions of the story, many characters are morally bankrupt, but Sweeney is downright wicked. He kills his first victim for a necklace brought from an exotic land by a sailor. This is the String of Pearls of the original penny dreadful title.
Following standard melodramatic conventions, George Dibdin-Pitt's play of the Sweeney tale contains shocks, thrills and several false endings. Constantly lurking about and cackling, the demon barber eludes capture and escapes at the brink of doom on nine different occasions. At one point, driven mad by what he thinks are the ghosts of his victims, Sweeney breaks down on the witness stand and confesses his wicked deeds to the judge. Sentenced to prison, he leaps at the last minute from the clutches of justice, returning to his shop in search of his treasures. While rooting around in the cellars, he is confronted and overtaken by the surprisingly still-alive romantic sailor-hero of the play's opening, but Sweeney outsmarts him and escapes - again - this time through a secret trap door.
It was Christopher Bond who added another dimension to the Sweeney character and gave him a dose of humanity. The barber's evil plot made more sense when seen as a twisted revenge fantasy being perpetrated against the corrupt society that destroyed his family and deprived him of his freedom. The cruel irony he faces as he holds the beggar woman at the end of the play causes Sweeney to tearfully repent and offers the character some redemption. Bond shows us that he is a madman, but he is human after all.
Posted on 12/02/06 at 07:43 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a short piece of info about how Sweeney Todd came about.
PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The barber himself was a long, low-jointed, ill put-together sort of a fellow, with an immense mouth and such huge hands and feet that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and what was more wonderful considering his trade, there was never such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd's. We know not what to compare it to; probably it came close to what one may suppose to be the appearance of a thick-set hedge in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled.
- The String of Pearls by George Dibdin-Pitt
Up until Christopher Bond's 1973 retelling of the story, Sweeney Todd was a cartoonish, outrageous monster, slashing his way through customers with the exclamation "I'll Polish Him Off!" In early versions of the story, many characters are morally bankrupt, but Sweeney is downright wicked. He kills his first victim for a necklace brought from an exotic land by a sailor. This is the String of Pearls of the original penny dreadful title.
Following standard melodramatic conventions, George Dibdin-Pitt's play of the Sweeney tale contains shocks, thrills and several false endings. Constantly lurking about and cackling, the demon barber eludes capture and escapes at the brink of doom on nine different occasions. At one point, driven mad by what he thinks are the ghosts of his victims, Sweeney breaks down on the witness stand and confesses his wicked deeds to the judge. Sentenced to prison, he leaps at the last minute from the clutches of justice, returning to his shop in search of his treasures. While rooting around in the cellars, he is confronted and overtaken by the surprisingly still-alive romantic sailor-hero of the play's opening, but Sweeney outsmarts him and escapes - again - this time through a secret trap door.
It was Christopher Bond who added another dimension to the Sweeney character and gave him a dose of humanity. The barber's evil plot made more sense when seen as a twisted revenge fantasy being perpetrated against the corrupt society that destroyed his family and deprived him of his freedom. The cruel irony he faces as he holds the beggar woman at the end of the play causes Sweeney to tearfully repent and offers the character some redemption. Bond shows us that he is a madman, but he is human after all.
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:30 AM (GMT)
Here's something about Sondheim himself posted on 12/01/06 at 07:14 AM
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Born: March 22, 1930
Active in major Broadway productions of American musical theater beginning in 1957, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (born 1930) redefined the Broadway musical form with his innovative and award winning productions. He continued to be a major force in the shaping of this genre into the 1980s.
American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim is mainly known for his stage works, which include "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962); "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964); "Company" (1970); "Follies" (1971); and "A Little Night Music" (1973). He is known for his collaborations with Leonard Bernstein as lyricist for "West Side Story" (1957) and "Candide" (1974), and with Richard Rogers on "Do I Hear a Waltz" (1965). Sondheim's partnership with the director/producer Hal Prince resulted in Tony Awards for Best Musical Scores for three consecutive years (1971-1973), and "Pacific Overtures" (1976) was hailed as a landmark in American musical theater because of its masterful use of traditional Japanese theater elements. In 1984, Sondheim paired himself with James Lapine to put together "Sunday in the Park with George," a musical inspired by a Georges Seurat painting.
Sondheim was born into a prosperous business family on March 22, 1930. He studied piano for two years while very young and continued his interest in the musical stage throughout his education. Sondheim's parents divorced in 1942 and his mother took up residence in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, close to the summertime residence of Oscar Hammerstein II. As a friend of Hammerstein's son, Sondheim was able to ask the famous librettist for an evaluation of his first stage work, a high school production produced at the age of 15. Hammerstein's critical evaluation of "By George" initiated a four-year relationship that was decisive in formulating the young artist's style. As Hammerstein's personal assistant, Sondheim gained entry into the world of professional theater.
While attending Williams College he performed duties in the preparation and rehearsals of the Rogers and Hammerstein productions of "South Pacific" and "The King and I." Upon graduation he won the Hutchinson Prize, which enabled him to study composition at Princeton University with Milton Babbitt.
Sondheim began his professional career in television by writing scripts for the TOPPER and THE LAST WORD series and incidental music for the Broadway musical "Girls of Summer." Shortly thereafter he made the acquaintance of Arthur Laurents, who introduced him to Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein as the possible lyricist for "West Side Story," which was produced in 1957. The young songwriter found himself involved in one of the most successful shows ever produced on Broadway. Sondheim followed this success by collaborating on the Broadway production of "Gypsy" in 1959, distinguishing himself as one of the great young talents in American musical theater.
Intent on broadening his talents, Sondheim sought productions where he could use his musical as well as lyrical expertise. He produced "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in 1962 ... a bawdy farce based on the plays of Plautus. The show had an impressive run of almost 1,000 performances, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and was made into a successful film in 1966.
A scene from Sondheim's "A Little Night Music."
Sondheim followed with two less successful ventures: "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964) and "Do I Hear a Waltz" (1965). Although both failed commercially, Sondheim contributed songs of high quality.
In 1970 Sondheim produced "Company," which once again won him unanimous praise from the critics. The production was awarded the Drama Critics and Tony Awards for Best Musical of the season, and Sondheim received awards for the best composer and best lyricist. One critic commented that "Company" "is absolutely first rate ... the freshest ... in years ... This is a wonderful musical score, the one that Broadway has long needed. ..." The following year Sondheim produced "Follies," a retrospective of the "Ziegfield Follies," in which the composer blended the nostalgia of popular songs of the past with his own style of sentimental ballad. He was awarded both the Drama Critics and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical of 1971.
In "A Little Night Music" (1973) Sondheim exposed his strong background in classical music. It was described by critics as reminiscent of Mahler, Strauss, Ravel, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Another Tony Award winner, "A Little Night Music" also included his first commercial hit song, "Send in the Clowns."
Noteworthy as a relentless innovator, Sondheim collaborated with Hal Prince on "Pacific Overtures" (1976). In an attempt to relate the westernization of Japan with the commercialized present, Sondheim fused the unlikely elements of Haiku poetry, Japanese pentatonic scales, and Kabuki theater with contemporary stage techniques in a production that was hailed as a successful Broadway hit. He followed this with "Sweeney Todd" (1979), the melodramatic story of the demon barber of Fleet Street who conspired with the neighborhood baker to supply her with sufficient barbershop victims for her meat pies. Less funny than tragic, "Sweeney Todd" explored the dark side of the 19th-century English social system.
Sondheim's talent derived from his ability to cross genres of music and theater to offer Broadway audiences works of remarkable craft on unexpected subjects that challenged and tested the form of the American musical. Sondheim explored issues of contemporary life; marriage and relationships in "Company"; madness and the human condition in "Anyone Can Whistle"; nostalgia and sentiment in "Follies"; Western imperialism in "Pacific Overtures"; and injustice and revenge in "Sweeney Todd."
Sondheim produced "Company," which ... won him unanimous praise from the critics.
Sondheim avoided filler in his lyrics and concentrated on direct impact through verbal interplay. His lyrics were witty without his ever sacrificing integrity for superficially clever rhyme. Similarly, he maintained his musical individuality even while operating in the adopted Eastern musical style of "Pacific Overtures." Sondheim's consistent ability to merge words and music that hint at the deeper personality beneath the prototype character distinguished him as a composer of rare ingenuity and talent.
"Side by Side by Sondheim," a musical tribute to the artist, was successfully produced in 1976. Sondheim's later works included the film score for REDS (1981) and "Sunday in the Park with George" (1984), which won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize. "Into the Woods" was another musical hit on Broadway in 1987.
Sondheim participated on the council of the Dramatists Guild and served as its president from 1973 to 1981. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. He won the 1990 Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)" from the movie DICK TRACY.
Sondheim composed the music for the ABC television presentation TIME WARNER PRESENTS THE EARTH DAY SPECIAL (1990). In 1992, he declined a National Medal of Arts Award, from the National Endowment for the Arts.
On July 4, 2000, Sondheim was given the Praemium Imperiale award by the Japan Art Association. He was honored for his work in film and theater.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/sondheim_s.html#
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Born: March 22, 1930
Active in major Broadway productions of American musical theater beginning in 1957, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (born 1930) redefined the Broadway musical form with his innovative and award winning productions. He continued to be a major force in the shaping of this genre into the 1980s.
American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim is mainly known for his stage works, which include "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962); "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964); "Company" (1970); "Follies" (1971); and "A Little Night Music" (1973). He is known for his collaborations with Leonard Bernstein as lyricist for "West Side Story" (1957) and "Candide" (1974), and with Richard Rogers on "Do I Hear a Waltz" (1965). Sondheim's partnership with the director/producer Hal Prince resulted in Tony Awards for Best Musical Scores for three consecutive years (1971-1973), and "Pacific Overtures" (1976) was hailed as a landmark in American musical theater because of its masterful use of traditional Japanese theater elements. In 1984, Sondheim paired himself with James Lapine to put together "Sunday in the Park with George," a musical inspired by a Georges Seurat painting.
Sondheim was born into a prosperous business family on March 22, 1930. He studied piano for two years while very young and continued his interest in the musical stage throughout his education. Sondheim's parents divorced in 1942 and his mother took up residence in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, close to the summertime residence of Oscar Hammerstein II. As a friend of Hammerstein's son, Sondheim was able to ask the famous librettist for an evaluation of his first stage work, a high school production produced at the age of 15. Hammerstein's critical evaluation of "By George" initiated a four-year relationship that was decisive in formulating the young artist's style. As Hammerstein's personal assistant, Sondheim gained entry into the world of professional theater.
While attending Williams College he performed duties in the preparation and rehearsals of the Rogers and Hammerstein productions of "South Pacific" and "The King and I." Upon graduation he won the Hutchinson Prize, which enabled him to study composition at Princeton University with Milton Babbitt.
Sondheim began his professional career in television by writing scripts for the TOPPER and THE LAST WORD series and incidental music for the Broadway musical "Girls of Summer." Shortly thereafter he made the acquaintance of Arthur Laurents, who introduced him to Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein as the possible lyricist for "West Side Story," which was produced in 1957. The young songwriter found himself involved in one of the most successful shows ever produced on Broadway. Sondheim followed this success by collaborating on the Broadway production of "Gypsy" in 1959, distinguishing himself as one of the great young talents in American musical theater.
Intent on broadening his talents, Sondheim sought productions where he could use his musical as well as lyrical expertise. He produced "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in 1962 ... a bawdy farce based on the plays of Plautus. The show had an impressive run of almost 1,000 performances, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and was made into a successful film in 1966.
A scene from Sondheim's "A Little Night Music."
Sondheim followed with two less successful ventures: "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964) and "Do I Hear a Waltz" (1965). Although both failed commercially, Sondheim contributed songs of high quality.
In 1970 Sondheim produced "Company," which once again won him unanimous praise from the critics. The production was awarded the Drama Critics and Tony Awards for Best Musical of the season, and Sondheim received awards for the best composer and best lyricist. One critic commented that "Company" "is absolutely first rate ... the freshest ... in years ... This is a wonderful musical score, the one that Broadway has long needed. ..." The following year Sondheim produced "Follies," a retrospective of the "Ziegfield Follies," in which the composer blended the nostalgia of popular songs of the past with his own style of sentimental ballad. He was awarded both the Drama Critics and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical of 1971.
In "A Little Night Music" (1973) Sondheim exposed his strong background in classical music. It was described by critics as reminiscent of Mahler, Strauss, Ravel, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Another Tony Award winner, "A Little Night Music" also included his first commercial hit song, "Send in the Clowns."
Noteworthy as a relentless innovator, Sondheim collaborated with Hal Prince on "Pacific Overtures" (1976). In an attempt to relate the westernization of Japan with the commercialized present, Sondheim fused the unlikely elements of Haiku poetry, Japanese pentatonic scales, and Kabuki theater with contemporary stage techniques in a production that was hailed as a successful Broadway hit. He followed this with "Sweeney Todd" (1979), the melodramatic story of the demon barber of Fleet Street who conspired with the neighborhood baker to supply her with sufficient barbershop victims for her meat pies. Less funny than tragic, "Sweeney Todd" explored the dark side of the 19th-century English social system.
Sondheim's talent derived from his ability to cross genres of music and theater to offer Broadway audiences works of remarkable craft on unexpected subjects that challenged and tested the form of the American musical. Sondheim explored issues of contemporary life; marriage and relationships in "Company"; madness and the human condition in "Anyone Can Whistle"; nostalgia and sentiment in "Follies"; Western imperialism in "Pacific Overtures"; and injustice and revenge in "Sweeney Todd."
Sondheim produced "Company," which ... won him unanimous praise from the critics.
Sondheim avoided filler in his lyrics and concentrated on direct impact through verbal interplay. His lyrics were witty without his ever sacrificing integrity for superficially clever rhyme. Similarly, he maintained his musical individuality even while operating in the adopted Eastern musical style of "Pacific Overtures." Sondheim's consistent ability to merge words and music that hint at the deeper personality beneath the prototype character distinguished him as a composer of rare ingenuity and talent.
"Side by Side by Sondheim," a musical tribute to the artist, was successfully produced in 1976. Sondheim's later works included the film score for REDS (1981) and "Sunday in the Park with George" (1984), which won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize. "Into the Woods" was another musical hit on Broadway in 1987.
Sondheim participated on the council of the Dramatists Guild and served as its president from 1973 to 1981. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. He won the 1990 Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)" from the movie DICK TRACY.
