On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (22 page)

In Bond’s repurposing, the string of pearls is gone. But it was Bond’s fond game to utilize much of the original story, including Fogg (the manager of an insane asylum where inconvenient innocents are incarcerated, tortured, and murdered), the boy Tobias (Todd’s assistant, who realizes that something unsavory is afoot and is bundled off to Fogg’s house of despair, though he escapes), and even the notion of a plucky young woman disguising herself as a boy.

Bond’s masterstroke is the new, improved Todd, tragedy’s favorite kind of hero: a good man wronged. Transported to Australia on false charges, the victim of a vicious judge and his accommodating beadle (both Bond’s inventions), Todd effects a getaway and crosses half the globe to return to London and plan his revenge. He is already somewhat deranged, and, when the judge breaks free just as Todd is about to slash his throat open, the protagonist crashes into outright madness. Henceforth, Todd will slit any throat offered up to him, and Mrs. Lovett will cook the remains as food.

Bizarre as this may sound, Todd’s dispassionate slaughter of innocents—good men wronged, as he was—is reminiscent of the behavior of horses butchered in American meat-process “farms.” The animals aren’t simply killed. They are mistreated so horribly that they become desperate to hit back at their tormentors. But they can’t. The men who make their last hours of life unbearable are out of reach, so they turn on each other, kicking their hind legs in helpless rage at other horses, though they are victims, too.

Good, I got your attention.
Sweeney Todd
is not only Sondheim’s
Porgy and Bess
: it’s his
Threepenny Opera
. The entire show views society as incurably wicked, tilted in favor of those with power against those without.
The Threepenny Opera
is a comedy (at least as intended; modern productions often make it grim and doctrinaire) and
Sweeney Todd
is a tragedy, but both works believe that social evils cannot be exorcised, because those in power will always be the worst people in the population. The playwright Maxwell Anderson (whom we may recall as the author of
High Tor
, one of the subjects of Sondheim’s four student musicals) thought this the only thing worth knowing about the very idea of government. In
Gods of the Lightning
, a play based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case (co-written with Harold Hickerson), an Anderson mouthpiece-character named Suvorin sounds the libertarian note in the tones of Jeremiah:

SUVORIN
: I tell you there is no government—there are only brigands in power who fight for more power! Till you die! Till we all die! Till there is no earth!

Todd, less vehemently, says something comparable, not about the state but about mankind in general, when a young sailor, Anthony, mentions saving Todd, whom he spotted floating on a raft:

ANTHONY
:
It would have been a poor Christian indeed who’d … not given the alarm.

TODD
:
There’s many a Christian would have done just that and not lost a wink’s sleep for it, either.

This marks a difference between
Sweeney Todd
and more politically minded plays: their perspective is legalistic while
Sweeney Todd
’s is humanistic. That is, the political works see catastrophe in the very existence of power structures while Sondheim’s opera sees it in the nature of man. True, the first bit of scenery one glimpsed in the original New York
Todd
was a drop bearing a Victorian etching of a sort of beehive view of the class system from top to bottom: a power structure, to be sure. Still, it is Todd who frames the show’s observation of evil, and he sees it as inherent in humankind, stopping short of the religious concept of a species corrupted by sinful creation. The corruption lies not in a view of sex but in a view of ethics: man, the show believes, has none.

Yet there are decent folk among the show’s principals—Anthony (who, as Christopher Bond’s equivalent of Mark Ingestrie, is the musical’s Boy who Gets Girl); Johanna, the Girl, now directly connected to Todd as his daughter; Tobias; and, perhaps, the Beggar Woman, a harmless wreck who was, before the brutalization that drove her mad, Todd’s wife, Lucy.

All the same, it is the malefactors who give the show its flavor; it oozes with evil. These are, first of all, Judge Turpin, who convicted the innocent Todd to get control of his wife and is now prepping Johanna to become Mrs. Turpin; Beadle Bamford, in league with the Judge; and Todd’s rival barber, Pirelli, an Irishman posing as an Italian to make his pitch for hair tonic intriguingly exotic. Despite a smallish role, Pirelli kicks the plot into second gear when he tries to blackmail Todd on penalty of exposure as an escaped convict. So Pirelli is Todd’s first murder victim. But what to do with the corpse?

And that brings us to
Sweeney Todd
 ’s only amusing character, Mrs. Lovett, vastly expanded from the personality-less shopkeeper of the novel. What to do with the corpse? Well, “You know me,” she says. “Sometimes ideas just pop into my head …”

And thus is born a strange union. On one hand, they become lovers, which we know from her allusion, in “By the Sea,” to her “rumpled bedding” (an image used also in “Quiet,” in the original version of
Candide
). On the other hand, he kills, she cooks, and man eats man: “God, That’s Good!” is the chorus that opens Act Two. Ever since the 1920s, it was all but de rigueur for musicals to launch their second act with a perky number, usually a chorus. The first act might start with a book scene and only then reach the First Number, but after the intermission the audience needed a bit of pepping up.

The practice gave us
Carousel
 ’s “This Was a Real Nice Clambake,”
My Fair Lady
’s “You Did It,” and
Rent
’s “Seasons of Love,” their effect greatly varying. “Clambake” is an atmosphere number, also a time-stater, as its lyrics make it clear that only a few hours have passed since Act One ended. “You Did It” is a plot number, recounting offstage events but also firing up the Boy Loses Girl as Higgins takes all the credit for the transformation of Eliza, who stands fuming and ignored and ready to rebel. “Seasons of Love” is an out-of-story carol in which the cast addresses the audience with a précis of
Rent
’s gospel of Love Thy Neighbor. Still, all three numbers reinvoke the spirit of musical comedy after the intermission’s fifteen minutes of banter, texting, smoking, and drinking.

