Sweeney Todd Words on Plays (2007)

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
PRESENTS
Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
music and lyrics by stephen sondheim
book by hugh wheeler
directed and designed by john doyle
american conservatory theater
august 30–september 30, 2007
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
michael paller
resident dramaturg
margot melcon
publications & literary associate
ariel franklin-hudson
publications & literary intern
Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco
Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, which
believes that a great nation deserves great
art, and the donors of The Next Generation
Campaign.
© 2007 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
table of contents
1.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Sweeney Todd
4.
Sweeney Incarnations
by Elizabeth Brodersen
12. A Brief Biography of Stephen Sondheim
15.
A Timeline of American Musical Theater
21. An Interview with Sweeney Todd Director John Doyle
Excerpts from a Downstage Center Radio Broadcast
30. The Legend of Sweeney Todd: A Literary History
37. The Company of Barbers
by Margot Melcon
41. Larger Than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd
by Stephen Sondheim
47. Questions to Consider
49. For Further Information . . .
One of the "Sensation Series" of penny magazines published by Felix McGlennon for sale at theaters staging the Sweeney
Todd melodrama
characters, cast, and synopsis of
SWEENEY TODD
The original production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened at
the Uris Theatre on Broadway March 1, 1979. The revival production, directed by John
Doyle, opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York November 3, 2005.
characters and cast
jonas fogg
John Arbo
tobias
Edmund Bagnell
judge turpin
Keith Buterbaugh
beggar woman
Diana DiMarzio
the beadle
sweeney todd
Benjamin Eakeley
David Hess
mrs. lovett
Judy Kaye
anthony
Benjamin Magnuson
johanna
Lauren Molina
pirelli
Katrina Yaukey
the setting
London.
synopsis
A
ct i. A madhouse. Tobias, in a gag and straitjacket, sits on a chair in a simple room.
A white-coated doctor approaches and frees Tobias from his restraints; Tobias introduces the tale of Sweeney Todd as Todd rises from a coffin.
The London docks. Todd returns to London after an absence of 15 years, in the company
of a young sailor named Anthony Hope. Anthony, who saved Todd’s life in a shipwreck,
is excited to return to his favorite city; Todd, on the other hand, is extremely cynical
about the horrors of both London and humanity. A Beggar Woman approaches Todd and
propositions him. Todd shoos her away uneasily after she seems to recognize him, and
tells Anthony the story of a foolish barber and his beautiful wife who were persecuted by
a “pious vulture of the law.” When Anthony asks what happened to the lady, Todd admits
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that he does not know. Todd declares that he has business of his own and takes his leave
of Anthony, indicating that he may be found in Fleet Street.
Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, Fleet Street. Mrs. Lovett—baker of “the worst pies in London”—is
thrilled to have a customer. When Todd inquires about the vacant room above her shop,
she tells him that it is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Benjamin Barker. Barker was a
barber, and a corrupt Judge and Beadle lusted after his wife. The Judge condemned Barker
on a trumped-up criminal charge and transported him to do hard labor in Australia. Once
Barker was dispatched, the Judge lured Barker’s wife to a costume ball where he raped her.
Caught up in the story, Todd demands, “Would no one have mercy on her?” Mrs. Lovett,
her suspicions satisfied by his reaction, remarks, “So it is you—Benjamin Barker.” Todd
does not deny her discovery of his true identity, but he does insist that she call him by his
new name and asks after his wife and daughter. Mrs. Lovett tells him that his wife, Lucy,
poisoned herself, and that his daughter, Johanna, was adopted by Judge Turpin. Todd vows
to get his revenge on the Judge. Mrs. Lovett reveals that she has preserved his barber’s
razors and returns them to him so that he can take up his former occupation.
Judge Turpin’s house. Confined in Judge Turpin’s house, Johanna muses on her own similarity to caged birds. Anthony, passing by Johanna’s window and spying her, instantly falls
in love with her. The Beggar Woman appears, tells Anthony the identity of his beloved,
and then crudely propositions him. He shoos her away, but as soon as she departs the Judge
catches Anthony and Johanna and forbids Anthony ever to come near Johanna again.
Anthony vows to free Johanna from her terrible “father.”
A marketplace. Tobias, apprentice to a barber by the name of Signor Adolpho Pirelli,
hawks “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” to an excited audience. Todd and Mrs. Lovett proclaim the
supposed miracle elixir to be a sham, and Todd challenges the offended Pirelli to a shaving
contest. The Beadle judges the contest, which Todd easily wins. When the Beadle remarks
that Todd seems familiar, Todd distracts him with the congenial offer of a free shave at his
new barbershop in Fleet Street—it will be, Todd assures the Beadle, “the closest shave he
will ever know.”
Judge Turpin’s house. The Judge begs God to deliver him from his lustful thoughts of
Johanna, but his prayers seem to make little difference. After his desire reaches its climax,
he informs Johanna that he plans to marry her as soon as possible. She is shocked and
horrified.
Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. Not for the first time, Mrs. Lovett shoos the Beggar Woman away
from her door. Todd, established in his new quarters above Mrs. Lovett’s shop, is anxious
for the Beadle to arrive for his shave. Mrs. Lovett urges patience, but Todd is obsessed;
Anthony arrives, fresh with the news of his secret engagement to Johanna. Anthony—with
no idea, of course, that Johanna is Todd’s daughter—asks to hide Johanna at Todd’s shop
after he steals her away from the Judge. Todd and Mrs. Lovett are happy to agree. Anthony
departs, and Pirelli and Tobias arrive. Mrs. Lovett takes Tobias downstairs for a pie and
Pirelli, who has recognized Benjamin Barker by his razors, blackmails Todd, demanding
the return of the five pounds he lost in the contest and half of Todd’s future profits in
exchange for secrecy. Todd cuts Pirelli’s throat.
Judge Turpin’s courtroom. Judge Turpin declares a death sentence and then adjourns his
court.
A wine bar. The Judge tells the Beadle about his plans to marry Johanna and about
Johanna’s “strange” reluctance to acquiesce. The Beadle suggests that the Judge could benefit from a trip to the barber’s, as “ladies are weak” and sensitive to appearance. Meanwhile,
at the Judge’s house, Johanna tells Anthony about her horrible dilemma, and the two lovers
plan to run away together.
Todd’s barbershop. Mrs. Lovett admonishes Todd for killing Pirelli, until Todd explains
that Pirelli attempted to blackmail him. The Beadle and the Judge arrive. Todd is overjoyed, but stalls, savoring his revenge as he prepares to “shave” the Judge. Just as he is
about to cut the Judge’s throat, however, Anthony bursts in to tell Todd about his planned
elopement. The Judge is furious and storms out, never suspecting that he was about to die.
Enraged by the interruption, Todd vows to continue killing, to “practice on less honorable
throats” until he has the Judge under his razor again. Mrs. Lovett expresses a concern
about what to do with the bodies. Todd suggests secret burial, but Mrs. Lovett has a better,
and far more practical idea: turn the corpses into meat pies.
A
ct ii. Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. Mrs. Lovett has become prosperous, thanks to the
popularity of her new pie recipe. Tobias, now her apprentice, hawks the pies just as
he hawked Pirelli’s elixir. As Mrs. Lovett and Tobias handle the customers, Todd waits
impatiently for the arrival of his new barber’s chair, specially rigged to deposit his murder
victims in the cellar. The chair arrives. The Beggar Woman becomes suspicious of the “evil
smoke” emerging from the pie shop, but no one listens to her warnings.
Fogg’s asylum. Meanwhile, Anthony wanders all over the city seeking Johanna, who
has disappeared. He finally hears her voice coming from Fogg’s Private Asylum for the
Mentally Deranged. Anthony demands Johanna’s release without effect, but the Beadle
sends him away.
Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. Mrs. Lovett tries to romance Todd, suggesting that they settle
down in a house for two at the seaside. Todd feigns interest, but is mostly preoccupied by
his obsessive need for revenge against the Judge. Anthony arrives with news of Johanna,
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4
and they plot her release: Anthony will enter the asylum posing as a wigmaker who seeks
to purchase hair of Johanna’s very specific shade of yellow. Once he has liberated Johanna
from the madhouse, Anthony will bring her back to the shop. After Anthony leaves, Todd
writes a letter to the Judge telling him about the plan—more or less—and advising the
Judge to come to the barbershop to reclaim Johanna.
Tobias, meanwhile, innocently promises to protect Mrs. Lovett from the “evil deeds”
going on around her. Mrs. Lovett refuses to understand his meaning, but when he recognizes Pirelli’s money purse and becomes convinced that Todd has killed Pirelli, Mrs. Lovett
locks Tobias in the bakehouse.
The Beadle arrives to pursue a complaint about the stink from the bakehouse chimney. Mrs. Lovett stalls, keeping the Beadle out of the bakehouse until Todd arrives. Todd
lures the Beadle upstairs for some complimentary barbering and cuts his throat. With the
Beadle disposed of, Mrs. Lovett and Todd catch each other up on Tobias’s suspicions and
the Judge’s imminent arrival.
Fogg’s asylum. Anthony successfully convinces Fogg of his credentials as a wigmaker
and picks out Johanna’s hair as the perfect color. Johanna recognizes Anthony just as Fogg
is about to cut her hair, and Anthony threatens to shoot him. Before he can, however,
Johanna takes the scissors and kills Fogg herself.
Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop; Todd’s barbershop. Todd and Mrs. Lovett search for Tobias, who
has disappeared into the cellars under the bakehouse. Anthony and Johanna arrive at the
barbershop; Johanna, disguised as a sailor, hides in the shop while Anthony sets out to
secure transportation. The Beggar Woman, searching for the missing Beadle, is discovered
and killed by Todd. The Judge arrives; just as the Judge finally recognizes him as Benjamin
Barker, Todd slits his throat. Todd discovers the disguised Johanna and is about to kill her,
too, when he is distracted by Mrs. Lovett’s screaming.
Johanna escapes and Todd goes into the bakehouse, where he suddenly recognizes the
body of the Beggar Woman as his wife, Lucy. Furious at her for lying about his wife’s
continued existence, he kills Mrs. Lovett. Tobias suddenly appears, completely mad, and
slits Todd’s throat.
Back in the madhouse, Pirelli ties Tobias back into his straitjacket.
musical numbers in SWEENEY TODD
act i
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” .................................... Tobias, Sweeney Todd, Company
“No Place Like London” ..................................Anthony, Sweeney Todd, Beggar Woman
“The Barber and His Wife” ....................................................................... Sweeney Todd
“The Worst Pies in London”.......................................................................... Mrs. Lovett
“Poor Thing” .................................................................................................. Mrs. Lovett
“My Friends” ......................................................................... Sweeney Todd, Mrs. Lovett
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” ........................................................................... Johanna
“Ah, Miss”................................................................... Anthony, Johanna, Beggar Woman
“Johanna” ............................................................................................................. Anthony
“Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir”......................................................................... Tobias, Company
“The Contest” ..........................................................................................................Pirelli
“Johanna” .......................................................................................................Judge Turpin
“Wait”............................................................................................................. Mrs. Lovett
“Kiss Me” ............................................................................................. Johanna, Anthony
“Ladies in Their Sensitivities” ......................................................................... The Beadle
“Quartet” ....................................................Johanna, Anthony, The Beadle, Judge Turpin
“Pretty Women”....................................................................Sweeney Todd, Judge Turpin
“Epiphany” ................................................................................................. Sweeney Todd
“A Little Priest” .............................................................................................. Mrs. Lovett
act ii
“God, That’s Good!”................................ Tobias, Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd, Company
“Johanna” ...........................................Anthony, Sweeney Todd, Beggar Woman, Johanna
“By the Sea”.................................................................................................... Mrs. Lovett
“Not While I’m Around” ...................................................................Tobias, Mrs. Lovett
“Parlor Songs” ............................................................................The Beadle, Mrs. Lovett
“City on Fire!” ........................................................ Tobias, Johanna, Anthony, Company
“Final Sequence” ......................Anthony, Beggar Woman, Sweeney Todd, Judge Turpin,
Mrs. Lovett, Johanna, Tobias
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” .................................... Tobias, Sweeney Todd, Company
5
SWEENEY
incarnations
by elizabeth brodersen
i wanted to make a melodrama but with a 20th-century sensibility. . . . the true terror of melodrama comes from its revelations
about the frightening power of what is inside human beings. and
if you write about kings and queens and are a great poet, you end
up with a first-class tragedy; if you write about ordinary people
and are an ordinary writer, you end up with a melodrama. that’s
exactly what this show is.