Sondheim composed the music for the ABC television presentation TIME WARNER PRESENTS THE EARTH DAY SPECIAL (1990). In 1992, he declined a National Medal of Arts Award, from the National Endowment for the Arts.
On July 4, 2000, Sondheim was given the Praemium Imperiale award by the Japan Art Association. He was honored for his work in film and theater.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/sondheim_s.html#
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:32 AM (GMT)
Both Macktheknife and Deppsdarling shared this article, it's well worth a look.
Click here Knowledge of London /Sweeney Todd
Click here Knowledge of London /Sweeney Todd
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:34 AM (GMT)
This interview was done in 1993, right as Sweeney Todd is about to open in London.
Click here: National Theatre : Platform Papers : Stephen Sondheim (June 1993)
National Theatre
Stephen Sondheim (June 1993)
Stephen Sondheim in conversation with Jeremy Sams
Lyttelton Theatre, 1 June 1993, before the opening the following day in the Cottesloe of Sweeney Todd
JS As you’ve just heard from the applause, England would seem to be very fond of you. What is it with you and England?
SS I first came here in 1952. I had a friend named John Ryan who had been selected to be John Huston’s assistant on a movie called Beat the Devil. He said come to Italy with me, and we stopped in London where his mother had a flat and I fell in love with the city. As a matter of fact, on that movie, I was clapper boy. Huston said if I could hold on till he got back to finishing the film at Shepperton, I could work up a music score. My money ran out and I couldn’t do it.
JSYou seem to have a feel for England, which if I may say so, many Americans don’t.
SS A lot of it comes from my friend Burt Shevelove. He was an anglophile and eventually moved over here to live. When A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum opened, he had enough money to get a flat here. He lived here till he died in 1983. He and I were very good friends and we used to do The Listener puzzles together.
JS No longer with us, you know.
SS I heard it transferred to The Times. Where is it? I looked for it on Sunday and it wasn’t there.
JS The back of the magazine on Saturday.
SS As a matter of fact, I’ve been a subscriber to The Observer since 1960, and I used to enter the Ximenes puzzle contests. I never won but I got high commendation once and I went to the Thousandth Dinner for them. So anyway, through osmosis I think I became an anglophile. Through Burt’s enthusiasm at first, and then I started to come over more frequently. I love the British theatre. Every time I hear anybody complain over here about the British theatre, I say, “Oh God, you don’t want the American theatre. It’s so much better here”.
JS What do you get here that you don’t get on Broadway?
SS There’s a theatre-going tradition. To come to the National Theatre and see a group of teenage schoolboys and girls attend a performance of King Lear, as I did, is something you would never see in the United States. There is no serious interest in the theatre there. Granted, the West End is going the way that Broadway is in many ways, becoming more and more weighted with light comedies, but there is still serious work being done in the West End, and virtually none being done on Broadway because there is no audience for it.
I’ve said this many times, so those of you who’ve heard it, forgive me, but what has killed the American theatre is that California and New York are 3,000 miles apart. Theatre has always existed on stars. There are many actors who love doing stage work in the United States and who draw audiences and re-create the theatre-going habit. For example, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau did Juno and the Paycock in California about fifteen years ago. Whether they did it well or not doesn’t matter, the point was you couldn’t get a ticket. And believe me the audience couldn’t have been less interested in Juno and the Paycock. But having done that, Matthau and Lemmon might have gone on to do another one if they had lived in New York City; and if the movie industry were in New York City, then they could do what British stars do. Here, they can afford to take a chance on a new play which might fold in a month or a week, and still support the family because they can go to the studios and make $10,000 a minute either on television or in movies. That’s why actors here can afford to play in places like the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Al Pacino is one of the few movie stars in the United States who regularly appears in the theatre. He did Oscar Wilde’s Salome recently, along with a new American play in a double bill. He can play New York because he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have to uproot his children and that sort of thing. But it’s very hard. The result is that the audiences aren’t attracted unless a play or musical gets extraordinary reviews. Virtually nothing sells until the reviews are out in New York City; that’s not true here. A star can sustain a play here for a while, at least until an audience can determine whether it likes it or not. The other thing is that New York theatre is entirely run by the New York Times. We are one of the major cities in the world and have only three daily papers. Four, I suppose, if you count Newsday. And only one of those papers appeals to the public that can afford to pay for theatre tickets. That’s what gives the New York Times its power. It’s not its critic, Frank Rich, it’s the New York Times.
JSIt can still today make or break a show?
SS Yes. What it can certainly do is make it. It can’t break certain musicals, and if a certain star appears in a play, it can’t break that. Frank Rich is a very intelligent reviewer and a very, very good writer, but like all critics – including Kenneth Tynan whom I watched over the years, and Walter Kerr – after a few years of being a first-rate mind in a second-rate job, a certain sourness creeps in. If you’re intelligent enough to know that you’re being corrupted, meanness starts. Frank Rich started to get bitchy and mean about five years ago, and he hadn’t been before. But I can’t blame him, because you and I can go to a bad play and we can leave in the middle or have dinner and not talk about it, but if we had to go home and write about it...
JS That job’s never been literally corruptible by bribery, has it?
SS I’ve heard tales about Clive Barnes, which are probably true, but...
JS What is it that our actors can do that Americans can’t?
SS Your actors can do virtually everything – except American plays, though I have seen American plays done well over here. It’s the training that actors get over here that allows them to be so versatile because they can do Restoration comedy and they can do contemporary drama, and many of them do musicals. The versatility is enormous because of the training and the rep system around the country, the fact that those rep companies don’t just do six months of one play. We don’t have that sort of thing, or our rep companies don’t train the actors in that many different styles. The great thing about the London theatre is that it’s still something of a supermarket. Virtually every afternoon or evening I have free, I go to a play here. Time Out is the first magazine I get when I get off the plane. There are so many different kinds of plays, that’s what’s always encouraging. You can still see a Whitehall farce, you can see serious new plays in the West End, or right here on this stage – I think Arcadia is a great play. It’s thrilling.
JS Which leads us to Sweeney Todd. What brought you to it? I presume Time Out said, come to this melodrama at Stratford East...
SS I don’t think Time Out existed then, it was only What’s On. No, I’ve always wanted to see Grand Guignol and an American friend told me this was a Grand Guignol play. (I was reminded, curiously enough, that the person who took me out there to see it was Sheila Reid, who is playing the Beggar Woman in this current production of Sweeney Todd.
Small world, isn’t it?) Anyway, it turned out to be not Grand Guignol but this charming melodrama, and melodrama and farce are my two favourite forms of theatre because, as I’ve said before, they are obverse sides of the same coin. Next day I had lunch with John Dexter, who was a friend of mine, and asked him would Sweeney Todd be the basis of a good operatic piece. He had always been pushing me to write a through-composed piece. He said it would be perfect and he got a copy from the British Library. Of course it was the 1847 copy which is this clunking, dreadful piece. It had been published in three or four other versions, spread out over the 130 years since then, and each one was worse than the other. As many of you may know, originally it was taken from a novel called String of Pearls which is about Sweeney Todd killing a sailor ...
JS Is he completely fictional?
SS There are many rumours. There was a famous cannibal group in Scotland called Sawney Bean and his family and the rhythm of the names is similar, but apparently during the French Revolution there was a shop that first started to sell animals and then, apparently, human beings as meat. It’s never been verified, but it seems natural with the guillotining going on. As far as the Fleet Street stuff goes, however, I think that’s all made up by Thomas Prest who wrote the story. Then it was popularised a few years later by the Neil Simon of his day, a man named George Dibdin Pitt, who was well-known for writing blood-and-thunder plays. Then Christopher Bond made the sea-change.
For those of you who don’t know the story, what happened is that Christopher Bond was an actor in a troupe and, as I understand it, they decided their Christmas play would be Sweeney Todd. They sent for the 1957 version, or whatever was around then, and he said, “This is dreadful, I’ll write my own”. In doing so he also wrote a juicy part for himself as Tobias. They put it on, and that’s what travelled to Stratford East. What Bond had done was to take elements of The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Count of Monte Cristo and add them to the traditional Sweeney Todd. By motivating Sweeney, he changed the whole thing from a silly melodrama to a serious one, though it has its comic aspects. It’s also rather subtly written. I didn’t realise till I started work on it that all the upper-class characters talk in blank verse. He gave the play substance.
JS What was it about melodrama that appealed to you?
SS I just love larger-than-life stuff, and that’s what farce and melodrama are. Everybody over-reacts all the time.
JS For us, melodrama is almost a pejorative term.
SS Yes, it has that connotation in America too, but Macbeth is a melodrama, Hamlet’s a melodrama, everyone over-reacts. Just like farce, melodrama is also based on mistakes, or events that spiral out of control.
JS One of the things that appeals to me particularly about Sweeney Todd is that it’s not ludicrous, it’s not silly at all.
SSThe interesting thing was that the Stratford production had charm. Interspersed with the scenes were street songs, which I assume were songs of the period. When I wanted to do it, a Broadway producer named Richard Barr had already optioned the Stratford East version to be done on Broadway with bar room songs. As many of you know, Stratford East is connected with a pub and, at least in those days, you could bring your beer back into the theatre. Bond wanted the audience to hiss and cheer and scream “Watch out!” and things like that. He wanted it – I didn’t. Nonetheless, his claim, and I think he’s right, is that you can respond that way and still take it seriously.
The first week in New York, working with Hugh Wheeler, who adapted Bond’s adaptation and wrote the libretto, I was only worried about how the audience would take the murders, whether they’d think them silly or not. And then, when Mrs Lovett gets the idea for making the meat pies, what would the audience’s reaction be? In America nobody’s ever heard of Sweeney Todd, which I gather is part of every childhood in England. But the Demon Barber of Fleet Street meant nothing whatsoever in America. So they were seeing this wild plot for the first time, and there was a loud gasp at the first murder, which was staged very violently with a great swash of blood. Then when Mrs Lovett got the idea for the pies and the audience realised what was up, there was a satisfying laugh, the like of which I’ve rarely heard. They had a wonderful time with the idea because they didn’t know it was coming.
JS That moment is particularly skilfully done, because Sweeney doesn’t know what’s coming either.
SS That’s true, but here the audience are waiting for him to get the idea. And that’s a huge difference.
JS That’s interesting, in English melodrama, the idea of violence somehow being entertaining. Outside opera, it’s not something you see on the musical stage very much.
SS People accept outsized events in opera, immolations.
JS Is that why the music for Sweeney sounds, to my ears, more “operatic”.
SS It’s an open secret that the music for Sweeney is an hommage to a film composer named Bernard Herrmann. When I was fifteen I saw a movie called Hangover Square, an American movie which took place in London, starring Laird Cregar as – wait for it – an insane composer who was musically way ahead of his time in 1900. Every time he would hear a high-pitched note, his mind would go blank and he’d go out and murder the nearest person. He doesn’t know what he does in these blackouts, and he goes to George Sanders, who is the police psychiatrist, who says, “Dear fellow you’re in a lot of trouble”. He’s arrested right in the middle of playing his piano concerto, but insists on finishing the concert, and sets the entire concert hall on fire. Everyone leaves and he’s left playing surrounded by flames. Bernard Herrmann wrote the concerto in such a way that it ends with solo piano with low chords. It’s a brilliant score, a one-movement piano concerto. When I was fifteen I sat through the movie twice because in the middle there’s a three-second shot of the score on the piano. I memorised it and I can still play it. As a matter of fact, when I visited the Library of Congress, they showed me a number of Bernard Herrmann manuscripts, including Citizen Kane, and they said that they’re going to try and get me a photostat of the score for Hangover Square.
Herrmann had a way of making suspense lushly musical, and he had a harmonic line which I thought was just right for Sweeney. I didn’t consciously copy him, but it was Hangover Square that started that kind of thought process in my head.
The reason there’s so much music in Sweeney is that I thought every time the music stops the audience will remember they’re in a theatre and that these events are ridiculous. That’s what good film scoring does. I remember when I saw Jaws, the moment those double basses started, and all you saw was water…. I was so frightened. I didn’t know what was going to happen, all I knew was I was scared to death. Music can do that to you and it can sustain suspense even when nothing is going on on stage. Herrmann’s harmonic language is always unresolved, so something is always going to happen. There’s constant motion but the harmony is never quite resolved.
JS Do you remember the opening of Psycho? Wonderful lush music...
SS And you think, “Why am I frightened?” That nice shot of the hotel, curtains blowing, and you’re scared to death. That’s what I hoped would happen with Sweeney. So there was the combination of Bond’s take on melodrama and my desire always to write that kind of score. I wanted to write a musical like a horror movie.
JS Since I know you’re a massive movie buff, have you ever been tempted to write a movie with songs?
SS I’ve actually just done one with Bill Goldman, which Rob Reiner is interested in directing, which is in abeyance at the moment. It has eight songs and I’ve written six. But actually, the answer is no. I wouldn’t have done this except I’ve always had a gimmick idea in mind to do a movie musical. I think, of all movie genres, the one I didn’t go to a lot when I was in my teens, were the musicals. They didn’t interest me much. The ones I looked forward to were films noirs and Westerns.
JS How about a Western musical?
SS We could call it Oklahoma!
JS I imagine theatregoers and people who go to musicals would be surprised by the harmonic language in Sweeney because it doesn’t sound like a musical. It sounds more like Bernard Herrmann, as you say, or Berg or Britten.
SS It has those elements because I didn’t want it to be so much of a song musical. The trouble with songs is they call for punctuations, which are often called applause but not always (sometimes it’s dead silence). If you’re going to keep a plot like that going, you don’t want to keep stopping all the time. One of the problems with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was that as the plot got going, the songs got unnecessary. That’s why in Forum there are only four songs in the second act, because by that time the plot is boiling and every time they stop to sing, it stops things dead. The same thing tends to happen in melodrama. All the songs in Forum are up front in the set up. The same thing is true in Sweeney, except for “By the Sea”, and maybe “Not While I’m Around”. The music in the second act of Sweeney Todd is a continuous push to the end. There are a few songs in the first act, particularly when people are meeting, but generally it’s forward motion in the music all the time because the plot starts to generate steam around the middle of the first act.
JS How did it go down when it was at New York City Opera? How did an opera audience, whatever that is, take to it, as opposed to a musical audience.