Sweeney Todd
 ’s “God, That’s Good!,” however, pursues the “musical thriller” aura by doubling down on the work’s horror. This is an Eat Thy Neighbor number—and a plot number as well, for threaded into the soprano-alto-tenor-bass chorus are separate lines for Mrs. Lovett and Tobias, conducting their business, and a scene apart for Todd and Mrs. Lovett concerning the arrival of a special chair to send his victims down a chute leading to the basement. (This derives directly from a less advanced set-up in the 1847 novel.)

Todd worries and Mrs. Lovett soothes him till the chair arrives and is tested—all while the pie-shop customers continue to rave over the heavenly taste of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pastries. Compared with
Carousel
 ’s clambake,
My Fair Lady
’s Embassy Ball recap, and
Rent
’s humanist anthem, this is one unique second-act opening, as Mrs. Lovett, her inventory exhausted, relaxes with a spot of ale, Todd gets ready to—oh look, here’s his first customer—and the chorus tops off the number in their four-part harmony, the sopranos hitting seven high B flats in a row.

That scene provides a kind of blueprint for the music given to Todd and Mrs. Lovett, in a classic driver-and-facilitator scenario. Todd is the driver, for this is a Revenger’s Tragedy: his story from top to toe. Mrs. Lovett is the facilitator, because she provides his infrastructure—the venue, the front for his murder spree, the elimination of the evidence, and moral support. So his music is that of an embittered victim-aggressor: couched in a low growl, intense, enraged. He philosophizes, he threatens, he gloats, a singular personage for the male lead in a musical, though not out of place in the opera world. By contrast, Mrs. Lovett’s music is that of a cutup, promoted from the chorus of merry villagers because she shows some theatrical spark. She jests, she arranges, she passes pungent remarks. And she loves. She probably fell for Todd the first moment she saw him, husband and father though he was.

So they both have implausible dreams: he, the escaped convict, wants revenge on powerful enemies, and she wants to be a part of his crimes and commit her own. His dream is grandiose, hers domestic, no more—in a certain way of looking at it—than sensible housekeeping.

Thus, he is opera and she is musical comedy, a helter-skelter match. However, his music contains some comedy (especially in the duet that closes Act One, “A Little Priest”) and hers contains some serious moments (as in her account of what happened to his family, “Poor Thing”). So the two may be said to blend at the edges. Still, the entire show really is a compound of discrepancies, a reflection of the lack of harmony in an industrialized society run by monsters. The sometimes screechy high notes we hear (from the Beadle in particular, but from others as well), or the jagged irruptions into the action by the narrating ensemble, or even the use of the Dies Irae
^*
(first heard on “Swing your razor wide, Sweeney,” then subtly varied throughout the score, for instance in Todd’s salute to his long-lost razor, “You there, my friend,” with the note relationships inverted).
Sweeney Todd
is a work unified by the extraordinary power of its driver, the man himself, and by the bond that Mrs. Lovett builds with him, despite his barely acknowledging her existence except when she is actively participating in his revenge plot. Everyone else in the piece offers forms of interference in his agenda, even the Beggar Woman, who is of course the real Mrs. Todd—or, rather, Mrs. Benjamin Barker, the name under which Todd was Judge Turpin’s prey.

When
Sweeney Todd
opened, on March 1, 1979, at the vast Uris Theatre (today the Gershwin), the show revealed a shift in Sondheim-Prince practice, with a wholly new production staff. First, Boris Aronson had retired after
Pacific Overtures
and a
Nutcracker
for the American Ballet Theatre, both in 1976. (Aronson died in 1980.) Eugene Lee designed the set, essentially a backdrop of a London wharf behind what looked like the interior of a factory (and was: Lee constructed it from parts of a Rhode Island iron foundry). There was a walkway above the stage and a revolving module representing Mrs. Lovett’s shop and flat and, on top, Todd’s barber shop. Lee’s wife, Franne, designed the costumes, Larry Fuller handled “dance and movement,” and Ken Billington lit the action. All had worked for Prince before, but never on a show with a new score by Sondheim. Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick was a holdover from all the Sondheims from
Company
on, but this was a musical consideration, Sondheim’s call rather than Prince’s. And
Sweeney Todd
really did feel “different” from Sondheim-Prince thus far—much roomier, obviously (because of the Uris’ gaping stage) but also somewhat in the grand manner, as befits a nineteenth-century melodrama. Even
Pacific Overtures
, on a bigger theme, was not physically as big as
Sweeney Todd
.

At 558 performances, the expensive production didn’t pay off in its first New York run, though it has long since become profitable, in a “same old story” paradigm. Noël Coward had one, after his huge successes in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1950, it was: four months of good houses, then a mad sag at the box office as his lock audience was exhausted and, soon after, the closing notice. Sondheim’s same old story, as I’ve said, runs thus: the original staging lasts somewhat over a year and loses money, but the show keeps getting done more or less everywhere and eventually becomes a classic.
Sweeney Todd
is even more than that: an initiation piece. When I was a tad, kids getting into the musical played the cast albums (or even the soundtracks) of, say,
Oklahoma!
and
The Pajama Game
. A generation later, they played
Mame
and
Cabaret
. Today, they play
Sweeney Todd
. It’s the Little Golden Record of the millennium.

^*
To chase metal is to ornament it, with a design created by artful indentations or even the use of precious stones.

^*
A thirteenth-century plainsong melody set to words meaning “Day of Wrath” and used in the Catholic requiem mass.

Merrily We Roll Along

Supremely ironic musical comedy on the bitch goddess Success, 1981.

Based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: George Furth.

Original Leads: Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, Lonny Price, Jason Alexander, Terry Finn. Director: Hal Prince.