Stephen Sondheim on Sweeney Todd
6
sensational origins
When London’s murderous barber first made his appearance in an 1846 “penny dreadful” (a popular tabloid of Victorian England), Sweeney Todd began a century-and-a-half
career of titillating audiences with tales of his bloody deeds. Todd’s purported exploits were
initially serialized in the story “The String of Pearls: A Romance,” attributed to Thomas
Peckett Prest; soon thereafter playwright George Dibdin Pitt created a theatrical adaptation for the stage. Advertised as “founded on fact,” and set in the reign of George ii, the
play debuted March 1, 1847, at the Hoxton Theatre, a notorious London “bloodbath”—a
theater specializing in sensational melodramas with generous amounts of sex and violence.
The enormous success of Dibdin Pitt’s play inspired dozens of imitations, which continued
to be produced in and around London throughout the 19th and early 20th century.
Cut to 1973, when Christopher Bond’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
opened in London at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Among the show’s fans was composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim—already recognized for his daring, sophisticated musical
explorations of the complexities of modern life—who appreciated the tale’s richly melodramatic potential. Sondheim recruited writer Hugh Wheeler to collaborate with him on
creating a musical treatment of Bond’s play. Bond, like Sondheim and Wheeler after him,
had found in Sweeney’s gruesome tragedy a means of dramatizing the most potent aspects
of human experience. “We care about the characters in Sweeney because they care about
each other; and on a good night we plunge headlong to triumph and disaster with them,”
wrote Bond later in the introduction to the published text of Sondheim and Wheeler’s
musical. “The people in Sweeney are fuelled by basic and simple human emotions: greed,
lust, vengeance, and a desire to love and be loved in return. They inhabit a corrupt, unjust,
and dangerous world, but this should tend to intensify their humanity rather than destroy
it.”
Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened at
Broadway’s Uris Theatre in 1979 in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring
Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. The recipient of eight Tony Awards, Sweeney Todd was
instantly recognized as a masterpiece and established Sondheim, in the words of New
Yorker critic John Lahr, as “a kind of god of the musical theater.”
Sweeney went on to be produced dozens of times, most famously in Susan H.
Schulman’s 1989 Broadway revival and Declan Donellan’s 1993 production for the Royal
National Theatre.
. . . something completely different
And then along came John Doyle. A British theater director who has in his distinguished
career run four theaters as artistic director and staged more than 200 productions, in 1992
Doyle found himself at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre with the desire to direct Leonard
Bernstein’s Candide—and almost no budget. No stranger to the financial strictures
imposed on nonprofit regional theaters—especially in Thatcher’s Britain—he realized he
had just enough money to pay either a cast or an orchestra, but not both. So he found a
way to make 12 actor-musicians fill both job descriptions. In the process, he discovered a
radical new way of making musical theater.
Several years later, while at the Watermill Theatre in the Berkshire countryside, he
once again found himself working with minimal resources on a tiny stage. Asked to direct
Sweeney Todd as a way of bringing much-needed cash to the theater, he decided to strip
Sondheim’s legendary musical down to its essence and look at it completely afresh.
Working with collaborator Sarah Travis, Doyle set about the enormous challenge of
interpreting Sondheim’s complex book and score—originally performed on Broadway by
a 27-piece orchestra—for ten actors who would have to remain onstage during the entire
performance, playing their own roles while accompanying their castmates on a variety of
instruments. Travis simplified Sondheim’s scene change music, and Doyle reconceived the
stage setting, placing the action in a mental institution where the story is played out in a
stark environment inhabited by inmates/performers wearing bloody lab coats and wielding simple, evocative props, as well as their orchestral instruments. Gone was Prince’s epic
mechanistic rendition of newly industrialized London, including Sweeney’s infamous
7
trapdoor barber chair. The result is a relentlessly focused chamber piece that lays bare the
dark humanism of the original story and the extreme weirdness of the characters.
Doyle took a hands-on approach to creating his own Sweeney world. “I went and found
the original operating theater, Guys Hospital in London, where they have got buckets at
the four corners and a black table in the middle of the room, white enamel buckets where
they collected the blood when the amputations were being done,” he described the process
in a radio interview for American Theatre Wing in 2006. “The barbers of the East End
were the people who went and did the amputations before anesthetic. That’s where the
imagery comes from.
“For me, everything must earn its place on the stage,” he has said. “Everything has to
be carefully selected and in perfect order and hopefully uncluttered. . . . My own taste . . .
is about simplicity. I don’t like ‘stuff ’ when I tell a story; never have done. I mustn’t sound
pompous, but, to me, if any form of theater is going to survive, we have to ask the audience
to do some imaginative work.”
The Watermill production generated such positive response that it soon moved to
London’s West End, where critical reaction to the concentrated potency of Doyle and
Travis’s interpretation was equally favorable. Lyn Gardner of the Guardian described
Sweeney as “a dark dissection of the heart” in which “the lyrical and the horrific are perfectly matched,” while the Times’s Michael Billington observed, “You may not get the
barber’s chair, but you get a strong sense of a man in the grip of slaughterous madness.”
8
back to broadway
Tipped off by friends that he should check out this unconventional new interpretation of
his work, Sondheim saw the London production and very much liked what he saw. So
much so that a Broadway production was soon in the works, with Sondheim an enthusiastic participant.
“When I first wrote this thing all I wanted to do was write a horror story,” Sondheim
told the New York Times. “Of all the productions I’ve seen, this is the one that comes closest
to Grand Guignol, closest to what I originally wanted to do. I characterize all the major
productions I’ve seen in terms of a single adjective. Hal’s was epic. Declan Donnellan’s production was exactly the reverse, it was very intimate. John’s, for me, is the most intense.
“There are nuances lost because of the compression of the narrative required by this
method of performing the piece,” he added. “But what you gain is a swiftness and intensity
that draws the audience into this macabre world, and that is created by a unified ensemble
working in one tone. Here it’s as if the audience is drawn into a tunnel.”
Sondheim made few changes to the production, asking that minimal cuts be restored
and writing new scene change music to cover Doyle’s staging. Overall, Sondheim was quite
pleased with Travis’s transformation of his score. “I think what she’s done is absolutely brilliant. The variety of sounds she’s gotten out of the instruments and also the practical way
in which they allow John to work with the performers onstage is extraordinary. But what
got me most about the orchestrations is what they did for the play’s atmosphere. These
are wonderfully weird textures. The sound of an accordion playing with a violin—it’s very
creepy.”
a new way of working
The task of assembling this kind of production is something akin to solving a complex
puzzle. The actors must not only learn their lines and songs, develop their roles, and figure
out where and how to interact with each other most effectively in each scene in which they
appear as individual characters, they must also learn their orchestral parts and choreograph
the continuous, seamless moment-to-moment transformation from dramatic performer
to musical accompanist—often on multiple instruments—and back again. And all this
without the guidance of a conductor, who traditionally directs the entire process from an
orchestra pit during performance.
Doyle describes his rehearsal process, in which, despite the technical and structural
challenges, the development of character in pursuit of the story remains paramount: “I start
with ten people in the room and work on a very personal level: How can we as a group
connect with Sweeney? It’s not like a therapy session, but I would be very honest with them
and, I hope, nondictatorial. A lot of the British tradition is rooted in ‘Let’s make this piece
of theater together,’ so my job is to illuminate the story in the hope that the connection for
you as an actor carries you to a connection between you and the audience. It’s about the
breaking down of the fourth wall and the absolute recognition that you the performer and
you the audience member are in the same place at the same time sharing the same story.”
Of course, one of the biggest challenges is finding actors who can also play musical
instruments well enough to do justice to one of musical theater’s most complex scores.
The task has become somewhat easier over the years, as Doyle’s approach has become
increasingly popular. (There is now a school in Britain, Rose Bruford College, that offers
a three-year training program for actor-musicians.)
The process of finding an American cast in New York to recreate the British production was less challenging than Doyle and Travis had feared. “We saw a lot of good people
before we selected, so I’m assuming that there must be actors all over New York practicing their cello, or something, because certainly I see more and more people now,” he has
9
said. “I think there is also something to be said for the fact that you do have a high school
marching band tradition [in the United States], which we don’t have in the uk. So it is
probable that more people—of a certain age, anyway—at least went through the business
of learning an instrument at school.”
More difficult is adjusting the show to account for the varying talents of new cast members in succeeding productions. “Because different instruments are now played by different
characters, the staging has had to change quite a bit,” Doyle has said. “In a way that was
good because it forced us to go back to square one and start again. People may wonder why
a character performs a particular action. It’s because to lose the musical voicing provided
by another actor who might perform it would be detrimental to the orchestration. It’s a
jigsaw puzzle.”
The process began again in New York in July, as Doyle and Travis prepared a new
cast for the a.c.t. production, which will continue on a national tour after it leaves San
Francisco. While many of the original Broadway cast members are continuing on with the
show, others had to be replaced, including those playing the key roles of Sweeney and Mrs.
Lovett. According to recent rehearsal reports, the technical process of bringing the new
performers into the staging and orchestration has been surprisingly easy, leaving time to
concentrate on the deeper work of developing the characters.
10
the power of the imagination
When Doyle’s incarnation of Sweeney Todd opened on Broadway in November 2005, musical theater purists may have been shocked by the austere simplicity of its Expressionist
production values and lean orchestrations. Yet many were impressed by the eerie effect
of stripping away the trappings of the conventional Broadway musical, which forces the
audience to engage with the actors in a surprisingly intimate—and, in the case of Sweeney,
somewhat terrifying—way.
“I think it works to our advantage that you have to listen hard to this production, not
just let it wash over you,” said Sondheim. “I think it’s great that at previews people are
leaning forward in their seats hanging on every word. I stand in the back of the theater
and am delighted by the silence.
“When an audience’s imagination is engaged they enjoy it even more. It’s what makes
theater different from the movies. The theater is a poetical medium and the movies are a
reportorial medium. That’s the fun of the theater.”
Although his approach was born out of economic necessity, it is the power of the storytelling that remains front and center for Doyle, as well. For Doyle—who has achieved
success applying his approach to stripped-down versions of numerous classic works of
music theater, including Pal Joey, Fiddler on the Roof, Mack and Mabel, Cabaret, Gilbert
& Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, Amadeus, and, most recently, his Tony Award–winning version of Sondheim’s Company—it is all about the story and the audience’s connection to
it, a conviction rooted in the ceilidh traditions of his Scottish homeland, which celebrate
participation of the entire community in the telling, singing, dancing, and playing of song
and fable.
Despite the impact his work has had on the American musical theater world, Doyle
denies any intent to revolutionize Broadway with his minimalist approach. “It kind of asks
the audience to take a journey that goes beyond their preconception of what real life is,”
he has said. “I suppose you could say it takes you to a kind of abstraction of reality. That’s
what I’m interested in, more than anything, really. What it does in terms of the relationship
between the actor and the audience is what interests me.