SS It was a sharp contrast. Even though the New York City Opera House is only fourteen blocks away from the theatre district, it was apparent that nobody there had ever ventured below, because they were all shocked at the revelations at the end of Sweeney Todd. The record had been out for five or ten years – it should not have been a big shock. I realised no-one in that audience had ever gone to a Broadway musical. I’ve always defined opera as anything done in an opera house in front of an opera audience. It’s the audience’s expectations that define the performance. They generally come to hear singers, not to see plots. People who go to musical theatre go to hear songs, or sometimes to see the stars, and are interested in the story. Opera audiences generally are not.
JS So Sweeney becomes an opera when it’s in an opera house?
SS Absolutely. My favourite example is The Medium and The Telephone, two one-acters by Gian-Carlo Menotti, which were first done on Broadway (in fact much of Menotti’s work was first done on Broadway). When it was done there it was a musical, and when you saw it in an opera house it was very clear it was something else. The atmosphere is palpably different. It’s about what the audience wants. They’re there to hear the voices and sometimes the music. I think opera is closer to rock concerts than it is to musicals, because it’s performer-orientated.
JS Do you go to the opera at all?
SS Rarely. I’m not all that interested. I like some of the old ones but I know the music and I’ve heard the score; I’m not interested in hearing Madame So-and-so as opposed to Madame So-and-so, though a lot of people are.… It’s not that I don’t approve of Mozart, it’s just that I don’t get the kick out of Mozart that some people get. Of course I admire him. In fact, when I was doing A Little Night Music, Peter Shaffer, who rather likes Mozart, advised me to listen to the beginning of Figaro. I thought “Oh, well...” and I listened to the first ten minutes of Figaro and thought “Brilliant!” Then I got to fifteen and thought “It’s still terrific, but...” Then I got to twenty and it started to lose my interest, because I’m not interested in voices per se, I have to see it. It has to unfold.
JSWhat are you writing at the moment?
SS I’m writing two one-act musicals with James Lapine, the fellow who wrote the book for Sunday in the Park and Into the Woods. One of them is based on an Italian movie called Passione d’Amore, which was directed in 1983 by Ettore Scola, based on an 1880 novel, never translated into English, called Fosca. It’s essentially about three characters. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since, but when I looked at it again a couple of years ago I thought it’s really a one-act, it’s not long enough.
Meanwhile, Jim Lapine had read a book published two years ago called Muscle, which is about an academic, 25 years old, a graduate from Oxford. His parents have been divorced but they’re both professors, one at Princeton and one at Harvard. He has been brought up in a world of books, a world of excellence, to always be number one. He goes back to the United States and gets frightened by the violence, although he doesn’t experience any himself. One day, to avoid an altercation, he ducks into a bookstore, the only home he knows. While he’s browsing, avoiding the street violence, he happens to open the biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Something clicks in his head and he becomes a bodybuilder. For a period of three or four years he goes through what they call the “disease” of bodybuilding and ends up in competition in California. He injects himself with steroids and all that. However, he comes in second. He becomes normal again. Then he writes the book.
JS So we see him get big ...
SS He’s going to get big the way you put on armour. On the book jacket – it’s one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen – there are three pictures: One of him on graduation day in Oxford, a nice normal looking fellow; three years later on a California street, he’s literally a monster; then two years later, nice-looking fellow again.
JSHave you written any music for it yet?
SS Yes. We had a reading of it about a year ago starring the guy who starred here in Carousel, Michael Hayden. It needs a lot more work. I can’t get the style of it quite. I think I’ve got it now.
JS Is it electronic funky music?
SS That’s what I want, yes. I was brought up on the piano and I don’t know enough – in fact I know nothing – about electronic music. I happen to like computers (like you, I’m a Macintosh freak) so I’m trying to learn this music programme.
JS Which one have you got?
SS This one is called Performer. Still and all, at this moment I’m working on the Italian musical. I’ve done about four sections of it. Jim Lapine has been doing movies, and as I work best in intense and prolonged collaboration, it’s been difficult lately. But we’re getting back to it; in fact we’re meeting this week in Paris.
JS There are a couple of questions I’ve been asked to ask: Is it true that you wrote some of the music for West Side Story?
SS Yes. A very small bit of it, a song called “Something’s Coming”. We wrote that during rehearsals, because Larry Kert, playing the lead, needed a number to give him some strength at the beginning of the show. Romeo always gets the worst notices. Mercutio gets the best, Juliet second. It was very clear that that was the character that needed the most work. We thought we could launch it by having him sing a song early on, a specific kind of song called a “two-four”, a very driving kind of showbiz song. Larry and Judy Garland were the champs at that kind of song – as in ‘The Trolley Song’. I thought we ought to write a two-four for him. Lennie Bernstein wrote the verse part and said how do you make this into a two-four? He knew what it was, but it’s a showbiz term more than a musical term. So I started to ad lib with the thumb line (that is to say, the cello line, an inner voice). That’s what I contributed, the two-four part of that.
JS How about Gypsy? Did you write any part of that musical?
SS I put together “Rose’s Turn”. Originally Jerry Robbins wanted Rose’s breakdown to be a ballet. At that time there were three little Louises instead of two. All three, as well as all the other characters in Rose’s life, were going to be in a nightmare ballet. After about a week of rehearsal Jerry said, “It’s not going to work, you’re going to have to write a song”. I said to myself “Oh God, this is the climax of the piece”. The night we did it comprised every Hollywood fantasy I’d ever had. We were rehearsing at the top of a decrepit theatre called the New Amsterdam. There was a small auditorium at the top of what had been a legitimate theatre, where in fact Ziegfeld had held his “midnight frolics”, which were not as salacious as that sounds. Jule Styne was going around with our leading lady, Sandra Church. They had a date after rehearsal so Jerry said to me, “Why don’t you stay and we’ll talk about the number?” I decided that what we should do is take all the songs of the show that were connected with the Ethel Merman character, Madame Rose, and mash them up, just the way Jerry was going to do with movement. It seemed appropriate and might make an interesting form. It was one of those things you dream of when you’re a kid. You write a song with the star, only it was Jerry Robbins as the star. He started moving, performing a strip, sashaying back and forth on the stage, and I started to ad lib with the tunes that were already written. Together we shaped the number. What it was, really, was writing a ballet score for Jerry but using only the music from the show.
Audience question
Without giving any professional secrets away, are there any subjects at the back of your mind you’d like to write about?
SS I never start with subject matter. It’s always the story. I always discover the subject I’m writing about as I write. Story and character – they are the same.
Audience question
Do you always write the lyrics before the music?
SS They go together. Rodgers & Hammerstein and Rodgers & Hart were entirely different. Rodgers wrote first and Hart wrote the lyrics afterwards, and with Hammerstein, he wrote the lyrics then Rodgers put the music. I suspect that most people who write both music and lyrics do what I do, which is start with one element and then move the other element in, so you don’t hem yourself in.
JS Have you ever written music for someone else’s lyrics?
SS Shakespeare. I wrote music for “Fear No More” from Cymbeline, but that’s the only time.
Audience question
Why did you decide to change act two of Follies for London?
SS First of all, it was in one act in New York. Cameron Mackintosh, who produced it in London, felt there was a kind of down-ness at the end. Not that he wanted a happy ending. More importantly, Jim Goldman wrote the book, and it had always bothered Jim that the story seemed to be only about Ben. He meant it to be about all four of the main characters having a nervous breakdown but, because of the way it was shaped, it looked like it was Ben’s story. So we altered it to try and change that. Also, Jim had an idea which was the single most effective moment in the London version, and I wish we’d thought of it for New York. I much preferred the New York version except for that moment at the end of the first act here – when they see their own ghosts. I thought that was a wonderful moment.
Audience question
Have you considered bringing back Company?
SS Writers don’t consider those things. Producers do. But of course I would. As a matter of fact it’s going to be done in New York next year, not on Broadway, but in a prestigious off-Broadway house, meaning an off-Broadway house that seats more than fifty people.
JSIf you did Company again, would you update it?
SS Absolutely not. It’s a real period piece. Remember the days when people used to talk about relationships?
Audience question
Given the obvious appreciation of a British audience for a Sondheim musical, and the revivals that you get at Manchester, and at the Leicester Haymarket, would you consider that the average British audience is more intellectual than an American one?
SS British audiences are interested in language and American audiences are not. The first good notices I ever got in my life were for the British production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was slammed to death by the critics in New York. Ten years later they commented on the “cleverness” and “brilliance” of the lyrics. It’s about listening, about delight in language. That’s not true in the United States. Intellectual is not a word I would use, but interest in language, which comes from interest in the theatre. Arcadia is a perfect example of it. A play partly about language. If you’re not interested in language, you cannot enjoy this play.
Audience question
Do you have any control over your work when it’s done in foreign languages?
SS The trouble is I don’t have a good enough knowledge of the foreign languages into which it’s translated to know whether it’s good or not. I have to rely on other people telling me. I have a fairly sour view of the translatability of one language into another. I think it’s as true of opera as it is of musicals. It seems to me that the music of any country is a reflection of its language, and that the rhythms of that particular country’s language are what is appropriate. As soon as you translate it, it’s very very hard to make it sound as if it really is wedded to the music. I really believe that.
Audience question
Is West Side Story an opera?
SS Oh no. Unless it’s done in an opera house. Though it is a very brief and concise book, there’s a good deal of dialogue. It could be considered opera bouffe, if it were done in an opera house. God forbid – would you want to see those opera singers in colour-co-ordinated sneakers, dancing?
JS My last question is why didn’t you go the whole hog on Sweeney Todd and in fact have music all the way through it?
SS I should have, and I swore that for this production at the National I would add more. I was having difficulty writing the piece with Lapine, and couldn’t get myself back into the Sweeney Todd mode – I attacked it too late. There are four or five passages where I know how the music lies. I wanted to and I didn’t, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I’m happy to say the dialogue holds up very well, but I should have, it’s a mistake. Bond’s play is thirty five pages long only, very very terse. I got to page seven, and already it was half an hour long. I thought, Oh my god, it’s going to be The Ring Cycle. Every single page I wanted to musicalise. That’s when I asked, or rather Hal Prince asked, Hugh Wheeler to join me, because I was afraid of the whole thing becoming unwieldy.
© National Theatre 2006
Click here: National Theatre : Platform Papers : Stephen Sondheim (June 1993)
National Theatre
Stephen Sondheim (June 1993)
Stephen Sondheim in conversation with Jeremy Sams
Lyttelton Theatre, 1 June 1993, before the opening the following day in the Cottesloe of Sweeney Todd
JS As you’ve just heard from the applause, England would seem to be very fond of you. What is it with you and England?
SS I first came here in 1952. I had a friend named John Ryan who had been selected to be John Huston’s assistant on a movie called Beat the Devil. He said come to Italy with me, and we stopped in London where his mother had a flat and I fell in love with the city. As a matter of fact, on that movie, I was clapper boy. Huston said if I could hold on till he got back to finishing the film at Shepperton, I could work up a music score. My money ran out and I couldn’t do it.
JSYou seem to have a feel for England, which if I may say so, many Americans don’t.
SS A lot of it comes from my friend Burt Shevelove. He was an anglophile and eventually moved over here to live. When A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum opened, he had enough money to get a flat here. He lived here till he died in 1983. He and I were very good friends and we used to do The Listener puzzles together.
JS No longer with us, you know.
SS I heard it transferred to The Times. Where is it? I looked for it on Sunday and it wasn’t there.
JS The back of the magazine on Saturday.
SS As a matter of fact, I’ve been a subscriber to The Observer since 1960, and I used to enter the Ximenes puzzle contests. I never won but I got high commendation once and I went to the Thousandth Dinner for them. So anyway, through osmosis I think I became an anglophile. Through Burt’s enthusiasm at first, and then I started to come over more frequently. I love the British theatre. Every time I hear anybody complain over here about the British theatre, I say, “Oh God, you don’t want the American theatre. It’s so much better here”.
JS What do you get here that you don’t get on Broadway?
SS There’s a theatre-going tradition. To come to the National Theatre and see a group of teenage schoolboys and girls attend a performance of King Lear, as I did, is something you would never see in the United States. There is no serious interest in the theatre there. Granted, the West End is going the way that Broadway is in many ways, becoming more and more weighted with light comedies, but there is still serious work being done in the West End, and virtually none being done on Broadway because there is no audience for it.
I’ve said this many times, so those of you who’ve heard it, forgive me, but what has killed the American theatre is that California and New York are 3,000 miles apart. Theatre has always existed on stars. There are many actors who love doing stage work in the United States and who draw audiences and re-create the theatre-going habit. For example, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau did Juno and the Paycock in California about fifteen years ago. Whether they did it well or not doesn’t matter, the point was you couldn’t get a ticket. And believe me the audience couldn’t have been less interested in Juno and the Paycock. But having done that, Matthau and Lemmon might have gone on to do another one if they had lived in New York City; and if the movie industry were in New York City, then they could do what British stars do. Here, they can afford to take a chance on a new play which might fold in a month or a week, and still support the family because they can go to the studios and make $10,000 a minute either on television or in movies. That’s why actors here can afford to play in places like the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Al Pacino is one of the few movie stars in the United States who regularly appears in the theatre. He did Oscar Wilde’s Salome recently, along with a new American play in a double bill. He can play New York because he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have to uproot his children and that sort of thing. But it’s very hard. The result is that the audiences aren’t attracted unless a play or musical gets extraordinary reviews. Virtually nothing sells until the reviews are out in New York City; that’s not true here. A star can sustain a play here for a while, at least until an audience can determine whether it likes it or not. The other thing is that New York theatre is entirely run by the New York Times. We are one of the major cities in the world and have only three daily papers. Four, I suppose, if you count Newsday. And only one of those papers appeals to the public that can afford to pay for theatre tickets. That’s what gives the New York Times its power. It’s not its critic, Frank Rich, it’s the New York Times.
JSIt can still today make or break a show?
SS Yes. What it can certainly do is make it. It can’t break certain musicals, and if a certain star appears in a play, it can’t break that. Frank Rich is a very intelligent reviewer and a very, very good writer, but like all critics – including Kenneth Tynan whom I watched over the years, and Walter Kerr – after a few years of being a first-rate mind in a second-rate job, a certain sourness creeps in. If you’re intelligent enough to know that you’re being corrupted, meanness starts. Frank Rich started to get bitchy and mean about five years ago, and he hadn’t been before. But I can’t blame him, because you and I can go to a bad play and we can leave in the middle or have dinner and not talk about it, but if we had to go home and write about it...
