Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street debuted on Broadway in 1979. Sweeney (originally known as Benjamin Barker) was a public domain character and urban boogeyman whose schtick was to murder people with straight razors. Sondheim always had a dark streak, but a straight-up slasher musical was a bold choice for his day, and the show had legs. It’s come back to Broadway several times, been a hit with touring companies, and lodged itself into the cultural consciousness pretty firmly.
There was also a 2007 Tim Burton film version which was… fine. Alan Rickman was really good in it, but he’s really good in anything.
This year, the play is getting a Broadway revival headed by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. You can listen to the opening number here…
Sweeney Todd has never been my favorite Sondheim piece, but that teaser has me really excited. The large cast and orchestra on this recording gives the whole song a dramatic, cathedral-choir vibe that I haven’t gotten from past productions. And it’s got me thinking about what makes this show special and lasting.
I’m going to get into some mild spoilers here, so consider yourself forewarned.
This play has always performed a balancing act between dark, emotional revenge tale and weird, grim comedy. There’s nothing funny about Sweeney’s backstory: a good man, exceedingly talented in his field, who’s sentenced to transportation to Australia (before that was fun) for a crime he didn’t commit. The judge who ordered the sentence did so to assault Sweeney’s wife and adopt/groom his daughter. You’d probably be reaching for the straight razor too, in that situation.
But then there’s Mrs. Lovett, the female lead in the piece and veritable joke factory. She laments how her failing pie shop can’t compete with the cheap ones that fill their pies with cat meat because she won’t stoop so low… also the cats are too fast. In a blood-drenched play, she’s more interested in making puns and courting Sweeney Todd, knowing full well that he’s a mass murderer, than getting to caught up in morality or hygiene standards. She’s not always acted with a lot of depth on stage, which is a shame, because you can definitely see a Harley Quinn quality in her attachment to a violent man who is never going to feel the same.
Sweeney, on the other hand, practically begs for the audience’s ambivalence. What was done to him was absolutely wrong, and most of us have wished at some time or another that people who abuse their power would face the consequences of their actions… or at least have a very close shave with them. But revenge doesn’t do Sweeney any real good (he neither starts nor ends this play a happy man), and the show doesn’t shy away from the fact that he’s an unrepentant murderer with an agenda. And we’ve all seen too many of those in the news to feel comfortable around him, even during a killer solo.
But the play doesn’t just drop the “revenge is bad” mic and call it a night. It puts a lot of effort into showing us how deeply unfair Sweeney’s world is, wants us to be infuriated by its injustices. Then it shows us how that fury can ruin our lives and the lives of almost everyone around us. The only characters who make it out of this play with their souls in tact do so by finding each other, caring for each other, and trying to leave the ugliness of the play’s London behind. When you think about it, that doesn’t solve anything. But it beats prison bars and barber chairs.