“All I’ve done is look at these works differently to make people listen and have to use
their imaginations . . . but that’s my job, isn’t it?”
This article draws from articles that originally appeared in the New York Times, London Daily Telegraph and Times, and Glasgow
Herald.
11
a brief biography of stephen sondheim
F
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or nearly half a century, Stephen Sondheim has extended the expressive possibilities
of the American musical theater with music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity
and sophistication. Born in New York
City, Sondheim was given piano lessons from an early age and showed a
distinct aptitude for music, puzzles,
and mathematics. When his parents
divorced, his mother took him to
live on a farm in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, where a neighbor and
mentor was the Broadway playwright, lyricist, and producer Oscar
Hammerstein ii.
Sondheim studied piano seriously
Stephen Sondheim (photo by Jerry Jackson)
while Hammerstein tutored him in
writing for the theater, an occupation he continued through his student years at Williams
College. Upon graduation, Sondheim was awarded a two-year scholarship to study composition, though he first found work writing for television.
Although Sondheim aspired to write both words and music, his first Broadway assignments called on him to write either one or the other. He made his Broadway debut as a
composer with incidental music to N. Richard Nash’s play The Girls of Summer (1956). He
was hired to write lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music in West Side Story in 1957, followed
by Jule Styne’s Gypsy in 1959.
The credit “Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim” finally appeared on Broadway for
the first time in 1962 with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Sondheim
followed Forum with Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a show that closed almost immediately
but has since become a cult favorite. He returned to the role of lyricist-for-hire one more
time to collaborate with Hammerstein’s old partner Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a
Waltz? in 1965.
Sondheim made a historic breakthrough as both composer and lyricist with Company
(1970), a caustic look at love and marriage in contemporary New York City, directed by
Harold Prince, who would serve as Sondheim’s close collaborator for more than a decade.
The show established Sondheim as the most inventive and daring composer working in
the musical theater. His second collaboration with Prince as director, Follies (1971), paid
masterfully ironic tribute to the song styles of Broadway’s past. While Sondheim’s admirers
stood in awe of his accomplishments, his detractors claimed that his work was too bitter to
win wide popularity, and his music too sophisticated for popular success. His next production, A Little Night Music (1973), put these doubts to rest. The show’s elegant, waltz-based
score and warm humor charmed audiences everywhere.
Sondheim received Tony Awards for the music and/or lyrics of all three of these
musicals. Other projects included adapting the classical Greek comedy The Frogs for Yale
University in 1974 and cowriting the screenplay for the murder mystery The Last of Sheila
(1973). From 1973 to 1981, Sondheim served as president of the Dramatists Guild, the professional association of playwrights, theatrical composers, and lyricists.
Never content to continue along comfortable or familiar lines, Sondheim and book
writer John Weidman explored new territory with Pacific Overtures (1976), an imaginative
account of relations between Japan and the United States. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber
of Fleet Street (1979) adapted an early Victorian melodrama with a combination of Grand
Guignol gore, biting satire, and Sondheim’s most complex score yet, bringing Sondheim
another Tony Award (the show earned a total of eight Tonys overall; John Doyle’s innovative reinterpretation garnered two more Tonys in 2006). Merrily We Roll Along (1981),
adapted from the bittersweet Kaufman and Hart drama of the 1930s, would be the last of
the successful collaborations between Sondheim and Prince for more than 20 years.
Sondheim then embarked on a partnership with playwright and director James Lapine.
The first fruit of their collaboration was Sunday in the Park with George (1984), a work
inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Grande
Jatte. Sunday was a solid success and brought Sondheim and Lapine the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama, a rare instance of the Pulitzer committee honoring a musical play. Into the Woods
(1987), another collaboration with Lapine, which explored the meaning of familiar childhood fairy tales, has been produced successfully all over the world.
Between Broadway assignments, Sondheim has written scores for the films Stavisky
(1974) and Reds (1981) and contributed songs to the films The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
(1976) and Dick Tracy (1990). “Sooner or Later,” written for Dick Tracy, won him an
Academy Award for Best Song. Side by Side by Sondheim (1976), Marry Me a Little (1981),
You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow (1983), and Putting It Together (1992) are anthologies of
Sondheim’s work as a composer and lyricist.
One of Sondheim’s most disturbing productions has been Assassins (1990)—also written with Weidman—an examination of the motives and delusions of the men and women
who have attempted to assassinate American presidents. Passion (1994), another collabo-
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ration with Lapine, took a dark, intimate story of unrequited love and set it to music of
heartrending poignancy. Sondheim reunited with Weidman as book writer and Prince as
director of his latest original production, Bounce, recounting the exploits of the legendary
Mizner brothers, which opened in Chicago and Washington in 2003.
In 1989, Sondheim was named Oxford University’s first Visiting Professor of
Contemporary Theatre. In his own country, he has been honored with the National Medal
of Arts.
Over the last 50 years, Sondheim has set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and
artistic integrity in the musical theater. His music, steeped in the history of the American
stage, is also deeply informed by the classical tradition, and his words, unequalled in their
wit and virtuosity, have recorded generations of insight into life, death, and love.
Excerpted and adapted from Stephen Sondheim: Master of the Musical, Academy of Achievement, http://www.achievement.org/
autodoc/page/son0bio-1.
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a timeline of american musical theater
1866 The Black Crook opens at Niblo’s Garden Theater in New York at the corner of
Broadway and Prince Street. An amalgam of plot elements from Goethe’s Faust, Weber’s
opera Der Freischütz, and other sources, and featuring a revealingly costumed female chorus, the show is an instant hit, playing an unheard-of 474 performances, despite its opening-night running time of five and a half hours. It is considered to be the first musical.
The musical theater of the next 40 years consists primarily of burlesques, melodramas,
and international imports like Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas and a variety of Viennese
operettas. Ned Harrigan and his partner, Tony Hart, become famous for writing shows
that are simple musical comedies about the everyday lives of the American working class.
Audiences look for spectacle and extravaganza, scantily clad women, humor, and catchy
tunes; they are not especially interested in plot.
1904 New York City builds the Interborough Rapid Transit (irt) line and opens the
Times Square subway stop at 42nd and Broadway. George M. Cohan, successor to the
tradition of Harrigan and Hart, makes his solo Broadway debut with “Give My Regards
to Broadway.”
1907 Florenz Ziegfeld produces his first Follies; Irving Berlin publishes his first song.
1910 In Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1910, Bert Williams becomes the first black performer to
appear on Broadway opposite white performers—although he has to appear in blackface—and Fanny Brice makes her debut.
1916 Cole Porter’s first Broadway score, See America First, fails, and Porter moves to France.
At Columbia University, Oscar Hammerstein ii and Lorenz Hart co-write the University
Variety Show and are met backstage by the teen-aged Richard Rodgers.
1919 Rodgers and Hart begin working together. After a major strike in August, Actors’
Equity, a union for actors founded in 1913, is recognized.
1924 Lady, Be Good! is George and Ira Gershwin’s first musical comedy and features the
dancing team of Fred and Adele Astair.
1927 Show Boat, a groundbreaking collaboration among Jerome Kern, Hammerstein, and
Ziegfeld, opens at the Ziegfeld Theatre. It has a complex narrative, racial themes, and
integrated music that moves the plot along or reveals character. It is often considered the
first modern musical. In Hollywood, The Jazz Singer, starring Broadway legend Al Jolson,
becomes the first motion picture to include singing and spoken dialogue.
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1928 Porter returns from Paris with the hit Fifty Million Frenchmen.
1929 The stock market crashes; Broadway productions dwindle from 264 in 1927–28 to 187
in 1930–31.
1931 Of Thee I Sing, written by the Gershwins, George S. Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind,
is the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize.
1935 The wpa creates the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39) to bring theater and entertainment to the masses on the government’s nickel. Rodgers and Hart return to Broadway
with Jumbo. The Gershwins’ black folk-opera, Porgy and Bess, opens to mixed reviews.
1936 Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, revolutionary for its use of dance, stars Ray Bolger
and features choreography by George Balanchine.
1937 George Gershwin dies. The government cuts Federal Theatre Project funding by 30
percent and in the process censors Marc Blitzstein’s controversial prolabor musical The
Cradle Will Rock. In response, Orson Welles and John Houseman take the play down the
street to the Mercury Theatre.
1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first Broadway collaboration, Oklahoma!, opens to rave
reviews and runs for 2,212 performances. Lorenz Hart dies.
1944 On the Town marks the Broadway debut of composer Leonard Bernstein and includes
the choreography of Jerome Robbins. The first original cast album, of Oklahoma!, tops the
charts.
1947 The first Tony Awards are bestowed; Kurt Weill wins for best composer for Street
Scene.
1948 Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate debuts. Rodgers and Hammerstein are the first guests on Ed
Sullivan’s television show, The Talk of the Town.
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1950 Frank Loesser’s second Broadway score, Guys and Dolls, is a huge hit.
1954 Nineteen-year-old Julie Andrews makes her Broadway debut in The Boyfriend.
Harold Prince produces his first musical, The Pajama Game, directed by George Abbott
and Jerome Robbins and choreographed by Bob Fosse.
1956 My Fair Lady, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s adaptation of George Bernard
Shaw’s Pygmalion, is Broadway’s biggest hit with 2,717 performances. The show makes Julie
Andrews’s career, turns Rex Harrison into an international star, and grosses more than
$800 million over the next 20 years.
1957 The Music Man and West Side Story both open. West Side Story is directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by newcomer
Stephen Sondheim, but Meredith Willson’s The Music Man defeats it for the Tony.
1959 The Sound of Music and Fiorello! win the first and only tied Tony Award for Best
Musical. Gypsy, with a score by Jule Styne and Sondheim, gives Ethel Merman the dramatic role of her career.
1960 Oscar Hammerstein ii dies and Broadway dims its lights in tribute. Bye Bye Birdie is
the first musical to incorporate rock and roll.
1962 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is the first Broadway musical for
which Sondheim is both composer and lyricist.
1963 Prince has his first success as a director with She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by
Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Angela Lansbury makes her musical comedy debut in
Anyone Can Whistle, a flop by Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents. Cole Porter dies
in California.
1964 Fiddler on the Roof is a huge hit. Sammy Davis Jr. stars as a black boxer trapped in
a white world in a musical update of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. Barbra Streisand is a
sensation as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.
1966 Cabaret, the first musical to tackle the rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, makes the
careers of director Prince, songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, and actor Joel Grey.
1967 Hair tackles the counterculture of the 1960s with a rock music score. It opens off
Broadway at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. The Tony Awards are broadcast on national
television for the first time.
1970 Company, the first collaboration between director Prince and composer/lyricist
Sondheim, establishes Prince and Sondheim as the most challenging musical theater artists of their generation. It will win six Tony Awards the following year.
1971 The revival of the 1925 No, No, Nanette is a surprise smash hit, inspiring legions
of revivals over the next 40 years. Sondheim and Prince produce Follies. Andrew Lloyd
Webber makes his first appearance on Broadway and Jesus Christ Superstar becomes a
controversial sensation.
1972 Fosse turns Stephen Schwartz’s Pippin into a major hit. Grease opens off Broadway
and eventually moves to Broadway and Hollywood. Fiddler on the Roof reaches its 3,242nd
performance and becomes the longest-running musical of its time.
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1973 “Send in the Clowns,” from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, is the biggest commercial song of his career. The tkts booth opens at Duffy Square on 47th and Broadway,
selling discounted tickets on the day of a performance.
1975 A Chorus Line opens at the Public, but the demand is so great that it moves to
Broadway. Fosse’s Chicago also opens but is overshadowed by A Chorus Line.