JS That job’s never been literally corruptible by bribery, has it?
SS I’ve heard tales about Clive Barnes, which are probably true, but...
JS What is it that our actors can do that Americans can’t?
SS Your actors can do virtually everything – except American plays, though I have seen American plays done well over here. It’s the training that actors get over here that allows them to be so versatile because they can do Restoration comedy and they can do contemporary drama, and many of them do musicals. The versatility is enormous because of the training and the rep system around the country, the fact that those rep companies don’t just do six months of one play. We don’t have that sort of thing, or our rep companies don’t train the actors in that many different styles. The great thing about the London theatre is that it’s still something of a supermarket. Virtually every afternoon or evening I have free, I go to a play here. Time Out is the first magazine I get when I get off the plane. There are so many different kinds of plays, that’s what’s always encouraging. You can still see a Whitehall farce, you can see serious new plays in the West End, or right here on this stage – I think Arcadia is a great play. It’s thrilling.
JS Which leads us to Sweeney Todd. What brought you to it? I presume Time Out said, come to this melodrama at Stratford East...
SS I don’t think Time Out existed then, it was only What’s On. No, I’ve always wanted to see Grand Guignol and an American friend told me this was a Grand Guignol play. (I was reminded, curiously enough, that the person who took me out there to see it was Sheila Reid, who is playing the Beggar Woman in this current production of Sweeney Todd.
Small world, isn’t it?) Anyway, it turned out to be not Grand Guignol but this charming melodrama, and melodrama and farce are my two favourite forms of theatre because, as I’ve said before, they are obverse sides of the same coin. Next day I had lunch with John Dexter, who was a friend of mine, and asked him would Sweeney Todd be the basis of a good operatic piece. He had always been pushing me to write a through-composed piece. He said it would be perfect and he got a copy from the British Library. Of course it was the 1847 copy which is this clunking, dreadful piece. It had been published in three or four other versions, spread out over the 130 years since then, and each one was worse than the other. As many of you may know, originally it was taken from a novel called String of Pearls which is about Sweeney Todd killing a sailor ...
JS Is he completely fictional?
SS There are many rumours. There was a famous cannibal group in Scotland called Sawney Bean and his family and the rhythm of the names is similar, but apparently during the French Revolution there was a shop that first started to sell animals and then, apparently, human beings as meat. It’s never been verified, but it seems natural with the guillotining going on. As far as the Fleet Street stuff goes, however, I think that’s all made up by Thomas Prest who wrote the story. Then it was popularised a few years later by the Neil Simon of his day, a man named George Dibdin Pitt, who was well-known for writing blood-and-thunder plays. Then Christopher Bond made the sea-change.
For those of you who don’t know the story, what happened is that Christopher Bond was an actor in a troupe and, as I understand it, they decided their Christmas play would be Sweeney Todd. They sent for the 1957 version, or whatever was around then, and he said, “This is dreadful, I’ll write my own”. In doing so he also wrote a juicy part for himself as Tobias. They put it on, and that’s what travelled to Stratford East. What Bond had done was to take elements of The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Count of Monte Cristo and add them to the traditional Sweeney Todd. By motivating Sweeney, he changed the whole thing from a silly melodrama to a serious one, though it has its comic aspects. It’s also rather subtly written. I didn’t realise till I started work on it that all the upper-class characters talk in blank verse. He gave the play substance.
JS What was it about melodrama that appealed to you?
SS I just love larger-than-life stuff, and that’s what farce and melodrama are. Everybody over-reacts all the time.
JS For us, melodrama is almost a pejorative term.
SS Yes, it has that connotation in America too, but Macbeth is a melodrama, Hamlet’s a melodrama, everyone over-reacts. Just like farce, melodrama is also based on mistakes, or events that spiral out of control.
JS One of the things that appeals to me particularly about Sweeney Todd is that it’s not ludicrous, it’s not silly at all.
SSThe interesting thing was that the Stratford production had charm. Interspersed with the scenes were street songs, which I assume were songs of the period. When I wanted to do it, a Broadway producer named Richard Barr had already optioned the Stratford East version to be done on Broadway with bar room songs. As many of you know, Stratford East is connected with a pub and, at least in those days, you could bring your beer back into the theatre. Bond wanted the audience to hiss and cheer and scream “Watch out!” and things like that. He wanted it – I didn’t. Nonetheless, his claim, and I think he’s right, is that you can respond that way and still take it seriously.
The first week in New York, working with Hugh Wheeler, who adapted Bond’s adaptation and wrote the libretto, I was only worried about how the audience would take the murders, whether they’d think them silly or not. And then, when Mrs Lovett gets the idea for making the meat pies, what would the audience’s reaction be? In America nobody’s ever heard of Sweeney Todd, which I gather is part of every childhood in England. But the Demon Barber of Fleet Street meant nothing whatsoever in America. So they were seeing this wild plot for the first time, and there was a loud gasp at the first murder, which was staged very violently with a great swash of blood. Then when Mrs Lovett got the idea for the pies and the audience realised what was up, there was a satisfying laugh, the like of which I’ve rarely heard. They had a wonderful time with the idea because they didn’t know it was coming.
JS That moment is particularly skilfully done, because Sweeney doesn’t know what’s coming either.
SS That’s true, but here the audience are waiting for him to get the idea. And that’s a huge difference.
JS That’s interesting, in English melodrama, the idea of violence somehow being entertaining. Outside opera, it’s not something you see on the musical stage very much.
SS People accept outsized events in opera, immolations.
JS Is that why the music for Sweeney sounds, to my ears, more “operatic”.
SS It’s an open secret that the music for Sweeney is an hommage to a film composer named Bernard Herrmann. When I was fifteen I saw a movie called Hangover Square, an American movie which took place in London, starring Laird Cregar as – wait for it – an insane composer who was musically way ahead of his time in 1900. Every time he would hear a high-pitched note, his mind would go blank and he’d go out and murder the nearest person. He doesn’t know what he does in these blackouts, and he goes to George Sanders, who is the police psychiatrist, who says, “Dear fellow you’re in a lot of trouble”. He’s arrested right in the middle of playing his piano concerto, but insists on finishing the concert, and sets the entire concert hall on fire. Everyone leaves and he’s left playing surrounded by flames. Bernard Herrmann wrote the concerto in such a way that it ends with solo piano with low chords. It’s a brilliant score, a one-movement piano concerto. When I was fifteen I sat through the movie twice because in the middle there’s a three-second shot of the score on the piano. I memorised it and I can still play it. As a matter of fact, when I visited the Library of Congress, they showed me a number of Bernard Herrmann manuscripts, including Citizen Kane, and they said that they’re going to try and get me a photostat of the score for Hangover Square.
Herrmann had a way of making suspense lushly musical, and he had a harmonic line which I thought was just right for Sweeney. I didn’t consciously copy him, but it was Hangover Square that started that kind of thought process in my head.
The reason there’s so much music in Sweeney is that I thought every time the music stops the audience will remember they’re in a theatre and that these events are ridiculous. That’s what good film scoring does. I remember when I saw Jaws, the moment those double basses started, and all you saw was water…. I was so frightened. I didn’t know what was going to happen, all I knew was I was scared to death. Music can do that to you and it can sustain suspense even when nothing is going on on stage. Herrmann’s harmonic language is always unresolved, so something is always going to happen. There’s constant motion but the harmony is never quite resolved.
JS Do you remember the opening of Psycho? Wonderful lush music...
SS And you think, “Why am I frightened?” That nice shot of the hotel, curtains blowing, and you’re scared to death. That’s what I hoped would happen with Sweeney. So there was the combination of Bond’s take on melodrama and my desire always to write that kind of score. I wanted to write a musical like a horror movie.
JS Since I know you’re a massive movie buff, have you ever been tempted to write a movie with songs?
SS I’ve actually just done one with Bill Goldman, which Rob Reiner is interested in directing, which is in abeyance at the moment. It has eight songs and I’ve written six. But actually, the answer is no. I wouldn’t have done this except I’ve always had a gimmick idea in mind to do a movie musical. I think, of all movie genres, the one I didn’t go to a lot when I was in my teens, were the musicals. They didn’t interest me much. The ones I looked forward to were films noirs and Westerns.
JS How about a Western musical?
SS We could call it Oklahoma!
JS I imagine theatregoers and people who go to musicals would be surprised by the harmonic language in Sweeney because it doesn’t sound like a musical. It sounds more like Bernard Herrmann, as you say, or Berg or Britten.
SS It has those elements because I didn’t want it to be so much of a song musical. The trouble with songs is they call for punctuations, which are often called applause but not always (sometimes it’s dead silence). If you’re going to keep a plot like that going, you don’t want to keep stopping all the time. One of the problems with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was that as the plot got going, the songs got unnecessary. That’s why in Forum there are only four songs in the second act, because by that time the plot is boiling and every time they stop to sing, it stops things dead. The same thing tends to happen in melodrama. All the songs in Forum are up front in the set up. The same thing is true in Sweeney, except for “By the Sea”, and maybe “Not While I’m Around”. The music in the second act of Sweeney Todd is a continuous push to the end. There are a few songs in the first act, particularly when people are meeting, but generally it’s forward motion in the music all the time because the plot starts to generate steam around the middle of the first act.
JS How did it go down when it was at New York City Opera? How did an opera audience, whatever that is, take to it, as opposed to a musical audience.
SS It was a sharp contrast. Even though the New York City Opera House is only fourteen blocks away from the theatre district, it was apparent that nobody there had ever ventured below, because they were all shocked at the revelations at the end of Sweeney Todd. The record had been out for five or ten years – it should not have been a big shock. I realised no-one in that audience had ever gone to a Broadway musical. I’ve always defined opera as anything done in an opera house in front of an opera audience. It’s the audience’s expectations that define the performance. They generally come to hear singers, not to see plots. People who go to musical theatre go to hear songs, or sometimes to see the stars, and are interested in the story. Opera audiences generally are not.
JS So Sweeney becomes an opera when it’s in an opera house?
SS Absolutely. My favourite example is The Medium and The Telephone, two one-acters by Gian-Carlo Menotti, which were first done on Broadway (in fact much of Menotti’s work was first done on Broadway). When it was done there it was a musical, and when you saw it in an opera house it was very clear it was something else. The atmosphere is palpably different. It’s about what the audience wants. They’re there to hear the voices and sometimes the music. I think opera is closer to rock concerts than it is to musicals, because it’s performer-orientated.
JS Do you go to the opera at all?
SS Rarely. I’m not all that interested. I like some of the old ones but I know the music and I’ve heard the score; I’m not interested in hearing Madame So-and-so as opposed to Madame So-and-so, though a lot of people are.… It’s not that I don’t approve of Mozart, it’s just that I don’t get the kick out of Mozart that some people get. Of course I admire him. In fact, when I was doing A Little Night Music, Peter Shaffer, who rather likes Mozart, advised me to listen to the beginning of Figaro. I thought “Oh, well...” and I listened to the first ten minutes of Figaro and thought “Brilliant!” Then I got to fifteen and thought “It’s still terrific, but...” Then I got to twenty and it started to lose my interest, because I’m not interested in voices per se, I have to see it. It has to unfold.
JSWhat are you writing at the moment?
SS I’m writing two one-act musicals with James Lapine, the fellow who wrote the book for Sunday in the Park and Into the Woods. One of them is based on an Italian movie called Passione d’Amore, which was directed in 1983 by Ettore Scola, based on an 1880 novel, never translated into English, called Fosca. It’s essentially about three characters. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since, but when I looked at it again a couple of years ago I thought it’s really a one-act, it’s not long enough.
Meanwhile, Jim Lapine had read a book published two years ago called Muscle, which is about an academic, 25 years old, a graduate from Oxford. His parents have been divorced but they’re both professors, one at Princeton and one at Harvard. He has been brought up in a world of books, a world of excellence, to always be number one. He goes back to the United States and gets frightened by the violence, although he doesn’t experience any himself. One day, to avoid an altercation, he ducks into a bookstore, the only home he knows. While he’s browsing, avoiding the street violence, he happens to open the biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Something clicks in his head and he becomes a bodybuilder. For a period of three or four years he goes through what they call the “disease” of bodybuilding and ends up in competition in California. He injects himself with steroids and all that. However, he comes in second. He becomes normal again. Then he writes the book.
JS So we see him get big ...
SS He’s going to get big the way you put on armour. On the book jacket – it’s one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen – there are three pictures: One of him on graduation day in Oxford, a nice normal looking fellow; three years later on a California street, he’s literally a monster; then two years later, nice-looking fellow again.
JSHave you written any music for it yet?
SS Yes. We had a reading of it about a year ago starring the guy who starred here in Carousel, Michael Hayden. It needs a lot more work. I can’t get the style of it quite. I think I’ve got it now.
JS Is it electronic funky music?
SS That’s what I want, yes. I was brought up on the piano and I don’t know enough – in fact I know nothing – about electronic music. I happen to like computers (like you, I’m a Macintosh freak) so I’m trying to learn this music programme.
JS Which one have you got?
SS This one is called Performer. Still and all, at this moment I’m working on the Italian musical. I’ve done about four sections of it. Jim Lapine has been doing movies, and as I work best in intense and prolonged collaboration, it’s been difficult lately. But we’re getting back to it; in fact we’re meeting this week in Paris.
JS There are a couple of questions I’ve been asked to ask: Is it true that you wrote some of the music for West Side Story?
SS Yes. A very small bit of it, a song called “Something’s Coming”. We wrote that during rehearsals, because Larry Kert, playing the lead, needed a number to give him some strength at the beginning of the show. Romeo always gets the worst notices. Mercutio gets the best, Juliet second. It was very clear that that was the character that needed the most work. We thought we could launch it by having him sing a song early on, a specific kind of song called a “two-four”, a very driving kind of showbiz song. Larry and Judy Garland were the champs at that kind of song – as in ‘The Trolley Song’. I thought we ought to write a two-four for him. Lennie Bernstein wrote the verse part and said how do you make this into a two-four? He knew what it was, but it’s a showbiz term more than a musical term. So I started to ad lib with the thumb line (that is to say, the cello line, an inner voice). That’s what I contributed, the two-four part of that.
JS How about Gypsy? Did you write any part of that musical?
