On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden [Mordden, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199394814
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Operatic serial-killer melodrama, 1979.

Based on the eponymous play by Christopher Bond.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: Hugh Wheeler.

Original Leads: Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury. Director: Hal Prince.

Sweeney Todd made his professional debut in a novel published in serial form in 1846–47 and entitled The String of Pearls. Thomas Peckett Prest is the presumed (and uncredited) author. This first Todd is a basic nineteenth-century villain, a savage who murders men for their valuables. In a business arrangement with a neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, Todd butchers the corpses, and a hired man, locked in Mrs. Lovett’s basement, combines the meat and breading into pies. When this employee tires of his solitary confinement, he is killed, and the next unwary hire replaces him.

Meanwhile, the romantic lead, Mark Ingestrie, and his fiancée, Johanna Oakley, become involved in the tale; the rank odor of the butchered flesh pervades a local church, creating public alarm; and justice finally catches up with Todd, who is hanged, though not before poisoning Mrs. Lovett. She collapses just after her latest prisoner—Mark Ingestrie, who was thought murdered for most of the novel—explodes into Mrs. Lovett’s shop through a secret passageway, telling her customers, “I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites.” The anonymous author helpfully describes the scene: “How the throng of persons recoiled.” The titular string of pearls, though crucial evidence in the case against Todd, appears but here and there in the narrative.

Was there a Sweeney Todd? He is at least a venerable urban legend in London, and The String of Pearls had not completed its serial publication when George Dibdin Pitt offered the first of the tale’s many theatrical adaptations. In 1973, Sondheim, in London for its first Gypsy, with Angela Lansbury, happened to see Christopher Bond’s new version of the play. Almost all of Sondheim’s musicals originated with someone other than himself: Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins conceived West Side Story (though Robbins hogged the credit), David Merrick got the idea for Gypsy, George Furth launched the Company project, Hal Prince dreamed of an elegant European je ne sais quoi that ended as A Little Night Music, and so on. But Sweeney Todd the musical was Sondheim’s inspiration, and it was going to be his Porgy and Bess: an opera.

Sondheim doesn’t use that term for his works—he billed Sweeney Todd as “a musical thriller”—because opera is over there and Broadway is over here. Still, the espressivo level of the Sweeney Todd music is nothing like what Broadway normally hears. Further, it was Sondheim’s intention to set Bond’s text as a series of numbers separated by underscored dialogue. Music would thus haunt the show, as in the kind of symphonic commentary pioneered in Hollywood soundtrack accompaniment by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the 1930s. Sondheim’s model would, however, have been Korngold’s younger contemporary Bernard Herrmann, a specialist in thrillers from The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) through Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) to Taxi Driver (1976). We

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.