1976 Sondheim and Prince turn their attention to Japan in Pacific Overtures, an all-AsianAmerican production borrowing from many Japanese theatrical traditions.
1977 Revivals begin to appear more frequently. Annie is an immediate sensation. Ticket
prices hit $17.50.
1979 Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd opens on Broadway. It is directed by Prince, stars Angela
Lansbury and Len Cariou, and wins eight Tony Awards. Lloyd Webber’s Evita comes to
New York from London with Patti LuPone in the title role. Grease surpasses Fiddler on the
Roof as Broadway’s longest-running musical. Richard Rodgers dies.
1981 Gilbert and Sullivan are reinvented with a hit version of The Pirates of Penzance. The
Sondheim-Prince partnership dissolves after the failure of Merrily We Roll Along.
1982 Producer Cameron Mackintosh brings Lloyd Webber’s Cats to Broadway from the
West End of London, inaugurating a series of unprecedented successes.
1983 La Cage aux Folles is the first musical in history to feature a mature gay couple as its
romantic leads; it wins the Tony for Best Musical. A Chorus Line becomes the longestrunning show in Broadway history.
1984 Sondheim teams up with a new collaborator, James Lapine, on Sunday in the Park
with George, which wins the Pulitzer. The average cost of a new musical production reaches
$3 million.
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1985 Ticket prices reach an average of $33. The number of Broadway shows is at an alltime low of 31.
1987 Les Misérables, the epic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, arrives on Broadway via
Cameron Mackintosh. Patti LuPone achieves huge success in Lincoln Center’s revival of
Anything Goes.
1988 The Phantom of the Opera, also a Mackintosh spectacle, opens with Michael Crawford
as the Phantom; it is directed by Prince.
1989 Jerome Robbins returns to Broadway after an absence of 25 years for Jerome Robbins’
Broadway, a compendium of his greatest dances. Irving Berlin dies at 101.
1990 The 46th Street Theatre is renamed in honor of Richard Rodgers. A Chorus Line
finally closes. Actors’ Equity refuses to let Jonathan Pryce, the West End star of Miss
Saigon, reprise his role on Broadway because he is Caucasian and would be taking a role
away from an Asian-American actor. Producer Mackintosh threatens not to bring the
show to Broadway at all, and Equity eventually gives in.
1991 Sondheim and John Weidman’s controversial Assassins opens off Broadway at
Playwrights Horizons. Joseph Papp dies.
1992 The Gershwins’ Girl Crazy makes it back to Broadway in a “revisal,” Crazy for You. At
1,622 performances, it runs four times longer than the Gershwins’ longest-running original
show.
1993 Julie Andrews returns to New York in an off-Broadway Sondheim revue, Putting
It Together. Rock music finds a match on Broadway in the stage adaptation of The Who’s
Tommy.
1994 The Walt Disney Co. makes its first foray onto Broadway: a stage adaptation of the
animated film Beauty and the Beast, which will become the longest-running American
musical since A Chorus Line. The top ticket price on Broadway is $75, for a revival of Show
Boat.
1995 Legendary director George Abbott dies at 107. George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover
team up for Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, a politically charged revue of AfricanAmerican dancing, which opens at the Public Theater and moves to Broadway. The New
Victory Theatre, a former burlesque house, is the first theater renovated on 42nd Street in
50 years.
1996 Rent, with book, music, and lyrics by Jonathan Larson, opens downtown at the New
York Theatre Workshop. Larson dies on the night of the final dress rehearsal and does not
see his rock musical make it on Broadway.
1997 The Lion King opens at the renovated New Amsterdam Theatre and is a phenomenal
hit for Disney; The Lion King’s director designer, Julie Taymor, is the first woman to win
the Tony for Best Director.
1999 Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, Contact is a trio of dances performed
to prerecorded versions of classic songs. Although it has no dialogue, no live orchestra, and
no original score, it wins the Tony for Best Musical.
2000 Elton John and Tim Rice write an original musical for Disney, Aida, suggested by
the Verdi opera.
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2001 Mel Brooks’s The Producers earns 12 Tony Awards; Broadway continues its trend
towards revivals and stage adaptations of movies. The 9⁄11 attacks close the theater district
for two days.
2003 Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked, a $14 million epic about life in Oz, engages audiences.
2004 Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick make Broadway history (and six figures a
week) by returning to their starring roles in The Producers for a sold-out four-month
engagement. Avenue Q, a transfer from the New York International Fringe Festival and
satirical look at the values (and puppets) of Sesame Street, is a surprise winner of the Tony
Award for Best Musical.
2006 John Doyle’s radical new interpretation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd wins two Tony
Awards (Best Direction of a Musical and Best Orchestrations) and four Drama Desk
Awards.
Spring Awakening, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Steven Sater, is a rock
musical about adolescent sexuality, adapted from a controversial German play by Frank
Wedekind from 1891. It wins eight Tony Awards the next year.
2007 Doyle’s similarly unconventional revival of Sondheim’s Company wins the Tony for
Best Revival of a Musical and three Drama Desk Awards.
20
an interview with SWEENEY TODD director
john doyle
Excerpts from a Downstage Center Radio Broadcast
original air date: november 24, 2006
jvs: i’m john von soosten, program director of xm28 on broadway.
hs: and i’m howard sherman, executive director of the american
theatre wing.
jvs: today we welcome john doyle, who is a new name on broadway
within the last year, but certainly not a new name when it comes to
theater. john, you’ve been involved in theater in your native great
britain for a long, long time. you have done scores of shows in the uk
and elsewhere, but two shows on broadway: sweeney todd, for which
you won the tony last year as best director, and, currently running on
broadway, company, the revival. to use the word controversial is maybe
not completely accurate, but there was some degree of discussion, some
degree of angst before people saw sweeney todd, that this doyle
fellow from great britain has come over, has eliminated the orchestra,
has given instruments to the ten actors onstage, had them play instruments and sing and dance and all that, and you won a tony for it. and
you won a drama desk award, an outer critics’ circle award, so something must have worked right. this is a technique you’ve been using for
some time in great britain, isn’t it?
john doyle: It is indeed. It came out of financial necessity, really. I was artistic director
of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, which is quite a cutting-edge theater, a very political theater, where they’ve done a lot of new work, and I decided to do a piece of musical
theater there, the [Leonard] Bernstein Candide, and I frankly couldn’t afford the orchestra
and the cast at the same time. So we put them together, and it was a pretty successful
exercise. But in those days, the [performers] sat and played the music at a music stand,
and then they got up and acted. But it would be unfair to say that I was the first director in my country to think of such a thing. A guy called Bob Carlton did a show called
Return to the Forbidden Planet, and there was also Buddy in the West End, which was
very successful, the Buddy Holly story, both using actors who played instruments. I knew
some of those actors and some of those directors, and I thought, well there must be a way
21
that those same techniques could be taken into the
more classic musical theater form. So that’s where
the journey started, almost 15 years ago now. And
it’s gone on through theaters that I’ve run as artistic director, and then at the Watermill Theatre in
Newbury, where I was associate director, using and
developing the same stuff, to the point that Sweeney
Todd went into the West End to a tiny, small theater,
Stephen Sondheim came and saw it, and the rest is
fairly recent history.
jvs: well, to take a leonard bernstein
work like candide and eliminate the
orchestra, what happened then? did
people start to scream, “how can you do
this?!”
Well, of course, there’s audacity wrapped up in it all.
Director John Doyle
(© 2007, www.salvationarmy.org.uk)
I’m quite prepared to admit that. but I don’t set out
to be audacious with it, and don’t set out to be in
any way revolutionary with it, or anything like that. The choices have been pragmatic, in
terms of cost. What has happened is that some kind of—I find the term “art form” rather
pretentious, but some sort of art form has grown out of it. And it’s not, obviously, aiming
to eliminate the orchestral sound, it’s aiming to use the instrument in a more dramatic
form. That means that you have to carry those instruments around all night as performers.
It requires a very flexible kind of actor to be able to do that.
22
jvs: but now with both sweeney todd and company on broadway, i don’t
imagine the cost was the driving factor in this case, was it?
No. Although it was when I did it first of all at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, where
the stage is, like, 14 feet by 14 feet, and there’s no place for an orchestra. Then Steve
Sondheim saw it, enjoyed what he’d seen, and encouraged it to come here to Broadway.
Of course, they could have said, “Well, now you can put an orchestra in the pit,” but that
would have denied the very reason for doing it in the first place. Not to say that it wasn’t
pretty scary when they first suggested that it would come to Broadway, on two points:
One, I never thought it would happen, because it’s the sort of dream that you don’t believe
will come true. And, I thought, Oh my goodness, what are people going to make of this?
For years in Britain I have been quoted as saying, jokingly, that my aim was to take the
Broadway out of the Broadway musical, because I was working in environments and in
theaters where the show was in what you would consider to be not-for-profit houses, for
four- or six-week runs, and that was it. There was no intention of Sweeney Todd ever living
beyond the six-week run. I certainly didn’t think anybody of any import would see it—well,
any audience is important, but you know what I’m saying.
jvs: well, you didn’t expect sondheim to come see it.
That’s really what I meant, yes. And that was pretty scary, because of what I do in terms
of the contractual way in which these pieces of musical theater are protected throughout
the world. What I do breaks those laws, in a sense. It was never meant to be about, We
want to get rid of an orchestra. It grew out of not being able to afford to have one. Then
it came into, How can you use that theatrical style to extend the audience’s disbelief? I
mean, you don’t often sit with a drink in one hand and a double bass between your legs. It
doesn’t happen very much in real life. [Laughter] So it kind of asks the audience to take a
journey that goes beyond their preconception of what real life is. I suppose you could say
it takes you to an abstraction of reality. That’s what I’m interested in, more than anything,
really, and what it does in terms of the relationship between the actor and the audience is
what interests me.
hs: well, on a practical level, since you mention the actors, as a
director, since you are now not only looking for people who can act
and sing, but they have to play instruments, does this narrow the field,
let’s talk first working in england, of the performers who are available to you, in terms of doing this work? does it restrict your options?
Yes. It did, I think it’s fair to say. Inevitably, “restrict” is often looked upon as a negative. I
think it can be quite a positive thing, you know, the fact that you are looking for a particular
set of skills to storytell with. It would not really be any different if you were doing a dance
piece, that you were looking for a particular set of talents. Now, when I first did Candide
all that time ago, I could truly only find ten or twelve people who could even approach
being able to play that score. We did that famous overture with a reduction of 12. But since
I started developing the technique, there is now a theater school, Rose Bruford College,
which has a three-year training program to teach people how to do it. They’ve made me a
fellow of the school, so it’s now becoming a recognized, legitimate way of making theater
happen in Britain. Certainly now if I put out a casting call to do a musical in my own
country, I can get anywhere between 500 and 1,000 applications, most of whom may not
be appropriate for the roles, but they’re certainly appropriate within the skills base that’s
required.
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hs: and was there a different experience when you came over here, first
to cast sweeney, and then to cast company?
Well, I said to the producers when we came here to cast Sweeney, “Look, for goodness
sake, don’t announce that you’re doing this show until we know whether we can find a
cast,” because I didn’t know for a moment if the skills would not so much be around, but
whether actors could see themselves as doing that kind of work. But you can sense very
quickly whether somebody is musical enough on the instrument to be able to fulfill the
requirements. Actually, with Sweeney Todd, it wasn’t such a difficult journey to find them
all. We saw very good people, and I’m assuming there must be actors all over New York
practicing their cellos, because certainly I see more and more people now. I think there is
also something to be said for the fact that you do have a high school marching band tradition, which we don’t have in the uk. So it is probable that more people—of a certain age,
anyway—at least went through the business of learning an instrument at school.