SS I put together “Rose’s Turn”. Originally Jerry Robbins wanted Rose’s breakdown to be a ballet. At that time there were three little Louises instead of two. All three, as well as all the other characters in Rose’s life, were going to be in a nightmare ballet. After about a week of rehearsal Jerry said, “It’s not going to work, you’re going to have to write a song”. I said to myself “Oh God, this is the climax of the piece”. The night we did it comprised every Hollywood fantasy I’d ever had. We were rehearsing at the top of a decrepit theatre called the New Amsterdam. There was a small auditorium at the top of what had been a legitimate theatre, where in fact Ziegfeld had held his “midnight frolics”, which were not as salacious as that sounds. Jule Styne was going around with our leading lady, Sandra Church. They had a date after rehearsal so Jerry said to me, “Why don’t you stay and we’ll talk about the number?” I decided that what we should do is take all the songs of the show that were connected with the Ethel Merman character, Madame Rose, and mash them up, just the way Jerry was going to do with movement. It seemed appropriate and might make an interesting form. It was one of those things you dream of when you’re a kid. You write a song with the star, only it was Jerry Robbins as the star. He started moving, performing a strip, sashaying back and forth on the stage, and I started to ad lib with the tunes that were already written. Together we shaped the number. What it was, really, was writing a ballet score for Jerry but using only the music from the show.
Audience question
Without giving any professional secrets away, are there any subjects at the back of your mind you’d like to write about?
SS I never start with subject matter. It’s always the story. I always discover the subject I’m writing about as I write. Story and character – they are the same.
Audience question
Do you always write the lyrics before the music?
SS They go together. Rodgers & Hammerstein and Rodgers & Hart were entirely different. Rodgers wrote first and Hart wrote the lyrics afterwards, and with Hammerstein, he wrote the lyrics then Rodgers put the music. I suspect that most people who write both music and lyrics do what I do, which is start with one element and then move the other element in, so you don’t hem yourself in.
JS Have you ever written music for someone else’s lyrics?
SS Shakespeare. I wrote music for “Fear No More” from Cymbeline, but that’s the only time.
Audience question
Why did you decide to change act two of Follies for London?
SS First of all, it was in one act in New York. Cameron Mackintosh, who produced it in London, felt there was a kind of down-ness at the end. Not that he wanted a happy ending. More importantly, Jim Goldman wrote the book, and it had always bothered Jim that the story seemed to be only about Ben. He meant it to be about all four of the main characters having a nervous breakdown but, because of the way it was shaped, it looked like it was Ben’s story. So we altered it to try and change that. Also, Jim had an idea which was the single most effective moment in the London version, and I wish we’d thought of it for New York. I much preferred the New York version except for that moment at the end of the first act here – when they see their own ghosts. I thought that was a wonderful moment.
Audience question
Have you considered bringing back Company?
SS Writers don’t consider those things. Producers do. But of course I would. As a matter of fact it’s going to be done in New York next year, not on Broadway, but in a prestigious off-Broadway house, meaning an off-Broadway house that seats more than fifty people.
JSIf you did Company again, would you update it?
SS Absolutely not. It’s a real period piece. Remember the days when people used to talk about relationships?
Audience question
Given the obvious appreciation of a British audience for a Sondheim musical, and the revivals that you get at Manchester, and at the Leicester Haymarket, would you consider that the average British audience is more intellectual than an American one?
SS British audiences are interested in language and American audiences are not. The first good notices I ever got in my life were for the British production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was slammed to death by the critics in New York. Ten years later they commented on the “cleverness” and “brilliance” of the lyrics. It’s about listening, about delight in language. That’s not true in the United States. Intellectual is not a word I would use, but interest in language, which comes from interest in the theatre. Arcadia is a perfect example of it. A play partly about language. If you’re not interested in language, you cannot enjoy this play.
Audience question
Do you have any control over your work when it’s done in foreign languages?
SS The trouble is I don’t have a good enough knowledge of the foreign languages into which it’s translated to know whether it’s good or not. I have to rely on other people telling me. I have a fairly sour view of the translatability of one language into another. I think it’s as true of opera as it is of musicals. It seems to me that the music of any country is a reflection of its language, and that the rhythms of that particular country’s language are what is appropriate. As soon as you translate it, it’s very very hard to make it sound as if it really is wedded to the music. I really believe that.
Audience question
Is West Side Story an opera?
SS Oh no. Unless it’s done in an opera house. Though it is a very brief and concise book, there’s a good deal of dialogue. It could be considered opera bouffe, if it were done in an opera house. God forbid – would you want to see those opera singers in colour-co-ordinated sneakers, dancing?
JS My last question is why didn’t you go the whole hog on Sweeney Todd and in fact have music all the way through it?
SS I should have, and I swore that for this production at the National I would add more. I was having difficulty writing the piece with Lapine, and couldn’t get myself back into the Sweeney Todd mode – I attacked it too late. There are four or five passages where I know how the music lies. I wanted to and I didn’t, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I’m happy to say the dialogue holds up very well, but I should have, it’s a mistake. Bond’s play is thirty five pages long only, very very terse. I got to page seven, and already it was half an hour long. I thought, Oh my god, it’s going to be The Ring Cycle. Every single page I wanted to musicalise. That’s when I asked, or rather Hal Prince asked, Hugh Wheeler to join me, because I was afraid of the whole thing becoming unwieldy.
© National Theatre 2006
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:37 AM (GMT)
PBS.com has a wonderful colletion of info on Sweeney Todd.
PBS has put together a wonderfully comprehensive site that takes you quickly from "melodrama to musical" and guides us through all of the characters. I really enjoyed these bits and unlike some of the other info out there, this is easy to follow and easy to jump back and forth.
Below is an excerpt from the site, please take some time and wander around...get to know the characters a bit...for more info click on the link:
CLick here: PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
For almost two centuries, the enduring legend of maniacal barber Sweeney Todd and his savory human pies has inspired terror in the hearts and minds of the public, whether through the printed page or the theatrical stage.
1825 - The French story of a murderous barber appears in Tell-Tale Magazine under the title "A Terrible Story of the Rue de la Harpe."
1846 - Thomas Peckett Prest serializes the story, retitled The String of Pearls. It is published in one of London's penny dreadful newspapers. (The title came from a necklace that Sweeney steals from one of his victims.) Weekly installments of the barber's homicidal exploits become immensely popular.
1847 - The String of Pearls is dramatized by George Dibdin-Pitt. His melodrama, subtitled "The Fiend of Fleet Street," is set in London during the "Reign of George II," or the second half of the 18th century. The play opens at the Britannia Theatre, where audiences demand bloodcurdling entertainments, and is advertised as being "Founded on Fact."
1848 - The enormous success of Dibdin-Pitt's play spawns dozens of imitations. In some, the hero is a dog whose master has met his end via Sweeney's blade. The faithful dog haunts the barber's doorstep and eventually leads authorities to the fiend. These bloody melodramas were continuously produced in and around London throughout the remainder of the 19th century.
1936 - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by George King, becomes the first film version of the story. Todd Slaughter, the film's star, makes a career out of portraying Sweeney Todd on stages around the world.
1959 - The Royal Ballet Company produces a ballet version, with music by Malcolm Arnold and choreography by John Cranko.
1973 - Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Christopher Bond opens at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. This version is seen by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who recruits book writer Hugh Wheeler to collaborate with him on a musical treatment of Bond's play.
1979 - Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens at Broadway's Uris Theatre in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. The recipient of eight Tony Awards, Sweeney Todd is instantly recognized as a landmark in musical theater inspiring productions in both theater and opera companies around the world.
2001 - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is performed in concert with the San Francisco Symphony. The performance, starring George Hearn and Patti LuPone (as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett), is filmed by Ellen M. Krass Productions. The resulting television program premieres on PBS October 31, 2001.
PBS has put together a wonderfully comprehensive site that takes you quickly from "melodrama to musical" and guides us through all of the characters. I really enjoyed these bits and unlike some of the other info out there, this is easy to follow and easy to jump back and forth.
Below is an excerpt from the site, please take some time and wander around...get to know the characters a bit...for more info click on the link:
CLick here: PBS - Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
For almost two centuries, the enduring legend of maniacal barber Sweeney Todd and his savory human pies has inspired terror in the hearts and minds of the public, whether through the printed page or the theatrical stage.
1825 - The French story of a murderous barber appears in Tell-Tale Magazine under the title "A Terrible Story of the Rue de la Harpe."
1846 - Thomas Peckett Prest serializes the story, retitled The String of Pearls. It is published in one of London's penny dreadful newspapers. (The title came from a necklace that Sweeney steals from one of his victims.) Weekly installments of the barber's homicidal exploits become immensely popular.
1847 - The String of Pearls is dramatized by George Dibdin-Pitt. His melodrama, subtitled "The Fiend of Fleet Street," is set in London during the "Reign of George II," or the second half of the 18th century. The play opens at the Britannia Theatre, where audiences demand bloodcurdling entertainments, and is advertised as being "Founded on Fact."
1848 - The enormous success of Dibdin-Pitt's play spawns dozens of imitations. In some, the hero is a dog whose master has met his end via Sweeney's blade. The faithful dog haunts the barber's doorstep and eventually leads authorities to the fiend. These bloody melodramas were continuously produced in and around London throughout the remainder of the 19th century.
1936 - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by George King, becomes the first film version of the story. Todd Slaughter, the film's star, makes a career out of portraying Sweeney Todd on stages around the world.
1959 - The Royal Ballet Company produces a ballet version, with music by Malcolm Arnold and choreography by John Cranko.
1973 - Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Christopher Bond opens at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. This version is seen by composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who recruits book writer Hugh Wheeler to collaborate with him on a musical treatment of Bond's play.
1979 - Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens at Broadway's Uris Theatre in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. The recipient of eight Tony Awards, Sweeney Todd is instantly recognized as a landmark in musical theater inspiring productions in both theater and opera companies around the world.
2001 - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is performed in concert with the San Francisco Symphony. The performance, starring George Hearn and Patti LuPone (as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett), is filmed by Ellen M. Krass Productions. The resulting television program premieres on PBS October 31, 2001.
Karen - January 14, 2007 05:40 AM (GMT)
Sweeney Todd......was he a real person? Read more before you decide as this will be a discussion question. So please don't start the discussion just yet. Thanks
Click here: Sweeney Todd
Sondheim Notes by Larry A. Brown
From The Annual Register of London in 1785, the entry read: “A most remarkable murder was perpetrated in the following manner by a journeyman barber that lived near Hyde Park Corner, who had been for a long time past jealous of his wife, but could no way bring it home to her. A young gentleman by chance coming into his master's shop to be shaved and dressed, and being in much liquor, mentioned his having seen a fine girl home, from whom he had certain favors the night before, and at the same time describing her person. The barber concluding it to be his wife, in the height of his frenzy, cut the young gentleman's throat from ear to ear and absconded” (Haining 34).
Thus began, according to one hypothesis, the infamous tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber whose homicidal activities at 186 Fleet Street have chilled and thrilled the hearts of Londoners for over 200 years. The historical Sweeney Todd, hanged for murder in 1801, may have been the most successful serial killer of all time, some accounts attributing 160 unfortunate customers to his victim list (Haining 96). Sweeney's saga has passed through so many retellings that what facts remain about this menace are enshrouded in layers of colorful exaggeration. One fact remains: the dark deeds of Sweeney Todd have crowned him the king of melodramatic villains.
Attend the Tale
Forty-five years after the crime spree, Thomas Peckett Prest adapted the story of Sweeney into a serial entitled "The String of Pearls: A Romance" published in The People's Periodical and Family Library. Beginning in November 1846, the story stretched across eighteen episodes in this penny newspaper printed appropriately on Fleet Street. The convoluted plot concerns a string of pearls which disappears along with its bearer in the vicinity of 186 Fleet Street. Miss Joanna Oakley, the intended recipient of the pearls, contacts the police when she fears foul play. Through various clues and horrifying discoveries, the police finally conclude that over the years Sweeney had been killing his customers for the money they had on them. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to Mrs. Lovett's bakery a few blocks away where they have supplied the stuffing for her meat pies. Their gruesome game ends when Todd is caught in the act by police and Mrs. Lovett dies of poison left for her by Todd. Joanna receives her pearls and her long lost fiancé, who has been trapped in Mrs. Lovett's cellar baking the unsavory pies against his will.
Sweeney's exploits reached a greater public when the prolific George Dibdin Pitt in March 1847 presented "The String of Pearls, or the Fiend of Fleet Street" as a melodrama at the Royal Britannia Saloon, where it soon became a long-running success. As is evident in the title change, the appeal of the piece rested primarily in its nefarious protagonist. While criminals had become the center of attention in melodrama since the appearance of Mack the Knife in The Beggar's Opera, these antiheroes usually had possessed some admirable characteristics, until Sweeney. In notes to the play, Montagu Slater says, “Pitt made the great discovery that there was no need to whitewash the criminal; on the contrary he were better black-washed. The important thing is to make him a supreme criminal, a demon” (Pitt 97). His devilish nature was intensified by the fact that he showed no remorse for his evil deeds. His motivation was entirely selfish; he seemed to live by his own warped standards of morality, if such concepts even entered his mind. He was a villain one could love to hate, for he evoked no sympathy from anyone.
Audiences were also entertained by Sweeney's ingenious murder weapon, his disappearing barber chair. Bolted to a trap door in the floor, the chair would flip over, sending its human contents plummeting into the basement, while a duplicate chair would swing up to take its place. This melodramatic device, resembling the childlike fun of a magician's trick and the spookiness of a haunted house, was a delight to spectators fascinated by the stage spectacle of the 1800s.
The setting of Sweeney's crimes was well known to audiences. Fleet Street in the 15th century had been a thriving business sector, but by the 16th century most of the important shops had moved. Due to the general malaise of an unemployed public and to an influx of taverns, lawlessness set in. The many byways, alleys, and tunnels on Fleet Street provided plenty of criminal hide-outs and escape routes. By the 18th century Fleet Street had regained some of its former importance because of the influence of St. Dunstan's church, a crack-down on crime by police, and the popularity of many exhibitions and street shows that drew people from all over London. Two famous attractions, the waxworks and the "Giants of St. Dunstan's" (two mechanical figures that struck the church clock), were located next to number 186, the establishment of Sweeney Todd. The crowds that gathered there would offer easy pickings for a maniacal barber (Haining). These familiar surroundings must have added to the chilling excitement of the melodrama, conjuring up vivid images in the spectator's mind of meeting this odd fellow on the way home.
Dramatic Transfusion
In 1973 a British playwright named Christopher Bond took this creaky old corpse of a play and pumped new blood into its rusty veins. The resurrected Sweeney, still as lethal, has a different kind of madness in his eye, a motivated purpose to his life, and a somewhat more human, even tragic, quality to his soul.
In the black-and-white world of melodrama people are divided into two distinct categories, the unblemished hero and the despicable villain. Melodrama focuses more on sensational surprises and last-minute rescues than character development. Bond transformed the plot, giving the characters some depth and psychological motivation for their crimes. In the early plays a clear line was drawn between the virtuous heroine and hero, Joanna and her fiancé, and their villainous counterparts, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd. In Bond’s version, Sweeney is the victim of cruel injustice at the hands of the wicked Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford. He is deported to Australia on false charges, his wife stolen from him and now presumably dead; his daughter has never known him as a father. Such suffering motivates and dramatically justifies his thirst for revenge.
However, when he begins his insane quest for genocide ("They all deserve to die"), the line dividing good and evil becomes blurred. No longer does villainy struggle with virtue, but wickedness begets wickedness as a just cause becomes a bloody crusade. The old Sweeney was an object of boos and hisses; Bond's Sweeney divides the audience's emotions, for he is both a pitiable creature and an abomination.
In the character of Sweeney Todd, Bond saw the potential for a tragic figure, although keeping the tone tongue-in-cheek. In a personal interview (1982) Sondheim commented on Bond's character: “Sweeney's Hamlet. They're both eaten up by revenge. Hamlet can't quite take the action, so he is consumed in an existentialist way, Sweeney in a very active way, but they're people who get destroyed by their need for revenge, in both cases justified.” This tragic likeness would not survive critical scrutiny if measured by a strict definition of tragedy, but just the semblance of such qualities raises Bond's play above the level of melodrama.
There are four major characteristics that distinguish Bond's work from earlier versions. First, Sweeney's motivation for murder is not greed but revenge, dramatically, if not morally, justified by the cruelties he and his family have suffered. Even his mad onslaught against the entire human race is somewhat understandable. When Mrs. Lovett relates the plight of his wife Lucy, Todd cries out, "Will no one have mercy on her? Then I will have no mercy either. None” (Bond 4). All men are judged guilty because they allow such evil to exist, so Sweeney appoints himself as their executioner.
Second, Sweeney exists in a fallen state. Benjamin Barker, his former self, was apparently a good and upright man who encouraged his wife for her virtue "instead of leaving his bed for a couple of nights" when the Judge began making improper advances (Bond 4). However, his idealism was his tragic mistake; he felt that virtue would be his protection. Such naiveté led to his fall. Now he has changed his name not only for secrecy but also as a sign that he is that man no longer. When Mrs. Lovett asks his name, he replies, "Todd, Sweeney Todd. The other man is dead" (5). The cruelties of men have killed the innocent Barker. Perhaps a glimpse of this idealist is present in Anthony, Sweeney's savior and friend. Throughout the play Todd's malevolent spirit is balanced somewhat by Anthony's unending exuberance and optimism. For one, London is a glorious homecoming; for the other, London is the pit of hell. Todd distrusts everyone, while Anthony places complete faith in his mysterious friend, making one think that Sweeney must have exhibited some good qualities at one time. This tragic fall gives Sweeney a sympathetic aspect that the original character completely lacked.
Third, Bond's sophisticated plot and language elevate the nature of the tale. Sondheim notes, “It had a weight to it . . . because he wrote certain characters in blank verse. He also infused into it plot elements from Jacobean tragedy and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was able to take all these disparate elements that had been in existence rather dully for a hundred and some-odd years and make them into a first-rate play” (“Musical Theater” 16). In addition, Bond's work possesses an intelligent sense of humor. After his contest with Pirelli, Todd makes a subtle reference to his own legend. After his shave, the Beadle tells him, “Remarkable! Hardly any pain at all! If you can carry out all your work as well as you've done on this gentleman, I swear you must be the most famous barber in London,” to which Todd responds, “I hope to become so.” Such adroit irony maintains the playful atmosphere of this otherwise dark piece, reminding the audience that the bloodletting is all in fun.
Fourth, the new play presents a degree of social commentary on the times in which Sweeney Todd was written. Mrs. Lovett's meat pies are no longer merely creepy but are symbolic of the dog-eat-dog philosophy that pervades a mechanistic, materialistic society. Man loses his identity and therefore is trampled on by those who covet what he has but do not recognize his rights as an individual. Given such a world, Sweeney reasons that he is only repaying mankind for the miseries it has inflicted upon him.
Anthony, visiting Fogg’s asylum, complains that Joanna does not look mad; Mr. Fogg responds: “Alas, she is. As mad as you or I. Why, who is maddest – he who's shut away or he who puts him there? What more unnatural act is there to deny a fellow creature air and light? . . . Why sir, it is the act of a cruel and desperate lunatic.” When Anthony protests, “But you preside over this place,” Fogg admits, “And therefore it is fitting that I should be the maddest man in here. What else can you expect in a world as mad as this?”
Many reviewers of the musical debated the extent of Bertolt Brecht's influence on the show, the Marxist playwright known for his scathing attacks on social injustice. Sondheim denies any direct influence: "That's because it takes place in Dickensian time, and the only Brecht they know is The Three Penny Opera. A chorus comes out in rags and starts to sing a song and they suddenly say ‘It's Brecht!' and of course it isn't Brechtian at all. It's absolutely the reverse of Brecht. His whole theory, his importance in the history of the theater, is the so-called alienation effect, having things deliberately not involve you. The idea of Sweeney is the idea of a horror movie, which is to say, 'I want to tell you a story. . . and this happened . . . and the door suddenly opened!' That's not Brecht." He also explains that "man devouring man" is not a specific Brechtian reference: "It's sung by an insane man at an insane moment in his life. It's not the author's thesis. I don't believe that. That's not what the show is about" (interview).
Musical mayhem
Whereas Bond's play jumps from a dark corner to say, "Boo!" Sondheim's musical thriller engulfs the imagination and retreats into the darkness, taking the spectator with it. Sondheim feels that the addition of music greatly increases the size of any drama, transforming it into a different theatrical experience: “What I did to Chris' play is more than enhance it. I had a feeling it would be a new animal. The effect it had at Stratford East in London and the effect it had at the Uris Theater in New York are two entirely different effects, even though it's the same play. It was essentially charming over there because they don't take Sweeney Todd seriously. Our production was larger in scope. Hal Prince gave it an epic sense, a sense that this was a man of some size instead of just a nut case. The music helps to give it that dimension” (interview).
Sondheim's Sweeney Todd owes more to French Grand Guignol than to English melodrama. This 19th century theater form specialized in violent plots, supernatural settings, and terrifying stage effects, but as Sondheim says, “Grand Guignol is no longer done well on stage because the movies have taken it over – Friday the 13th and Halloween – and there's a huge market for it. I always wanted to do it on the stage to see if you could scare people with music, especially a 20th century audience which just came off the street where there are much worse things going on” (interview).
Music is indeed the mystical power behind the engrossing impact of Sweeney Todd. Over eighty percent of the production is set to music, either sung or orchestrated underneath dialogue. The score is one vast structure, each individual part meshing with others for the good of the entire musical machine. Never before or since in his work has Sondheim utilized music in such an exhaustive capacity to further the purposes of the drama.
The production opens with a street chorus singing "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," a theme that winds through the catacombs of this tale, popping up in unexpected places. When at times the charm of such numbers as "By the Sea" and "Not While I'm Around" may temporarily invoke an untroubled world, the ballad re-appears to remind the listener of mysterious forces at work underneath the surface. To create a sense of gloom, Sondheim begins the piece in a very low register and adds a scurrying, low accompanying figure that periodically crescendos slightly as if something were about to happen and then does not (London Weekend Television interview). In this show, song is almost inseparable from dialogue; there are no comment songs, no inner monologues and no narrators as in previous shows. Nevertheless, the ballad establishes an overall presentational quality to the drama:
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
He served a dark and a vengeful god.
What happens then – well, that's the play,
And he wouldn't want us to give it away,
Not Sweeney,
Not Sweeney Todd.
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Within the ballad appears the first of many leitmotif phrases that return to haunt the mind, uttering unspoken secrets. As the chorus rises to a climactic "Swing your razor wide, Sweeney! Hold it to the skies!" the melodic line sounds the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) motif from the 13th century Mass for the Dead (we hear this traditional theme also in Rachmanninoff’s symphonies and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique). Later the motif recurs in other guises as well. When Sweeney sings to his razors, the phrase "See this one shine, How he smiles in the light, My friend" is an inversion of the Dies Irae. In "Epiphany" the motif appears subtly in the low brass accompaniment starting just before the lines "They all deserve to die! Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, Tell you why." On this day of wrath Sweeney's razor becomes the Grim Reaper's sickle as he executes justice on the human race for its sins.
Sondheim carefully delineates characters with his musical touch. On his first entrance Anthony's "There's no place like London!" soars joyfully; when sung by Todd, it falls into a minor key. In another instance Toby's innocent "Nothing's gonna harm you, Not while I'm around" turns into a menacing reprise as Todd and Lovett search for the young escapee who now knows too much. Clearly nothing but harm is on their minds.
Rapid changes of meter occur in several numbers, notably in Mrs. Lovett's "The Worst Pies in London" where "the dislocations in the meter give emphasis to her attempts to swat the flies that plague her as she kneads the dough: 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, 3/4, 5/4, 4/4, etc" (Blyton 23). This song is an excellent example of Sondheim's ability to integrate music with the action of the character, providing the actor specific business to play. "Those of us who write songs should stage each number within an inch of its life in our own heads when we write. ... They may not use anything in your blueprint at all, but they have something to work on, something to build from" (Sondheim, "Musical Theater" 17).
Crowds act as more than a chorus in this musical. Sondheim dislikes choral pieces in traditional operas where everyone assembles to sing the same music and lyrics for no reason. Like Richard Wagner, he feels that only the music is served in such cases, not the drama (London interview). In "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" Sondheim splits the crowd into several factions, some in favor of the elixir, others against it; many are totally uninterested. This variety of reactions is more natural and exciting than one homogeneous response, mirroring the audience's feelings of ambiguity about Todd. Although the contest is obviously constructed to win support for Todd as the crowd applauds wildly in his favor, knowing that Sweeney is only trying to lure the Beadle into his trap makes the audience somewhat uneasy over joining the applause.
This dramatic tension is produced not only by the content of the lyrics but also by several musical elements throughout the score. Wittke writes, "[Sondheim's] prevalent use of the blue note [a flatted 3rd or 7th in a major scale] makes the major and minor pitches unstable and generates the necessary psychological ambiguity of the show” (311). The minor mode, common in English folk music but rare in Broadway musicals, is quite distinctive in such songs as "These are my Friends. " Although use of the minor key does not always indicate mysterious and sinister moods, here it combines with haunting lyrics as a foreboding sign that Sweeney's sanity might be in question; establishing a spiritual bond with one's razors is not exactly the occupation of a sound mind.
Several songs use the tritone or augmented 4th (play C and F# on the piano), called the diabolus in musica for its sinister sound, which Wittke notes is a perfect symbol for this show. For example, the first act closes on a harmonic tritone as this demonic duo sings the final chords of "A Little Priest." Intermission must have been an uncomfortable hiatus.
The most terrifying use of music in the production is undoubtedly Sweeney's "Epiphany." Although frightening in its own way, "A Little Priest" is comic relief next to this nightmarish number. This pair of songs at the end of Act I is the most significant musical addition which Sondheim made to Bond’s version. In the play Sweeney’s mental collapse and the subsequent "Meat Pie Connection" take place in less than half a page of dialogue, much too quickly for the full psychological impact. Sondheim carefully reveals the developing ideas in Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett's demented minds.
Sondheim took a month to mix motifs, monstrous dissonances, and the Dies Irae for the proper blend of madness in "Epiphany." The music is jarring, frenetic, leaping back and forth between phrases as Sweeney's mind begins to crack. The judge's escape has pushed him beyond the point of no return. Now his price is all mankind:
Not one man, no,
Nor ten men
Nor a hundred
Can assuage me . . .
And I will get him back
Even as he gloats.
In the meantime I'll practice
On less honorable throats.
The title of the piece is significant. One definition of "epiphany" reads: "A sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an intuitive grasp of reality.” Sweeney discerns at this point that revenge is not a short and easy road and that there is little justice in this world, but perhaps another meaning is more appropriate: "An incarnation of a god or a divine being.” Sweeney does not merely change directions; he has become the earthly emissary of ultimate darkness. In a mad vision he has "heard music that nobody heard" and must obey the summons of his "dark and hungry god."
After a psychologically motivated first act, the rest of the show is mostly action. However, Sondheim uses previously developed musical themes to make thematic connections between past and present. The melody of "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" is heard again with altered lyrics in "More Hot Pies," indicating that the pies, like the elixir, are not exactly what they seem. As the song continues, a customer asks Mrs. Lovett for her recipe. She slyly avoids revealing her "family" secret, but the answer comes when the same tune is used to describe both Sweeney's chair and the pies "fit for a king." If only the patron could hear it, music would point to the source of these succulent treats.
As the new barber chair "swings into place from the heavens like a gift from the wrong kind of gods” (Kerr), and the butcher and the baker prepare for the arrival of “fresh supplies,” Todd and Lovett's exchange, "Psst! Excuse me. Psst! Dear, see to the customers" is a fragmented version of the scurrying madness motif in the orchestration of "No Place Like London" and the beginning of "Epiphany.” The results of Todd's insanity are now manifesting themselves in very ominous ways.
In his most inventive use of motifs, Sondheim tantalizes the audience with musical clues as to the true identity of the Beggar Woman. Very subtly he suggests a connection between the falling semitones of her "Alms! Alms!" and Sweeney's phrase, "Lucy lies in ashes." Later, in Act 2, as she is looking for the Beadle, orchestration from "There was a Barber and his Wife" plays just before her entrance. Seeing the barbershop rekindles old memories in her addled brain; her crazed song, "Beadle deedle deedle dumpling," the same tune she sung to proposition Sweeney and Anthony at their first meeting ("Ow would you like a little squiff, dear, A little jig jig"), was the music which played so elegantly at the Judge's party many years earlier on the night of her rape. Finally, when Sweeney in his haste slashes the Beggar Woman's throat, the "Lucy lies in ashes" theme rises from the orchestra as a terrible dirge. Fate has had the last laugh: Sweeney's sins have killed the only thing he ever loved.