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hs: clearly, there has to be some relationship between the
instrument that the character plays and their character itself. how
do you develop the idea of what the instrumentation might be for a
particular character, or is it you find people who are multifaceted?
It’s a little of everything. I mean, you do start off by saying to your orchestrator, “Okay,
what do we need?” It’s obvious that you’re going to need probably two piano players to get
you through the evening, to start off with. And maybe it’s quite nice if those two piano
players play husband and wife in the play, so that at some point they could both sit at
the same piano and play together, as they do in “Side by Side” in Company. You’d need a
double bass, usually, because you need the bass root to the orchestra, and if you haven’t got
the ability to have a double bass, then you have to have a cello, which can take the double
bass line. And if you can’t have that, you have an instrument like a tuba, which can take
the same bass notes. So you start to look around the possibilities of all of that. And then,
inevitably, you think, Okay, which character makes you think most like a violin? Which
character would you associate with the flute? But some of it is done on the rehearsal room
floor, where you think: Ah, okay, they’re playing those two instruments; that’s how that
couple happened to be. Let’s make a language with those two instruments out of the
orchestration. That’s certainly more the case in Company than was the case in Sweeney
Todd. In Sweeney, because they were all locked in the same, whatever that place was, lunatic
asylum or hospital or whatever—
hs: you tell us! you should know.
Well, I don’t know if I do know, really—but because they were all locked in and had to
make music for each other, the music is slightly less character driven than it is in Company.
The choices in Company have been more rooted around the specific characters.
jvs: well, particularly with sweeney, because that was your first broadway effort, but also with company, a lot of attention was paid in the
press to the fact that the actors were playing the instruments and
that there was no orchestra. let’s move beyond that, because in the
show itself you have to move beyond that. the audience in the first
five or ten minutes gets it or they don’t. what else did you look for in
terms of casting the actors, and in terms of the staging, other than
them playing the instruments?
You have to create a world, first of all, where nobody leaves the stage. That’s the first thing
you have to do, because, of course, they all need to be onstage all the time, because they
have to accompany each other. So I wanted a world, whatever that world would be in
either case, where they could all be trapped in the story. It’s a little bit like Into the Woods
in that sense: we’re all trapped in the same story. In the case of Sweeney, I wanted them to
be trapped in Tobias’s head. That is why he started the story tied up—the boy who’s driven
mad by the story, and almost looking at the story retrospectively, and then retied up to tell
it again tomorrow. It’s the perpetual angst or entrapment of that. In Company, I wanted
them all to be clearly the demons in Bobby’s head. So, I wanted people who were able first
of all to embrace the idea that they would be generous enough to take the front moment, if
you like, but also having the generosity to be able to sit in the corner in the dark and play
the orchestra bells or the triangle. Then, I wanted people who—now this is to do with my
own taste in what acting is—would approach the musical, not in the way that a musical
theater performer would normally approach a musical, but would explore it almost like a
play with songs, which I think is a slightly different context. It’s a more naturalistic way of
approaching dialogue, if you like.
jvs: did that necessitate many changes to the book and the staging and
the whole structure of the show?
In the case of Sweeney Todd, there were changes that Sondheim helped to make, particularly in the second act. There was almost nothing changed in the first act, other than a
couple of cuts, which were traditional cuts. In the second act, he actually wanted to rework
some of the material himself, and we did that reworking together to try to make a very
complicated story more clear in what was already a more complex theatrical conceit.
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hs: as you’ve been pursuing this particular style of exploring musical
theater, have you looked at shows that you don’t think lend themselves to this style, or indeed have you ever done a show that ultimately, once into it, you found didn’t work?
I think there are definitely shows that would not work for it. It would be rather foolhardy
to try West Side Story, because West Side Story is a show that is about people who communicate through dance, and I think that would be the wrong thing to try to do. You could
argue that there were great dance moments in Company, when Michael Bennett did the
original staging, but not all the way through the show. It’s not a show where the expression is a dance expression. In terms of shows that I think haven’t worked, I did Pal Joey
this way and I felt that didn’t work, but then I have a feeling that’s because the book of
the second act of that show is tricky to work, anyway. The shows that work best for me—I
think, Fiddler on the Roof, which I did with ten people—that worked because music was
indigenous to the language of the story and to the culture. So that type of piece works very
well. I’ve done two Gilbert and Sullivan adaptations, taking one into a jazz world and one
into a big band world, and they both really worked because of the musical rhythms of the
piece. They’re already stylized enough to work. Into the Woods definitely worked because
it’s already a slightly mad world that it’s happening in. There have been some [shows]
in which I’ve struggled more than others to make sure that the conceit—I use the word
conceit rather than concept, because I think that “concept” is something else—but I don’t
think there was ever one of the 20 shows probably I’ve done, that stands out as absolutely
not working. It is obvious that things like Cabaret are going to work very well because it’s
in a club, and people are playing instruments in a club, so that’s going to work better than
some that may be even more naturalistic in terms of the world that they live in.
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jvs: with the success that’s greeted you here in the u.s., and certainly
the introduction of sweeney and now company, are you concerned at
all that people are only going to look to you as this director who does
this style?
I read those things online that say that I’m a “one-trick pony.” I could care less. I am who
I am, and there is nothing I can do about that, and this is how I express myself. I come
from the highlands of Scotland, where I’m used to a ceilidh tradition. I’m used to people
sitting in the front room making music. I was brought up with a piano in the room. It’s
what I do. Why deny yourself? I’d already had success. I never stopped working. That to me
is success. To get a Tony Award is a treat. It’s the cherry on the sundae. But I was already
doing what I do, and now, just because it’s been maybe more successful on the commercial
platform than I ever thought it would be, I’m not going to stop doing it for that reason. I
will do stories that I want to tell and I will tell them in the appropriate way at the time.
What I won’t do is, I won’t use this technique only to make cheap theater. I will go into
under-resourced situations, which is where I love to create. I really enjoy regional theater
and I really enjoy the business of being told, “This is all you have.” Then I can use my
imagination. And I will continue to search for those opportunities—always, always, always.
If they then bring the opportunity to take that work onto Broadway or into the West End,
isn’t that great? Of course, that’s lovely for me, it’s lovely for the cast. It’s lovely for everything. Or, if I could find Broadway opportunities where I could say, “Look, don’t expect it
to have an enormous visual feast or don’t give me such a lot of money that I don’t know
what to do with it. Give me people to storytell with.” And maybe there is something in
that, in the human relationship between that and an audience that is precious, is special.
I think one of the reasons that Sweeney worked—forget the instruments, forget the glorious Patti [Lupone] and Michael [Cerveris] and their fantastic performances and Steve’s
incredible music—one of the reasons I think it worked was the connection between the
audience and the action itself, and the direct, honest approach of saying, “We know you’re
there, and you know we’re here.”
hs: what struck me most when i saw your production of sweeney in the
west end was that it was the first time i had seen sweeney todd in the
more than 20 years it’s been around that i wasn’t looking at some
version of hal prince’s production. and i wondered, had you seen that
production at any time and how you went about banishing those
ghosts.
I had seen that production in the West End, at Drury Lane. I had done my own watered
down production in a regional repertory theater with a cast of, I don’t know, 18, and a
band of 8 or 10. I’d done one years ago. And I was asked by Jill Fraser, who was the artistic
director of the Watermill, where I have originated quite a number of these pieces of work,
to do a piece of work for her at a time of year that I really didn’t want to go there. It was
January, it was cold, and I didn’t want to do the job. It’s a theater where you get paid almost
no money and you all have to stay in this accommodation together and it’s glorious and
terrible all at the same time and there is never any budget. I had been working a lot and I
needed the time off. The theater needed to make some money; they were going through
hard times. She sat me down and said, “John, I need you to come and do something.” I
said, “I don’t want to do anything.” And she said, “I want you to come and do Sweeney
Todd,” and I said, “Oh my goodness, it’s the last thing in the world I want to do, I’ve done
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it before.” She said, “Please think about it.” And I thought, Well, she needs it. That was
really important to me. The theater needed it, and I had loyalty to the audience, and I
thought, The way I can survive this is by designing it myself, as well—actually going away
and thinking about a total concept, a total re-look. I don’t usually do my own design work.
I knew that the budget was about 5 or 8 thousand pounds—about 10 to 15 thousand dollars. I knew it was a tiny amount of money. I went out myself and found the costumes in
clothing warehouses. I went out myself and found all the props for that back wall—which
I continued to do on Broadway. I repeated exactly the same journey on Broadway, because
I was insistent that it had to be a very hands-on experience from my viewpoint. I then
went and found the original operating theater, Guys Hospital in London, where they have
got buckets at the four corners and a black table in the middle of the room, white enamel
buckets where they collected the blood when the amputations were being done. And the
barbers of the East End were the people who went and did the amputations before anesthetic. That really interested me, and that’s where the imagery came from. I went into the
rehearsal room not knowing how I was going to solve the problems of the piece, other than
I had no money and I had very little to do it with.
You know, of all the wonderful, wonderful things that happened in the last two years
about Sweeney, there have been great gifts and marvelous opportunities. One of the very
special things was a letter that I received from Hal Prince, which said that this was probably the first time he’d ever seen it and it not be a copy of his production, and he was so
pleased about that. I thought that was the most generous action, and it made me feel free.
And that links to the whole thing about what we think revival is. Is revival a copy of an
original, or is it something that you do for the audience that you’re doing it for now, for
the artists who are making the story happen? I happen to think it should be the second,
in the same way that you would revive Shakespeare differently all the time, and you would
revive Ibsen differently all the time. I would want to put certainly Mr. Sondheim’s work in
the category of those other names. And I think the same with anybody, if you want to tell
a story anew, you have to tell it for the time that you live in. That doesn’t mean to say it
has to be dressed in the time that we live in. That doesn’t mean to say that it has to say to
us, Look! Get it, this is you. But to have a connection that gives it a relevance.
jvs: what song from sweeney do you think is most representative of your
style and of your work?
There are so many of them and they are all so great, but my “Desert Island” song would
be the “Johanna” in Act ii of Sweeney Todd. I think it represents it not only musically,
but visually, the much-talked-about white little baby’s coffin, the whole image of a man
grieving for his child while singing some of the most beautiful music ever written for the
American musical theater.
jvs: when you select something to do, what do you look for? putting
aside how you’re going to execute it, whether you’re going to have the
actors play the instruments or not, how you’re going stage it. putting
that aside, what do you really look for when you’re selecting what
to do?
I think I look for something that has the potential for a darker side. The potential for a
true expression of what humanity is. Something that gives me the opportunity to look at
all our madness and sadness and badness at the same time as being potentially very funny
or ironic or whatever it is, but that has inside it a depth or a connection with our humanity.
Something like, for example, Company. Why did it interest me? Because I could be that
man. I have been that man. I’m old enough to have been Bobby. Maybe will be Bobby
again. That’s the sort of story I like. Something that I think, Ah, okay, I can put something
of myself into this. If I can’t address myself in it, how can I ever help an artist, an actor,
address themselves in it? I feel it’s important that I tell stories that I don’t stand in the way
of. I’m not interested in my own ego becoming more important than the story. The story
is the important thing to me. Even if I don’t tell it well, I will try to tell it well. So it has
to be something that I feel strongly enough about to think that there is something there
that I want to say, rather than it become a glossy cover up.
Downstage Center is a presentation of the American Theatre Wing and XM Satellite Radio. © ATW & XM; used by permission.
Available online at www.americantheatrewing.org.
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the legend of sweeney todd
A Literary History
F
or almost two centuries, the enduring legend of maniacal barber Sweeney Todd has
inspired terror in the hearts and minds of the public, whether on the printed page or
the theatrical stage.