Flesh Factory
What Sondheim thought of as "a small horror piece" (interview) became a colossal portrait of the Industrial Revolution in the hands of director Hal Prince. At first, Prince was not interested in directing the show; to him it was just another melodrama, not very experimental structurally. Then he discovered a metaphor which expanded the story into an essay on the human condition.
On the stage of the Uris Theater in New York (now called the Gershwin), this little barbershop of horrors was transformed into a mountain of steel in motion. Prince's scenic metaphor for Sweeney Todd was a 19th century iron foundry moved from Rhode Island and reassembled on the stage, which Jack Kroll aptly described as "part cathedral, part factory, part prison, that dwarfed and degraded the swarming denizens of the lower orders." For Pacific Overtures Prince's directorial philosophy had been "Less is more," but for Sweeney Todd he decided, "Less is boring. More is more” (London interview).
The massive scope of this setting went beyond even Sondheim's intentions. “Hal is very much influenced by [the experimental Soviet director] Meyerhold. Meyerhold would recognize one of his children, because [for Hal] it's all about scale and size and space and light – epic theater." Sondheim admits that his conception of the show differed from that of Prince: "Hal's metaphor is that the factory turns out Sweeney Todds. It turns out soulless, defeated, hopeless people. That's what the play's about to him; Sweeney Todd is a product of that age. I think it's not. Sweeney Todd is a man bent on personal revenge, the way we all are in one way or another, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the time he lived in, as far as I'm concerned” (interview).
For Prince the age is everything; he said that the show is not just about revenge but about "the incursion of the industrial age and its influence on souls, poetry, and people” (Gussow 15). Several times Sweeney is referred to in mechanistic terms: "Sweeney pondered and Sweeney planned/ Like a perfect machine ‘e planned." Sweeney's plight represents the condition of industrialized man: he has become a cog in the Great Machine. His soul is replaced with whirring belts and whining gears, and his feeble flesh is compelled to do its inhuman bidding.
Throughout the production a factory whistle, "the hard, pervasive sound of authority, of oppressive economic power," pierces the air in a shrill blast. Howard Kissel recognized its shrewd significance: “What distinguishes Sweeney Todd from simple Victorian dramaturgy is its deliberate theatricality, its desire not just to scare us, but to invest the horror with irony. 19th century realism assumed its audience was naive and innocent: post-Brechtian theater presumes its audience is theatrically knowing and socially guilty. When it is used to punctuate moments of horror, the whistle, blaring and abrasive, implies an awareness that it takes quite a lot, nowadays, to shock us.”
Although Sondheim says he disagreed with the director's interpretation, Prince based his mechanistic vision on social commentary in the lyrics themselves. Sweeney describes London as "a hole in the world like a great black pit":
At the top of the hole
Sit the privileged few,
Making mock of the vermin
In the lower zoo,
Turning beauty into filth and greed ...
McLaughlin remarks, "Obtaining and keeping power and profits are the primary goals of the society presented here. The necessary result of these goals is the objectification of people; people become tools to be used and discarded by those with money and power. The Beggar Woman haunts the play as a reminder of our tendency to dismiss and deny the humanity of others" (33). However, both Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett soon become guilty of the crimes of society they criticize. When he achieves his "Epiphany," Sweeney decides "They all deserve to die," not only the "privileged few" but their victims as well: "The lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death will be a relief." In their macabre parody of private enterprise, they "objectify people, first denying their humanity by using them for their own purposes and then literally turning them into objects: meat pies" (McLaughlin 34). Beckoned by the call of his dark god, Sweeney follows the path of his persecutors to their bloody end.
SOURCES
Blyton, Carey. "Sondheim's Sweeney Todd." Tempo 149 (1984): 19-26.
Bond, Christopher. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Samuel French, 1974.
Gussow, Mel. “Sweeney Todd: A Little Nightmare Music.” New York Times, February 1, 1979.
Haining, Peter. Sweeney Todd: the Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Barnes and Nobles, 1993.
Kerr, Walter. “Is Sweeney on Target?” New York Times, March 11, 1979.
Kissel, Howard. “Sweeney Todd.” Women’s Wear Daily, March 12, 1979.
Kroll, Jack. “The Blood Runs Cold.” Newsweek, March 12, 1979, 101-3.
London Weekend Television. “Sweeney Todd: Scenes from the Making of a Musical.” November 7, 1980.
McLaughlin, Robert L. "No One is Alone: Society and Love in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim." Journal of American Drama and Theater 1991: 27-41.
Pitt, George Dibdin. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. ed. Montagu Slater. Howe, 1928.
Sondheim, Stephen. Interview at his home, New York, June 3, 1982.
Sondheim, Stephen. “The Musical Theater.” Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Autumn 1978):6-29.
Wittke, Paul. “Review of Records: Sweeney Todd.” Musical Quarterly 66 (April 1980): 309-313.
Zadan, Craig. Sondheim and Co. MacMillan,1974.
Click here: Sweeney Todd
Sondheim Notes by Larry A. Brown
From The Annual Register of London in 1785, the entry read: “A most remarkable murder was perpetrated in the following manner by a journeyman barber that lived near Hyde Park Corner, who had been for a long time past jealous of his wife, but could no way bring it home to her. A young gentleman by chance coming into his master's shop to be shaved and dressed, and being in much liquor, mentioned his having seen a fine girl home, from whom he had certain favors the night before, and at the same time describing her person. The barber concluding it to be his wife, in the height of his frenzy, cut the young gentleman's throat from ear to ear and absconded” (Haining 34).
Thus began, according to one hypothesis, the infamous tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber whose homicidal activities at 186 Fleet Street have chilled and thrilled the hearts of Londoners for over 200 years. The historical Sweeney Todd, hanged for murder in 1801, may have been the most successful serial killer of all time, some accounts attributing 160 unfortunate customers to his victim list (Haining 96). Sweeney's saga has passed through so many retellings that what facts remain about this menace are enshrouded in layers of colorful exaggeration. One fact remains: the dark deeds of Sweeney Todd have crowned him the king of melodramatic villains.
Attend the Tale
Forty-five years after the crime spree, Thomas Peckett Prest adapted the story of Sweeney into a serial entitled "The String of Pearls: A Romance" published in The People's Periodical and Family Library. Beginning in November 1846, the story stretched across eighteen episodes in this penny newspaper printed appropriately on Fleet Street. The convoluted plot concerns a string of pearls which disappears along with its bearer in the vicinity of 186 Fleet Street. Miss Joanna Oakley, the intended recipient of the pearls, contacts the police when she fears foul play. Through various clues and horrifying discoveries, the police finally conclude that over the years Sweeney had been killing his customers for the money they had on them. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to Mrs. Lovett's bakery a few blocks away where they have supplied the stuffing for her meat pies. Their gruesome game ends when Todd is caught in the act by police and Mrs. Lovett dies of poison left for her by Todd. Joanna receives her pearls and her long lost fiancé, who has been trapped in Mrs. Lovett's cellar baking the unsavory pies against his will.
Sweeney's exploits reached a greater public when the prolific George Dibdin Pitt in March 1847 presented "The String of Pearls, or the Fiend of Fleet Street" as a melodrama at the Royal Britannia Saloon, where it soon became a long-running success. As is evident in the title change, the appeal of the piece rested primarily in its nefarious protagonist. While criminals had become the center of attention in melodrama since the appearance of Mack the Knife in The Beggar's Opera, these antiheroes usually had possessed some admirable characteristics, until Sweeney. In notes to the play, Montagu Slater says, “Pitt made the great discovery that there was no need to whitewash the criminal; on the contrary he were better black-washed. The important thing is to make him a supreme criminal, a demon” (Pitt 97). His devilish nature was intensified by the fact that he showed no remorse for his evil deeds. His motivation was entirely selfish; he seemed to live by his own warped standards of morality, if such concepts even entered his mind. He was a villain one could love to hate, for he evoked no sympathy from anyone.
Audiences were also entertained by Sweeney's ingenious murder weapon, his disappearing barber chair. Bolted to a trap door in the floor, the chair would flip over, sending its human contents plummeting into the basement, while a duplicate chair would swing up to take its place. This melodramatic device, resembling the childlike fun of a magician's trick and the spookiness of a haunted house, was a delight to spectators fascinated by the stage spectacle of the 1800s.
The setting of Sweeney's crimes was well known to audiences. Fleet Street in the 15th century had been a thriving business sector, but by the 16th century most of the important shops had moved. Due to the general malaise of an unemployed public and to an influx of taverns, lawlessness set in. The many byways, alleys, and tunnels on Fleet Street provided plenty of criminal hide-outs and escape routes. By the 18th century Fleet Street had regained some of its former importance because of the influence of St. Dunstan's church, a crack-down on crime by police, and the popularity of many exhibitions and street shows that drew people from all over London. Two famous attractions, the waxworks and the "Giants of St. Dunstan's" (two mechanical figures that struck the church clock), were located next to number 186, the establishment of Sweeney Todd. The crowds that gathered there would offer easy pickings for a maniacal barber (Haining). These familiar surroundings must have added to the chilling excitement of the melodrama, conjuring up vivid images in the spectator's mind of meeting this odd fellow on the way home.
Dramatic Transfusion
In 1973 a British playwright named Christopher Bond took this creaky old corpse of a play and pumped new blood into its rusty veins. The resurrected Sweeney, still as lethal, has a different kind of madness in his eye, a motivated purpose to his life, and a somewhat more human, even tragic, quality to his soul.
In the black-and-white world of melodrama people are divided into two distinct categories, the unblemished hero and the despicable villain. Melodrama focuses more on sensational surprises and last-minute rescues than character development. Bond transformed the plot, giving the characters some depth and psychological motivation for their crimes. In the early plays a clear line was drawn between the virtuous heroine and hero, Joanna and her fiancé, and their villainous counterparts, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd. In Bond’s version, Sweeney is the victim of cruel injustice at the hands of the wicked Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford. He is deported to Australia on false charges, his wife stolen from him and now presumably dead; his daughter has never known him as a father. Such suffering motivates and dramatically justifies his thirst for revenge.
However, when he begins his insane quest for genocide ("They all deserve to die"), the line dividing good and evil becomes blurred. No longer does villainy struggle with virtue, but wickedness begets wickedness as a just cause becomes a bloody crusade. The old Sweeney was an object of boos and hisses; Bond's Sweeney divides the audience's emotions, for he is both a pitiable creature and an abomination.
In the character of Sweeney Todd, Bond saw the potential for a tragic figure, although keeping the tone tongue-in-cheek. In a personal interview (1982) Sondheim commented on Bond's character: “Sweeney's Hamlet. They're both eaten up by revenge. Hamlet can't quite take the action, so he is consumed in an existentialist way, Sweeney in a very active way, but they're people who get destroyed by their need for revenge, in both cases justified.” This tragic likeness would not survive critical scrutiny if measured by a strict definition of tragedy, but just the semblance of such qualities raises Bond's play above the level of melodrama.
There are four major characteristics that distinguish Bond's work from earlier versions. First, Sweeney's motivation for murder is not greed but revenge, dramatically, if not morally, justified by the cruelties he and his family have suffered. Even his mad onslaught against the entire human race is somewhat understandable. When Mrs. Lovett relates the plight of his wife Lucy, Todd cries out, "Will no one have mercy on her? Then I will have no mercy either. None” (Bond 4). All men are judged guilty because they allow such evil to exist, so Sweeney appoints himself as their executioner.
Second, Sweeney exists in a fallen state. Benjamin Barker, his former self, was apparently a good and upright man who encouraged his wife for her virtue "instead of leaving his bed for a couple of nights" when the Judge began making improper advances (Bond 4). However, his idealism was his tragic mistake; he felt that virtue would be his protection. Such naiveté led to his fall. Now he has changed his name not only for secrecy but also as a sign that he is that man no longer. When Mrs. Lovett asks his name, he replies, "Todd, Sweeney Todd. The other man is dead" (5). The cruelties of men have killed the innocent Barker. Perhaps a glimpse of this idealist is present in Anthony, Sweeney's savior and friend. Throughout the play Todd's malevolent spirit is balanced somewhat by Anthony's unending exuberance and optimism. For one, London is a glorious homecoming; for the other, London is the pit of hell. Todd distrusts everyone, while Anthony places complete faith in his mysterious friend, making one think that Sweeney must have exhibited some good qualities at one time. This tragic fall gives Sweeney a sympathetic aspect that the original character completely lacked.
Third, Bond's sophisticated plot and language elevate the nature of the tale. Sondheim notes, “It had a weight to it . . . because he wrote certain characters in blank verse. He also infused into it plot elements from Jacobean tragedy and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was able to take all these disparate elements that had been in existence rather dully for a hundred and some-odd years and make them into a first-rate play” (“Musical Theater” 16). In addition, Bond's work possesses an intelligent sense of humor. After his contest with Pirelli, Todd makes a subtle reference to his own legend. After his shave, the Beadle tells him, “Remarkable! Hardly any pain at all! If you can carry out all your work as well as you've done on this gentleman, I swear you must be the most famous barber in London,” to which Todd responds, “I hope to become so.” Such adroit irony maintains the playful atmosphere of this otherwise dark piece, reminding the audience that the bloodletting is all in fun.
Fourth, the new play presents a degree of social commentary on the times in which Sweeney Todd was written. Mrs. Lovett's meat pies are no longer merely creepy but are symbolic of the dog-eat-dog philosophy that pervades a mechanistic, materialistic society. Man loses his identity and therefore is trampled on by those who covet what he has but do not recognize his rights as an individual. Given such a world, Sweeney reasons that he is only repaying mankind for the miseries it has inflicted upon him.
Anthony, visiting Fogg’s asylum, complains that Joanna does not look mad; Mr. Fogg responds: “Alas, she is. As mad as you or I. Why, who is maddest – he who's shut away or he who puts him there? What more unnatural act is there to deny a fellow creature air and light? . . . Why sir, it is the act of a cruel and desperate lunatic.” When Anthony protests, “But you preside over this place,” Fogg admits, “And therefore it is fitting that I should be the maddest man in here. What else can you expect in a world as mad as this?”
Many reviewers of the musical debated the extent of Bertolt Brecht's influence on the show, the Marxist playwright known for his scathing attacks on social injustice. Sondheim denies any direct influence: "That's because it takes place in Dickensian time, and the only Brecht they know is The Three Penny Opera. A chorus comes out in rags and starts to sing a song and they suddenly say ‘It's Brecht!' and of course it isn't Brechtian at all. It's absolutely the reverse of Brecht. His whole theory, his importance in the history of the theater, is the so-called alienation effect, having things deliberately not involve you. The idea of Sweeney is the idea of a horror movie, which is to say, 'I want to tell you a story. . . and this happened . . . and the door suddenly opened!' That's not Brecht." He also explains that "man devouring man" is not a specific Brechtian reference: "It's sung by an insane man at an insane moment in his life. It's not the author's thesis. I don't believe that. That's not what the show is about" (interview).
Musical mayhem
Whereas Bond's play jumps from a dark corner to say, "Boo!" Sondheim's musical thriller engulfs the imagination and retreats into the darkness, taking the spectator with it. Sondheim feels that the addition of music greatly increases the size of any drama, transforming it into a different theatrical experience: “What I did to Chris' play is more than enhance it. I had a feeling it would be a new animal. The effect it had at Stratford East in London and the effect it had at the Uris Theater in New York are two entirely different effects, even though it's the same play. It was essentially charming over there because they don't take Sweeney Todd seriously. Our production was larger in scope. Hal Prince gave it an epic sense, a sense that this was a man of some size instead of just a nut case. The music helps to give it that dimension” (interview).
Sondheim's Sweeney Todd owes more to French Grand Guignol than to English melodrama. This 19th century theater form specialized in violent plots, supernatural settings, and terrifying stage effects, but as Sondheim says, “Grand Guignol is no longer done well on stage because the movies have taken it over – Friday the 13th and Halloween – and there's a huge market for it. I always wanted to do it on the stage to see if you could scare people with music, especially a 20th century audience which just came off the street where there are much worse things going on” (interview).
Music is indeed the mystical power behind the engrossing impact of Sweeney Todd. Over eighty percent of the production is set to music, either sung or orchestrated underneath dialogue. The score is one vast structure, each individual part meshing with others for the good of the entire musical machine. Never before or since in his work has Sondheim utilized music in such an exhaustive capacity to further the purposes of the drama.
The production opens with a street chorus singing "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," a theme that winds through the catacombs of this tale, popping up in unexpected places. When at times the charm of such numbers as "By the Sea" and "Not While I'm Around" may temporarily invoke an untroubled world, the ballad re-appears to remind the listener of mysterious forces at work underneath the surface. To create a sense of gloom, Sondheim begins the piece in a very low register and adds a scurrying, low accompanying figure that periodically crescendos slightly as if something were about to happen and then does not (London Weekend Television interview). In this show, song is almost inseparable from dialogue; there are no comment songs, no inner monologues and no narrators as in previous shows. Nevertheless, the ballad establishes an overall presentational quality to the drama:
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
He served a dark and a vengeful god.
What happens then – well, that's the play,
And he wouldn't want us to give it away,
Not Sweeney,
Not Sweeney Todd.
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Within the ballad appears the first of many leitmotif phrases that return to haunt the mind, uttering unspoken secrets. As the chorus rises to a climactic "Swing your razor wide, Sweeney! Hold it to the skies!" the melodic line sounds the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) motif from the 13th century Mass for the Dead (we hear this traditional theme also in Rachmanninoff’s symphonies and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique). Later the motif recurs in other guises as well. When Sweeney sings to his razors, the phrase "See this one shine, How he smiles in the light, My friend" is an inversion of the Dies Irae. In "Epiphany" the motif appears subtly in the low brass accompaniment starting just before the lines "They all deserve to die! Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, Tell you why." On this day of wrath Sweeney's razor becomes the Grim Reaper's sickle as he executes justice on the human race for its sins.
Sondheim carefully delineates characters with his musical touch. On his first entrance Anthony's "There's no place like London!" soars joyfully; when sung by Todd, it falls into a minor key. In another instance Toby's innocent "Nothing's gonna harm you, Not while I'm around" turns into a menacing reprise as Todd and Lovett search for the young escapee who now knows too much. Clearly nothing but harm is on their minds.
Rapid changes of meter occur in several numbers, notably in Mrs. Lovett's "The Worst Pies in London" where "the dislocations in the meter give emphasis to her attempts to swat the flies that plague her as she kneads the dough: 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, 3/4, 5/4, 4/4, etc" (Blyton 23). This song is an excellent example of Sondheim's ability to integrate music with the action of the character, providing the actor specific business to play. "Those of us who write songs should stage each number within an inch of its life in our own heads when we write. ... They may not use anything in your blueprint at all, but they have something to work on, something to build from" (Sondheim, "Musical Theater" 17).
Crowds act as more than a chorus in this musical. Sondheim dislikes choral pieces in traditional operas where everyone assembles to sing the same music and lyrics for no reason. Like Richard Wagner, he feels that only the music is served in such cases, not the drama (London interview). In "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" Sondheim splits the crowd into several factions, some in favor of the elixir, others against it; many are totally uninterested. This variety of reactions is more natural and exciting than one homogeneous response, mirroring the audience's feelings of ambiguity about Todd. Although the contest is obviously constructed to win support for Todd as the crowd applauds wildly in his favor, knowing that Sweeney is only trying to lure the Beadle into his trap makes the audience somewhat uneasy over joining the applause.
This dramatic tension is produced not only by the content of the lyrics but also by several musical elements throughout the score. Wittke writes, "[Sondheim's] prevalent use of the blue note [a flatted 3rd or 7th in a major scale] makes the major and minor pitches unstable and generates the necessary psychological ambiguity of the show” (311). The minor mode, common in English folk music but rare in Broadway musicals, is quite distinctive in such songs as "These are my Friends. " Although use of the minor key does not always indicate mysterious and sinister moods, here it combines with haunting lyrics as a foreboding sign that Sweeney's sanity might be in question; establishing a spiritual bond with one's razors is not exactly the occupation of a sound mind.
Several songs use the tritone or augmented 4th (play C and F# on the piano), called the diabolus in musica for its sinister sound, which Wittke notes is a perfect symbol for this show. For example, the first act closes on a harmonic tritone as this demonic duo sings the final chords of "A Little Priest." Intermission must have been an uncomfortable hiatus.
The most terrifying use of music in the production is undoubtedly Sweeney's "Epiphany." Although frightening in its own way, "A Little Priest" is comic relief next to this nightmarish number. This pair of songs at the end of Act I is the most significant musical addition which Sondheim made to Bond’s version. In the play Sweeney’s mental collapse and the subsequent "Meat Pie Connection" take place in less than half a page of dialogue, much too quickly for the full psychological impact. Sondheim carefully reveals the developing ideas in Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett's demented minds.
Sondheim took a month to mix motifs, monstrous dissonances, and the Dies Irae for the proper blend of madness in "Epiphany." The music is jarring, frenetic, leaping back and forth between phrases as Sweeney's mind begins to crack. The judge's escape has pushed him beyond the point of no return. Now his price is all mankind:
Not one man, no,
Nor ten men
Nor a hundred
Can assuage me . . .
And I will get him back
Even as he gloats.
In the meantime I'll practice
On less honorable throats.
The title of the piece is significant. One definition of "epiphany" reads: "A sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an intuitive grasp of reality.” Sweeney discerns at this point that revenge is not a short and easy road and that there is little justice in this world, but perhaps another meaning is more appropriate: "An incarnation of a god or a divine being.” Sweeney does not merely change directions; he has become the earthly emissary of ultimate darkness. In a mad vision he has "heard music that nobody heard" and must obey the summons of his "dark and hungry god."
After a psychologically motivated first act, the rest of the show is mostly action. However, Sondheim uses previously developed musical themes to make thematic connections between past and present. The melody of "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" is heard again with altered lyrics in "More Hot Pies," indicating that the pies, like the elixir, are not exactly what they seem. As the song continues, a customer asks Mrs. Lovett for her recipe. She slyly avoids revealing her "family" secret, but the answer comes when the same tune is used to describe both Sweeney's chair and the pies "fit for a king." If only the patron could hear it, music would point to the source of these succulent treats.
As the new barber chair "swings into place from the heavens like a gift from the wrong kind of gods” (Kerr), and the butcher and the baker prepare for the arrival of “fresh supplies,” Todd and Lovett's exchange, "Psst! Excuse me. Psst! Dear, see to the customers" is a fragmented version of the scurrying madness motif in the orchestration of "No Place Like London" and the beginning of "Epiphany.” The results of Todd's insanity are now manifesting themselves in very ominous ways.
In his most inventive use of motifs, Sondheim tantalizes the audience with musical clues as to the true identity of the Beggar Woman. Very subtly he suggests a connection between the falling semitones of her "Alms! Alms!" and Sweeney's phrase, "Lucy lies in ashes." Later, in Act 2, as she is looking for the Beadle, orchestration from "There was a Barber and his Wife" plays just before her entrance. Seeing the barbershop rekindles old memories in her addled brain; her crazed song, "Beadle deedle deedle dumpling," the same tune she sung to proposition Sweeney and Anthony at their first meeting ("Ow would you like a little squiff, dear, A little jig jig"), was the music which played so elegantly at the Judge's party many years earlier on the night of her rape. Finally, when Sweeney in his haste slashes the Beggar Woman's throat, the "Lucy lies in ashes" theme rises from the orchestra as a terrible dirge. Fate has had the last laugh: Sweeney's sins have killed the only thing he ever loved.
Flesh Factory
What Sondheim thought of as "a small horror piece" (interview) became a colossal portrait of the Industrial Revolution in the hands of director Hal Prince. At first, Prince was not interested in directing the show; to him it was just another melodrama, not very experimental structurally. Then he discovered a metaphor which expanded the story into an essay on the human condition.
On the stage of the Uris Theater in New York (now called the Gershwin), this little barbershop of horrors was transformed into a mountain of steel in motion. Prince's scenic metaphor for Sweeney Todd was a 19th century iron foundry moved from Rhode Island and reassembled on the stage, which Jack Kroll aptly described as "part cathedral, part factory, part prison, that dwarfed and degraded the swarming denizens of the lower orders." For Pacific Overtures Prince's directorial philosophy had been "Less is more," but for Sweeney Todd he decided, "Less is boring. More is more” (London interview).
The massive scope of this setting went beyond even Sondheim's intentions. “Hal is very much influenced by [the experimental Soviet director] Meyerhold. Meyerhold would recognize one of his children, because [for Hal] it's all about scale and size and space and light – epic theater." Sondheim admits that his conception of the show differed from that of Prince: "Hal's metaphor is that the factory turns out Sweeney Todds. It turns out soulless, defeated, hopeless people. That's what the play's about to him; Sweeney Todd is a product of that age. I think it's not. Sweeney Todd is a man bent on personal revenge, the way we all are in one way or another, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the time he lived in, as far as I'm concerned” (interview).
For Prince the age is everything; he said that the show is not just about revenge but about "the incursion of the industrial age and its influence on souls, poetry, and people” (Gussow 15). Several times Sweeney is referred to in mechanistic terms: "Sweeney pondered and Sweeney planned/ Like a perfect machine ‘e planned." Sweeney's plight represents the condition of industrialized man: he has become a cog in the Great Machine. His soul is replaced with whirring belts and whining gears, and his feeble flesh is compelled to do its inhuman bidding.
Throughout the production a factory whistle, "the hard, pervasive sound of authority, of oppressive economic power," pierces the air in a shrill blast. Howard Kissel recognized its shrewd significance: “What distinguishes Sweeney Todd from simple Victorian dramaturgy is its deliberate theatricality, its desire not just to scare us, but to invest the horror with irony. 19th century realism assumed its audience was naive and innocent: post-Brechtian theater presumes its audience is theatrically knowing and socially guilty. When it is used to punctuate moments of horror, the whistle, blaring and abrasive, implies an awareness that it takes quite a lot, nowadays, to shock us.”
Although Sondheim says he disagreed with the director's interpretation, Prince based his mechanistic vision on social commentary in the lyrics themselves. Sweeney describes London as "a hole in the world like a great black pit":
At the top of the hole
Sit the privileged few,
Making mock of the vermin
In the lower zoo,
Turning beauty into filth and greed ...
McLaughlin remarks, "Obtaining and keeping power and profits are the primary goals of the society presented here. The necessary result of these goals is the objectification of people; people become tools to be used and discarded by those with money and power. The Beggar Woman haunts the play as a reminder of our tendency to dismiss and deny the humanity of others" (33). However, both Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett soon become guilty of the crimes of society they criticize. When he achieves his "Epiphany," Sweeney decides "They all deserve to die," not only the "privileged few" but their victims as well: "The lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death will be a relief." In their macabre parody of private enterprise, they "objectify people, first denying their humanity by using them for their own purposes and then literally turning them into objects: meat pies" (McLaughlin 34). Beckoned by the call of his dark god, Sweeney follows the path of his persecutors to their bloody end.
SOURCES
Blyton, Carey. "Sondheim's Sweeney Todd." Tempo 149 (1984): 19-26.
Bond, Christopher. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Samuel French, 1974.
Gussow, Mel. “Sweeney Todd: A Little Nightmare Music.” New York Times, February 1, 1979.
Haining, Peter. Sweeney Todd: the Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Barnes and Nobles, 1993.
Kerr, Walter. “Is Sweeney on Target?” New York Times, March 11, 1979.
Kissel, Howard. “Sweeney Todd.” Women’s Wear Daily, March 12, 1979.
Kroll, Jack. “The Blood Runs Cold.” Newsweek, March 12, 1979, 101-3.
London Weekend Television. “Sweeney Todd: Scenes from the Making of a Musical.” November 7, 1980.
McLaughlin, Robert L. "No One is Alone: Society and Love in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim." Journal of American Drama and Theater 1991: 27-41.
Pitt, George Dibdin. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. ed. Montagu Slater. Howe, 1928.
Sondheim, Stephen. Interview at his home, New York, June 3, 1982.
Sondheim, Stephen. “The Musical Theater.” Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Autumn 1978):6-29.
Wittke, Paul. “Review of Records: Sweeney Todd.” Musical Quarterly 66 (April 1980): 309-313.
Zadan, Craig. Sondheim and Co. MacMillan,1974.