Sweeney Todd’s first known appearance in print was in 1846 in a “penny dreadful,”
or serialized horror story, called “The String of Pearls.” “The String of Pearls” is usually
attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest, an author who wrote, adapted, and plagiarized stories for publisher Edward Lloyd. Weekly installments of the barber’s homicidal exploits
become immensely popular; the story’s bloody killing spree, ghoulish villain, and macabre
manner of disposing of the evidence were perfect fodder for the Victorian imagination.
Ever since, speculation has raged about whether the Demon Barber was man or myth.
There are no clear answers. No public records substantiate the existence of a London
barber named Todd in the late 18th century or, for that matter, of a barbershop located on
Fleet Street. But there were certainly enough bits and pieces of real-life horror floating
around at the time, reported in “The Old Bailey” section of the London Times, as well as
other daily newspapers. The public had an enormous appetite for all things gruesome and
devoured local news accounts of wicked deeds and nefarious crimes. And because news
commonly traveled by word of mouth (much of the population was still illiterate), stories
of shocking criminal exploits passed from person to person (with probable embellishment
along the way) and were asserted to be “true fact.”
To add to the confusion, many penny dreadfuls were fictionalized accounts of real
crimes. And second-rate writers like Prest were known to hunt regularly through newspapers for story ideas.
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true criminals
There are several well-documented contemporaneous crimes that share similar themes
with the Sweeney Todd legend and could possibly have served as inspiration for The String
of Pearls. The Annual Register, a periodical that recorded historical, political, and literary
events in Britain, for 1784 reported on a barbarous barber near Fleet Street who, in a jealous
rage, cut his victim’s throat from ear to ear before disappearing into the night:
OPPOSITE From the Charles Fox "penny dreadful" of 1878
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December 1784. A most remarkable murder was perpetrated in the following
manner, by a journeyman barber that lives 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 liquor, mentioned his having seen a fine girl home
to Hamilton-street, from whom he had certain favours the night before, at
the same time describing her person; the barber, concluding it to be his wife,
in the height of his frenzy cut the gentleman’s throat from ear to ear, and
absconded.
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The Newgate Calendar, a five-volume biographical record of notorious criminals housed
at Newgate Prison published in the late 1700s, recounted the gruesome story of the
renowned mass-murderer Sawney Bean, the “Man-Eater of Scotland.” Bean was executed
along with his entire family for robbing passers-by, then murdering the victims and eating
the corpses.
Joseph Fouche, who served as minister of police in Paris from 1799 to 1815, graphically
documented in his Archives of the Police a series of murders committed in 1800 by a Parisian
barber. Fouche wrote that the barber was in league with a neighboring pastry cook, who
made pies out of the victims and sold them for human consumption. While there is some
speculation about the authenticity of this account, the story was republished in 1824 under
the headline “A Terrific Story of the Rue de Le Harpe, Paris” in The Tell Tale, a London
magazine. Perhaps Thomas Prest, scouring publications for ideas, read about the Paris case
and stored it away for later use.
Or perhaps Prest was inspired by a libel suit in 1818 against scandalmonger James
Catnatch. Catnatch regularly published rumors, innuendo, false stories, and outrageous
headlines to drum up business for his one-page newssheets. One banner declaring “A
Number of Human Bodies Found in the Shop of a Pork Butcher” nearly drove Drury
Lane butcher Thomas Pizzey out of business. Pizzey filed a libel suit against Catnatch in
retaliation, which focused a great deal of attention on the publisher’s corrupt tricks. Court
documents described Catnatch as an “evil, wicked” person with a “malicious mind and disposition.” The butcher’s good name was ultimately restored when the Clerkenwell Court
found the publisher guilty and sentenced him to six months in the House of Correction
for his crime.
In Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1993), British journalist and historian Peter Haining argues that Sweeney Todd was a real person. Haining’s
evidence is generally dismissed by most critics and scholars (although it does serve as the
basis for courttv’s Crime Library website entry on Sweeney Todd, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/todd/index_1.html). While Haining’s belief in Todd’s
historical existence cannot be substantiated, it again illustrates that the Demon Barber
continues to haunt critical minds and imaginations after nearly two hundred years.
onto the stage
It did not take long for George Dibdin Pitt, a hack playwright who commonly purloined
other people’s ideas, to dramatize The String of Pearls for the stage. He subtitled his melodrama “The Fiend of Fleet Street” and advertised the production as “Founded on Fact.”
The play debuted in 1847 at the Britannia in Hoxton, a London “bloodbath,” or theater
specializing in sensational melodramas.
Dibdin Pitt’s enormously successful melodrama was followed by numerous other
Victorian adaptations of the Sweeney Todd story. These productions invariably played at
theaters catering to the poor and working class. Every version was bloody and sensational.
In one version, the hero was a dog whose master met his end via Sweeney’s blade. The
faithful dog haunted the barber’s doorstep and eventually led authorities to the fiend.
There were two silent film adaptations of the story, in 1926 and 1928. In 1936, a much
more famous film version was directed by George King and starred the far-too-aptly
named Tod Slaughter, who made a career out of portraying Sweeney Todd on stages
around the world.
The Royal Ballet Company turned Sweeney Todd into ballet in 1959; the production
had music by Malcolm Arnold and choreography by John Cranko.
christopher bond’s sympathetic sweeney
In 1973 playwright Christopher Bond adapted Dibdin Pitt’s Sweeney Todd. In his foreword
to the Samuel French edition of the play, Bond wrote:
All the versions of the play have contained the chair and the pies, and so does
mine—I would hardly have the temerity to call my play Sweeney Todd if it
didn’t. However, I’ve cast my net wider than anyone else in “borrowing” from
other authors. . . . I have “borrowed” from, amongst others, The Count of Monte
Christo, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy, the family greengrocer,
and Shakespeare, as well as Dibdin Pitt’s original melodrama. My object has
been to add to the chair and the pies an exciting story, characters that are large
but real, and situations that, given a mad world not unlike our own, are believable.
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Until Bond’s retelling of the story, Sweeney Todd had been a cartoonish monster, slashing his way through customers with the exclamation, “I’ll polish him off!” In early versions
of the story, Sweeney is downright wicked; he commits his first murder in order to steal
an exotic “string of pearls” from sailor-hero Mark Ingestrie. Christopher Bond, however,
gave Sweeney and his story a dose of humanity; his version is different enough from the
original tale to make a comparison of the two worthwhile.
Dibdin Pitt’s original play, following standard melodramatic conventions, contains
shocks, thrills, and several false endings. Constantly lurking about and cackling, the demon
barber eludes capture 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.
In Bond’s version, the barber’s evil plot makes 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 still human after all.
Mrs. Lovett is also a more complicated character in Bond’s retelling. She is sneaky,
intelligent, and the architect of the devious pie-making plot. 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. Bond also gives her an open romantic interest in
the barber, which better explains her willingness to cook up his victims. In all the earlier
versions, Mrs. Lovett is a secondary character, an unfortunate neighbor and reluctant
accomplice; in Dibdin Pitt’s melodrama, she is one of Sweeney’s first victims and dies in
the second act of a four-act production.
In Dibdin Pitt’s melodrama, there is a bit of class warfare brewing beneath the surface, and Tobias Ragg becomes one of many heroes at the end of the play. He begins as
Sweeney’s apprentice, and Sweeney treats him terribly. When Tobias begins to notice
the extraordinary number of unclaimed hats and umbrellas piling up in the barbershop,
Sweeney locks him up in Jonas Fogg’s lunatic asylum. Tobias eventually escapes and, with
the help of another apprentice named Jarvis, brings Sweeney to justice. The play ends with
the boys wrestling Sweeney into his trick barber chair. Sweeney meets his final demise with
a cacophonous shriek as his own chair flings him into the dungeon.
In Bond’s play, Tobias is apprentice to Adolfo Pirelli, a rival barber original to Bond.
After Sweeney kills Pirelli, Mrs. Lovett employs Tobias in the pie shop. When Mrs.
Lovett begins to fear he may suspect the truth, she asks Sweeney to get rid of him. Instead,
Sweeney convinces her to enlist his help with the making of the pies. Once he is locked in
the cellar, Tobias’s curious nose leads him to his staggering, gruesome discovery.
The romantic hero and heroine of The String of Pearls originally had no connection
to Sweeney Todd other than circumstance. In The String of Pearls, Mark Ingestrie—later
renamed Anthony Hope by Bond—is a young sailor who returns to London with a beautiful pearl necklace for his beloved, Johanna Oakley. Sweeney kills—or attempts to kill—
Ingestrie, and Johanna sets out to find her missing lover. In most versions, Johanna hides
her identity, even disguising herself as a boy apprentice to Sweeney. As in all melodramas,
the romantic hero is indestructible. In Dibdin Pitt’s play, Ingestrie has three seemingly
catastrophic confrontations with the razor-wielding barber (one in each act) and reappears
alive and well in the final scene of the play. Right is restored, Sweeney Todd is disposed
of, and the lovers are reunited.
Bond’s Anthony Hope is still a sailor, but he is no longer Sweeney’s adversary. He is
a sympathetic friend to the barber, helping him to re-establish his life and trade. Even
though he catches glimpses of Sweeney’s darker side, he is never fully aware of the barber’s
deadly rampage. Likewise, Sweeney does not view Anthony as a threat. Anthony’s main
concern is outmaneuvering the crooked Beadle and the conniving Judge Turpin so that he
can be with Johanna, who, in Bond’s version, is Sweeney’s long-lost daughter. Imprisoned
in the house of the disgusting Judge Turpin, she refuses the old man’s overtures of marriage
and pursues, with characteristic single-mindedness, her true love, Anthony Hope. Though
she is no damsel-in-distress, it is important to note that Bond unravels the plot in such a
way that Johanna is never fully aware of Sweeney’s heinous crimes.
The Beadle, Judge Turpin, and the Beggar Woman are all original to Bond’s version,
although they have certain antecedents in Dibdin Pitt’s melodrama and The String of
Pearls. Dr. Aminadab Lupin, a lecherous preacher who drinks, flirts with Mrs. Lovett, and
lusts after Johanna in Dibdin Pitt’s play, is the precursor of Judge Turpin. He is much less
sinister than the judge, however, and serves as the comic element in the midst of Dibdin
Pitt’s horror-tragedy. While there are beggar women and secondary female characters—
including Johanna’s mother, Mrs. Oakley—in the earlier versions, the prophetic Beggar
Woman who turns out to be Sweeney’s long-lost wife is unique to Bond’s tale.
Bond’s Sweeney Todd—as Bond himself was clearly aware—is very different from the
Sweeney Todd of Prest and Dibdin Pitt and their successors. The play retains the pies and
trick chair, the murderous barber and his conniving baker accomplice, the young lovers,
and the apprentice who discovers and destroys Sweeney, but Bond’s version does not tell
the same story. The plot is simpler and clearer than that of most Victorian melodramas and
penny dreadfuls, and the characters are more sympathetic. Sweeney and his actions are still
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demonic, but Bond gives Sweeney a reason for his madness. The play is still a horror story,
but it strives for a realism to which the Victorian originals never aspired.
from melodrama to musical
In 1973 Stephen Sondheim saw a production of Bond’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber
of Fleet Street at Joan Littlewood’s Stratford East Theatre. In Stephen Sondheim: A Life,
biographer Meryl Secrest describes Sondheim’s reaction to the play:
Sondheim said, “It turned out to be not Grand Guignol but this charming
melodrama. . . . Next day I had lunch with John Dexter and asked him whether
Sweeney Todd would 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.”
Sondheim was enchanted by the transformation Bond had made of what was,
basically, a dreadful Victorian relic. “This new version is . . . still a melodrama,
but also a legend, elegantly written, part in blank verse which I didn’t even recognize till I read the script. . . . 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.”
The Sweeney Todd crafted by Sondheim and the author of the book for the musical,
British writer Hugh Wheeler, is extremely faithful to Bond’s version of the story. The show
opened in 1979 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 was instantly recognized as a landmark in musical theater, inspiring productions in
both theater and opera companies around the world.
Excerpted and adapted from PBS’s website for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, http://www.pbs.org/kqed/
demonbarber/penny/index.html.
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the company of barbers
by margot melcon
T
hroughout history, the practice of having one’s hair removed—through cutting,
trimming, or shaving—has been a ceremonial event, and the relationship between
customer and barber a sacred one. Because hair removal happens with some steady regularity—a shave every day for men, a hair cut every six weeks, a wash and set once a week for
the ladies, cut and color at the salon once a month—the customer develops a connection
with the person who grooms them, built on trust, consistency, and faith. The position of
barber demands respect and reverence as you, the customer, are trusting that barber not
only to make you look the way you desire, but also to safely and gently bring sharp objects
close to your face, head, and neck.
The word barber comes from the Latin, barba, meaning beard. The practice of barbering is an ancient one, as barbers were synonymous with medicine men, able to drive bad
spirits away from the body by cutting the hair. Relics of the barber trade, including basins
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Sunday Morning, engraved by George Hunt, after a color litho by Theodore Lane (1800–28) (© Guildhall Library, City of London
/ The Bridgeman Art Library)
38
and razors, have been found at sites dating back to the Bronze Age, about 3500 b.c.e. The
trade is also mentioned in the Bible: “And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take
thee a barber’s razor and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard.” (Ezekiel
5:1, King James Version). In ancient Greek and Roman societies, visiting the barber for a
trim and style of the hair, beard, and fingernails was as important as the daily visit to the
public baths, and barbers’ shops became social centers for news and gossip. These barbers
also were employed as surgeons and dentists, practicing tooth extraction, bloodletting,
leeching, surgery of wounds, and administration of enemas.
In England through the Middle Ages, the clergy were required to undergo bloodletting
at regular intervals and were thought to have become skilled in performing the task, along
with minor surgery. When a papal decree in 1215 forbade priests and monks to participate
in the shedding of blood, these duties—thought to be beneath medical doctors of the era,
whose knowledge was almost entirely theoretical—were passed on to barbers, who had
already proven their skill with sharp instruments.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Black Death wiped out nearly all scholarly physicians, and barbers became increasingly relied upon for medical procedures. Some traveled
from town to town, setting up tents and offering their services. At a time when facilities
for washing and bathing were limited for most people, and skin complaints, rashes, and
boils were common, the barber could at least create the illusion of cure as the customer
left cleaner and refreshed, believing himself to be in better health. In 1540, the Company
of Barbers and the Fellowship of Surgeons were united by a royal decree, creating the
Company of Barber-Surgeons, a unified trade guild that remained in place for the next two
hundred years. The barber-surgeons were sometimes called “doctors of the short robe” to
distinguish them from university-trained physicians and surgeons, whose superiority was
likely to be only in their knowledge of Latin and their title of “doctor of the long robe.”
Many patients preferred the trust and congenial atmosphere of the barbershop to the antiseptic and expensive visit to a surgeon.
The Company of Barber-Surgeons had a monopoly on barbering within the city of
London and a surrounding seven-mile radius by 1629. As barbering was a trade, like any
other, entry into the guild began with an apprenticeship at the age of 14 for seven years,
according to the custom of the city, though few apprentices ever completed their education. The tools of the trade included traditional pivotal scissors, bowls for lathering soap,
and a steel straight razor, typically sharpened on a leather strap or pumice stone. For the
OPPOSITE A barbershop and barber tools, from the Encyclopédie des Sciences et Metiers, by Denis Diderot, published c.1770
(© Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)
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other duties a barber executed, including tooth extraction, bloodletting, and leeching, the
instruments used were a gruesome collection of pliers, bleeding cups, and tourniquets.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century medical practices were primitive, to say the least,
and were based on a rudimentary understanding of the human body. The theories of the
ancient Greeks and Romans—Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen—were still being taught
and used as the guiding principles for treatment. Galen’s theory of the four vital humors
(blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) was the basis for nearly all understanding of
medicine. If a person was ill, it was assumed that one of their humors was out of balance,
and the patient was then treated accordingly.
Bleeding was the most common course of treatment. The theory went that if you
removed the patient’s blood, the body would be relieved of that overproduced humor and
could then function more freely with what was left. Doctors either applied leeches to suck
the blood away, or they would engage in bloodletting—slicing small cuts in the flesh to
allow blood to drain off into bowls.
To encourage blood flow during a bloodletting procedure, the barber-surgeon commonly gave his patient a pole to hold and squeeze. He also wound a strip of cloth around
the arm as a tourniquet, and had another to later apply as a bandage when the procedure
was finished. When it was not being used, the pole with the bandage wound around it
was hung at the barber-surgeon’s door as a sign. Later, for convenience, instead of using
the actual pole, an imitation was painted and hung outside of the shop, the red and white
stripes symbolizing the blood and bandages used by the barber-surgeon. This was the
origin of the modern spiraling barber pole.
For centuries, barbers were left undisturbed in the practice of surgery and dentistry, but
as knowledge progressed and surgeries became more complicated, it became evident that
they were attempting too much. Patients began to complain that barber-surgeons were
making them sick instead of well.
Many barber-surgeons resorted to spectacle and showmanship to cover up their ignorance of medicine and anatomy. These abuses were brought to the attention of the mayor
and council of London by the surgeons, who began to forge to the front of the guild. As
the practice of medicine advanced, barbers became less and less capable of performing the
triple functions of barber-surgeon-dentist. The surgeons were separated from the barbers
by an act of parliament, which dissolved the alliance between the barbers and surgeons in
June 1745.
larger than life
Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd
by stephen sondheim
the nature of melodrama
I have the feeling that melodrama has its own meaning for different people. Some think
of melodrama as villains twirling mustaches and lashing young virgins to railroad tracks,
in other words, something that is to be spoofed or is funny. I think that’s always implicit
when someone says, “Oh, stop being so melodramatic about it.”
There are others—and I am one of them—who think of melodrama simply as being
high theater, theater in whatever form you care to think of theater—what I am talking
about is the kind of theater that takes place in an auditorium with a proscenium arch.
Thus, for me, melodrama is theater that is larger than life—in emotion, in subject, and in
complication of plot. I do not believe melodrama has to be bloody, although many people
associate melodrama with blood. Actually there is a great deal of high drama that I consider to be melodrama. In spite of its simplicity of plot, Oedipus Rex, in my opinion, is very
close to melodrama. It is a mystery with a stunning surprise solution (surprising for the
hero, that is), and then it has a violent and bloody dramatic conclusion: Oedipus blinds
himself. As far as I’m concerned, Sophocles’ play is merely a serious Grand Guignol.
melodrama and grand guignol
I saw some Grand Guignol in Paris in the 1960s, although by then it was no longer what it
once had been. I went because I wanted to see what Grand Guignol was like. There were
three extremely bloody one-act plays. Each had a plot at least as simple as Oedipus, only
far less interesting, and each had one climactic bloody, gory effect, exactly like Oedipus.
Actually, to be precise, that was true of two of the plays; the third had about 75 gory
effects—it was nothing more than a series of disembowelments carried out on various
people who simply happened to wander in. The three plays were extremely boring because,
bloody as the effects were, if you were squeamish, you hardened yourself, and if you weren’t
squeamish, it was just red tomato sauce and a lot of people in terrible make-up overacting. Melodrama, for me, has to be a great deal purer than that, and it has to be at least as
interesting as other drama.
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melodrama and farce
Another aspect of melodrama that interests me is that it is the obverse side of farce, which
is another favorite form of mine. We find the same qualities in both. Complications of
plot, larger-than-life characters, grand gestures, and nonnaturalistic acting are common to
both melodrama and farce. The only difference is that in melodrama what we could call
tragic events occur, events with truly unpleasant consequences. In farce annoying events
happen with comic and generally happy consequences, although there are a number of
farces that could be viewed as unpleasant, particularly in the 20th century, when writers
started to create black farces, as, for example, Joe Orton did.
The point is that melodrama and farce are essentially the same form, and they represent for me the heart of the theatrical experience. They offer what I do not find in other
narrative media. I suppose that one might sometimes find it in novels, if one’s imagination is large enough. But not in the movies—movies are a reportorial form—and twodimensional at that—and there is no direct communication with the audience: the film is
a presented object. Television is perhaps even one step further removed and, at the same
time, one step closer to the spectator. It is a small, cozy form, and anyone attempting to do
anything larger than life on television makes an absolute fool of himself.
The theater is the one place where you can create larger than life, and melodrama and
farce represent the two forms best suited to that kind of circusy quality that I love in the
theater.
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earlier sweeney todd plays and bond ’s modern version
Now I had never seen a good Grand Guignol melodrama, and Sweeney Todd, I must stress,
is a special kind of melodrama: Grand Guignol (originally a character in the French puppet
theater), which is always associated with lots of blood and outlandishness. All the Sweeney
Todds that existed before Christopher Bond’s version were indeed bloody, although
nowhere near as bloody as those one-act horror plays I saw in Paris. In fact, all these earlier
Sweeney Todd plays were very boring and essentially overwritten one-act dramas with one
or two central incidents and a great deal of padding. In the 19th century I imagine there
was also liberal use of thunder sheet effects and lots of emoting, as opposed to acting. All
the interest and suspense had to do with the scenic effects and with wondering whether
or not somebody was going to get killed in the chair. Todd was merely a villain, and Mrs.
Lovett was merely an accomplice—and a secondary one at that. There was no attitude or
tone. It was simply a matter of seeing the villain get caught in the end.
Christopher Bond humanized all the characters and gave the story motivation which
had never existed before in the earlier versions of Sweeney Todd. Yet while enlarging
the human dimensions of the play, Bond remained true to the melodramatic tradition.
Everyone in Bond’s version is larger than life; the characters are not real people. The events
are extraordinary, melodramatic in the sense that they are larger than life; in real life there
may have been mass murderers and even ones who used razors—but their stories were not
compressed and heightened in this way. Sweeney Todd is larger than life as a story and
larger than life in technique.
Take the matter of language. Hugh Wheeler, who adapted Bond’s play and prepared
the libretto, pointed out to me that Bond had written half of his play in blank verse, but
that the lines were not typed out as blank verse. All the speeches of the Judge, Todd, and
the two young lovers are written in iambic meter, and the lower-class characters are given
nonmetered dialogue. This produces a very subtle effect when you read the play. Beyond
the formality of the diction, there is a kind of stateliness in some of the characters that
creates an odd juxtaposition with the rag-tag rhythms in the lower-class figures.
Attention to details of this sort gives Bond’s Sweeney Todd greater depth than the usual
melodrama, which is quite shallow. It is exactly this added dimension that we wanted in
our musical version, and when Hugh and I first sat down to work on the piece, we were
interested in retaining the same spirit that had attracted me to the play.
on taking melodrama seriously
Since I hadn’t wanted to do the piece alone, I asked Hugh Wheeler—with whom I’d had
two lovely collorations, three actually, or one and two halves. Hugh was also a mystery
story writer and British born and therefore he understood the whole tradition. He was
perhaps the only person in the United States to whom I could say, “Sweeney Todd” and
who wouldn’t say, “Who’s that?”
Hugh and I talked about it and wondered whether we could get away with doing the
only thing that would be fun: treating Sweeney Todd seriously. Otherwise it would not be
worth undertaking. I do not enjoy camp, spoof melodrama, like Dracula, for example. It’s
not that Dracula is not well done; it is simply not a form that I enjoy. I like my melodrama
straight. . . .
[In Sweeney Todd,] I wanted to make a melodrama but with a 20th-century sensibility.
. . . I wanted to scare an audience out of its wits but not by suddenly opening doors in the
dark, which can always terrify audiences and produce little shrieks f surprise, but that is not
the kind of scare I am referring to. The true terror of melodrama comes from its revelations
about the frightening power of what is inside human beings. And if you write about kings
and queens and are a great poet, you end up with a first-class tragedy; if you write about
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ordinary people and are an ordinary writer, you end up with a melodrama. That’s exactly
what this show is.
Shakespeare, who had to write plays that would entertain everybody, created melodrama
in the form of Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth—all of which are blood-and-thunder
melodramas. And when it is done right, melodrama really does entertain everybody.
The only difference is that Shakespeare is Shakespeare. If he had been given the plot of
Sweeney Todd, we would have seen what could have been made of it. I say this not out of
false modesty but only to indicate that the dividing line between melodrama and tragedy is
not necessarily one of intention, which is what they teach you in school. I think it’s in the
execution. I do not think that there is any difference in intention between Shakespeare’s
writing Hamlet and our writing Sweeney Todd. That is not to say that I thought we were
writing a tragedy; rather, I think that Shakespeare thought he was writing a melodrama.
...
a melodrama of revenge
I believe that there’s a little of everything in all of us, and most people can understand
and identify with any emotion; the writer simply must draw the audience into the feelings of the characters that he has created on the stage. Sweeney Todd, which after all is
a melodrama about revenge, poses a problem for a lot of people who refuse to admit to
themselves that they have a capacity for vengeance, but I think it’s a universal trait. I didn’t
see any reason why we couldn’t do what Christopher Bond had done, which is to make
Sweeney a tragic hero instead of a villain, because there is something of Sweeney in all of
us, I believe. . . .
44
comedy and character in melodrama
As Alfred Hitchcock made millions of dollars proving, there is a very thin line between
melodrama and comedy, between being scared and laughing. An audience is more vulnerable to laughter—as we are in real life, not just in the theater—when it’s most tense. If
somebody is tense, you can tickle him; if he’s relaxed, you can’t.
The kind of comedy that is the most effective and valid on the stage is character comedy, and there are many possibilities for such comedy when the characters are as rich,
though two-dimensional, as those in melodrama. The characters in Sweeney Todd are not
complex; I don’t think they should be. If you are to use complex characters in melodrama,
you really have to be somebody like Shakespeare to hold it together. The more outlandish
things people do, the less likely we are to believe in them as complex human beings.
In Sweeney, Mrs. Lovett’s venality can be treated in a comic way because that is what
she is: a venal character. Certainly there are a few shadows and lights here and there, but
primarily Mrs. Lovett is defined by her practicality combined with her greed. Todd is a
man bent on revenge, he thinks of nothing else; that is his dimension. The fact that there
is some tenderness and some love in the man is part of the shading and nothing more.
And, unquestionably, each of the other characters can be described primarily in terms of
a single noun or adjective.
When you have characters like that, you can get laughs quite easily. In fact, Shakespeare
gets his laughs in Hamlet and Macbeth by providing us with characters of one or two
dimensions, the Fop with a capital F, or what I call the drunken porter syndrome. You
know when he brings the drunken porter on, it’s to give you relief from the relentlessness
of the melodrama. Although the Shakespeare scene is a total breakaway and what we try
to do is to get laughs within the scenes, the principle is the same. The two colors are so
close, melodramatic emotion and comic emotion, that it is fairly easy to skip from one side
of the board to the other.
Of course, there is another kind of laughter, the so-called nervous laugh. For example,
people laugh a great deal at the beggar woman in the first scene of Sweeney Todd. It is not
simply the shock of her obscenity; there is something creepy about the beggar woman, and
by laughing at somebody or something, we attempt to ward it off. Now it seems to me that
this is a kind of laughter you can create only in melodrama, where an audience will laugh
to protect itself from being scared.
Sweeney Todd is a play about obsession, and when a person is totally obsessed, everything
else becomes irrelevant. In this sense, Sweeney is detached; the only interest from which he
is not detached is his obsession: his revenge. The only time this detachment is dramatized
on stage . . . is in the second-act sequence called “Johanna,” where a succession of victims
comes into the barber shop; Sweeney sings dreamily and in a detached way while doing the
most bloody things with his hands. That kind of schizoid split could be called detachment,
and in fact, that is the word I used to describe to the actor how to play the scene.
But most of all, I think of Sweeney Todd as a person so passionate on one subject that
he has no energy for anything else. He is hot after one goal, becomes sidetracked because
of circumstances, and goes crazy until suddenly another lucky chance happens and he is
able to proceed along his path, destroying everything along the way. He is a man interested
in only one thing, and he is animated only when he is in active pursuit of that goal.
All the characters in the play are boxed in; they have one thing they want. That is
characteristic of both melodrama and farce: the characters can be outlined by the one
thing they want. In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pseudolus wants
45
his freedom, the hero wants the girl, the old man wants the young girl, the wife wants the
husband, the pimp wants money, the old man wants his children: everyone is motivated
entirely by one want.
The same thing is true in Sweeney Todd. Everybody is obsessed by one thing: the Judge
with his lechery, the Beadle with his authority, Mrs. Lovett with her greed, Sweeney with
his revenge, the boy Tobias with a home, and the lovers with each other. Everybody wants
one thing, they all clash, and there is a terrible collision. When the refuse clears, only two
of them are left alive—the lovers. That’s part of the tradition of popular melodrama. The
show must have some feeling of traditional form. You might argue that it would be more
realistic to have the girl killed off, but the audience wouldn’t be as satisfied and they certainly wouldn’t feel for Sweeney. The ending should be formally satisfying.
Excerpted from extemporaneous remarks made by Stephen Sondheim to, and recorded by, Daniel Gerould on September 5, 1979,
published in their entirety in Melodrama, edited by Daniel Gerould and Jeanine Parisier Plottel (New York Library Forum, 1980).
46
questions to consider
1. In his 1973 stage adaptation of the Sweeney Todd legend, Christopher Bond attempted
to make Sweeney more “human.” Do you think he succeeded? Do you find the Sweeney
Todd of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical to be a sympathetic character?
Why or why not?
2. Sondheim has said that he wanted the music to immediately set the scene for a horror
story. Does it do so? How? Does the music of Sweeney Todd remind you of any horror
movies you have seen?
3. What function do the songs serve in Sweeney Todd? Do they reveal characters or comment on the action? Do they move the story forward? How? How is Sweeney Todd like and
unlike other musicals you have seen or heard?
4. How and why does Sweeney’s character change over the course of the story?
5. Is one form of murder (revenge for a specific, personal act) more justifiable than another
(serial killing)?
6. Do you think Sweeny Todd makes a statement about class, social politics, and/or political
corruption? If so, what?
7. Director John Doyle’s production takes place in an insane asylum and is seen through
the eyes of an inmate, represented by the actor who plays Tobias. What do you think of
Doyle’s choice of setting? How does the setting change or enhance the story? How do
the lights, costumes, and props affect your perception of the play? Would you design the
production differently? How?
8. How does having the actors double as the orchestra affect your experience of the
story?
9. Why do you think Mrs. Lovett lies to Sweeney about his wife? Do you think she is at
all justified? In her position, would you do the same?
10. In many early versions of the Sweeney Todd story, Johanna is a strong female heroine.
Do you consider Sondheim’s Johanna to be a feminist character? Why or why not?
11. Why do you think Tobias kills Sweeney? Does the fact that it is Tobias who kills
Sweeney thematically affect the story? What role does Tobias’s madness play in his
actions? How does his madness thematically alter the ending? Is it a satisfying ending?
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12. What does each of the characters desire most? Does he or she achieve that desire? If
not, why not? If so, how?
13. In traditional melodrama, the moral characters are rewarded and the immoral characters are punished. Do you think this is true in Sweeney Todd? Who are the moral characters
in Sweeney Todd? On what criteria do you base your judgment?
14. Why do you think the story of Sweeney Todd has remained so popular over the
centuries?
15. What is the “moral” of Sweeney Todd?
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for further information...
on stephen sondheim and the american musical
Andrews, Julie, et al. B’Way: Broadway; The American Musical. dvd collection. Directed by
Michael Kantor. pbs Paramount, 2005.
Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
Brown, Gene. Show Time: A Chronology of Broadway and the Theatre from Its Beginnings to
the Present. New York: Macmillan, 1997.
Citron, Stephen. Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
“Featured Subject: Stephen Sondheim.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/
books/98/07/19/specials/sondheim.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
Goodhart, Sandor, ed. Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York:
Garland Pub., 2000.
Horowitz, Mark Eden, ed. Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions. Lanham,
md. Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Hutchins, Michael H. The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide. http://www.sondheimguide
.com/index.html.
Maslon, Laurence. Broadway: The American Musical. pbs. New York: Thirteen Online/
wnet, 2004. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/index.html.
Secrest, Meryl. Stephen Sondheim: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
The Sondheim Review. http://www.sondheimreview.com/.
Swayne, Steve. How Sondheim Found His Sound. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005.
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on sweeney todd
American Theatre Wing. “John Doyle.” Downstage Center, November 24, 2006. http://
www.americantheatrewing.org/downstagecenter/detail/john_doyle.
Bond, c. g. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, A Melodrama. London: Samuel
French, 1974.
Dibdin Pitt, George. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Edited by Marvin
Kaye. Rockville, md: Wildside Press, 2004.
Guest, Kristen. “Are You Being Served? Cannibalism, Class, and Victorian Melodrama.”
In Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, edited by
Kristen Guest, 107–27. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.
Haining, Peter. The Mystery and Horrible Murders of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of
Fleet Street. London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1979.
⎯⎯⎯. Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. London: Robson
Books, 1993.
Jones, John Bush. “From Melodrama to Tragedy: The Transformation of Sweeney Todd.”
New England Theatre Journal 2, no. 1 (1991): 85–97.
Gerould, Daniel, ed. Melodrama. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980.
Gribben, Mark. “Sweeny Todd: Man or Myth?” courtTV Crime Library. http://www
.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/todd/index_1.html.
Lunden, Jeff. “Music Goes Onstage in Sweeney Todd.” npr, Weekend Edition Saturday,
November 19, 2005. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5018561.
Powell, Sally. “Black Markets and Cadaverous Pies: The Corpse, Urban Trade, and
Industrial Consumption in the Penny Blood.” Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation,
edited by Andrew Maunder, 45–58. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004.
Raynor, j. l. and g. t. Crook. The Complete Newgate Calendar. London: The Navarre
Society, 1926.
Slaughter, Tod. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. dvd. Directed by George
King. 1936. Edina, mn: Alpha Studio, 2004.
OPPOSITE The Patriotick Barber of New York, or the Captain of the Suds, by Robert Dighton (1752–1814) (© Ashmolean Museum,
University of Oxford, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library)
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Taylor, Mark. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. pbs. San Francisco, ca: kqed
Inc., 2001. http://www.pbs.org/kqed/demonbarber/index.html.
Victoria DeCapitate Productions. Sweeney Todd Online. http://www.sweeneytoddonline
.com/sweeneyframe.html.
Wheeler, Hugh, and Stephen Sondheim. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1991.
sondheim.com. http://www.sondheim.com/.
on the history of barber surgeons
Burn, Ian, ed. The Company of Barbers and Surgeons. London: Farrand Press, 2000.
Dobson, Jessie and R. Milnes Walker. Barbers and Barber-Surgeons of London. Oxford:
Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1979.
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