Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd

Aaron Thomas, Aaron C. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138678866
• eBook ISBN: 9781317192213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a murderous barber and his pastry chef accomplice, is unquestionably strange subject matter for the musical theatre – but eight Tony awards and enormous successes on Broadway and the West End testify to its enduring popularity with audiences. Written by Hugh Wheeler, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical premiered in 1979 and has seen numerous revivals, including Tim Burton's 2007 film version.

Aaron C. Thomas addresses this darkly funny piece with fitting humour, taking on Sweeney Todd's chequered history and genre, its treatment of violence and cannibalism, and its sexual politics.

1

The throat that gleams

The murderous barber Sweeney Todd and his pastry-chef accomplice Mrs Lovett made their first appearances in fiction long before Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street first appeared on Broadway in 1979. They were not devised by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, neither did they originate as melodramatic caricatures on the British stage. Instead, Sweeney Todd of Fleet Street and Mrs Lovett of Bell Yard first appeared in the columned pages of a type of periodical referred to as a ‘penny blood’ (the ‘penny dreadful’ was a later, supposedly more respectable, version of this genre). These short, cheap, easy-to-read publications were aimed at a wide audience of poor and working-class people, and they contained serialized tales, often with criminal subject matter and a vaguely historical setting. The story in which Sweeney first appeared went by the title The String of Pearls, and it was published between November of 1846 and March of 1847.¹

The bloods were penned by various hack writers, working not for artistic fulfilment or literary reputation but for wages earned. Despite its negative connotation, hack writer doesn’t necessarily have to mean bad writer, but these authors often cared little for credit and less for style. Robert Mack, who has written a thorough and fascinating history of the legend of Sweeney Todd, offers two serious candidates for the original author of The String of Pearls. These are Thomas Peckett Prest, a novelist and playwright who wrote the stage melodramas The Miser of Shoreditch (1854) and Lucy Wentworth (1857), and James Malcolm Rymer, an author of penny bloods who typically wrote under various pseudonyms.

Authorship of The String of Pearls is disputed and possibly even irrecoverable. As Mack argues, however, even if someone could state definitively whether it was Prest or Rymer (or one of many other candidates) who actually first wrote down the story, legends of barbers who killed unsuspecting patrons, tales of cannibalistic, incestuous families, rumours of pastry shops with suspicious contents and stories of mysterious smells in the crowded urban centres of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries circulated widely in France, Ireland, England and Italy.² The author of The String of Pearls – whoever he may have been – cleverly connected the threads of numerous legends together in what quickly became an enduring theatrical narrative, one that would delight and terrify audiences for the next 150 years and beyond.

The String of Pearls found its way from the page to the stage almost immediately:

Even before the final number […] had appeared in print on 20 March 1847, a dramatized version of the tale, adapted for the stage by George Dibdin Pitt, was being performed at the Britannia Theatre in High Street, Hoxton, from 22 February of that year – performed, in other words, more than three weeks before the ‘original’ narrative in The People’s Periodical had even had the opportunity to bring the story to its own conclusion.³

Like the narrative version of the tale, Dibdin Pitt’s String of Pearls first appeared in a venue not widely respected for its quality. Food and drink were served inside the Britannia, and audiences could be very rowdy. Sweeney Todd has never been quite respectable, and, as we will see, critics were still turning their noses up 132 years later in 1979, when Sondheim and Wheeler’s version of the tale premiered at the Uris Theatre in New York, the biggest theatre on Broadway.

Other stage versions of The String of Pearls quickly followed Dibdin Pitt’s.⁴ Although the jewelry in the original title emphasizes the story’s love plot, Todd himself was always the real star of the show, and for Frederick Hazleton’s 1862 version the play’s title became Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: or, The String of Pearls. These two stage versions of Sweeney cemented some of the standard elements of the show. One could always expect, for example, to see Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett, as well as Sweeney’s terrified assistant Tobias Ragg (traditionally played by an actress), the young sailor Mark Ingestrie (later renamed Anthony Hope) and his lover Johanna Oakley (she is not traditionally Todd’s daughter). In these melodramas Sweeney doesn’t generally slit his victims’ throats; he uses a trick barber’s chair to kill them. A lever opens a trap door, dropping the unsuspecting customer to his death in the cellar. Later – sometimes after waiting as long as a week! – the villain goes downstairs to ‘polish off’ his victim. Sweeney is an unrepentant villain in these plays, forever threatening to cut someone’s throat from ear to ear or gleefully telling the audience that he is excited to polish off some customer or other. Polish him off would become one of Sweeney’s typical catchphrases, and almost every subsequent version of the play includes it, though Sondheim and Wheeler leave it out.

Dibdin Pitt and Hazleton established other traditions as well, many of which managed to survive the century between the 1847 original and the 1979 musical. Johanna, for example, always dresses in (male) sailor drag at some point in the show, and Mrs Lovett – as her name implies – is always portrayed as a lustful widow, grotesquely attempting to seduce any number of customers or suitors. The story always takes place in Fleet Street near St Dunstan’s Church, and Johanna is nearly always pursued by a hypocritical and libidinous man of the cloth (Hazleton names this character Lupin, ‘wolf’). Indeed, even the earliest versions of the play emphasize the hypocrisy of Londoners – men who pretend to be upright but whose righteous pretentions are designed only to mask avarice and lechery.⁵ When Sondheim’s lyrics seem, perhaps strangely, to celebrate Sweeney sinking his razor into ‘the rosy skin / Of righteousness!’ (23), punishing ‘those / Who moralize!’ (2), or ‘float[ing] across the throats / Of hypocrites’ (67), he directly references this tradition of critical mockery towards the ‘moral’ and pretentious among us.

The demon barber was always a murderous, unhinged maniac with a disturbingly creepy laugh. By the 1870s his play was being subtitled The Barber Fiend,⁶ and he is compared to the devil himself in Hazleton’s version.⁷ The original Sweeney was not a righteous revenger; he was not unjustly imprisoned by a rapacious judge; and he was certainly never a family man. Sweeney Todd was traditionally a thief. That is, although he was most famed for his grisly murders, the motive for these murders was always greed: Sweeney would kill his customers and steal their possessions, including the string of pearls in the play’s title. This is true for every stage version of Sweeney Todd from 1847 to 1979, including Malcolm Arnold’s Sweeney Todd ballet (1959), Brian J. Burton’s Sweeney Todd the Barber: a Melodrama (1962), Austin Rosser’s Sweeney Todd: a Victorian Melodrama (1969) and Peter Miller and Randall Lewton’s The Sweeney Todd Shock ’n’ Roll Show (1979).⁸ It is this villainous, thieving Sweeney whom we hear described in Sondheim’s ‘Ballad of Sweeney Todd’, when the chorus sings that ‘his skin was pale and his eye was odd’ (1). It is this traditionally ruthless monster they describe when they sing ‘Sweeney was smooth, Sweeney was subtle, / Sweeney would blink and rats would scuttle’ (3).

Sweeney Todd is a malicious, unrepentant thief in all versions, that is, but one: Christopher Bond’s play Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Bond changed Sweeney’s essential character, shifting the murderer’s motive from theft to revenge. Bond’s Sweeney is also – for the first time – actually an excellent barber, able to shave a face and extract a tooth with dexterity. This Sweeney is a member of his nineteenth-century society rather than an external threat to that society.

Dramaturgically speaking, the Dibdin Pitt, Hazleton, Burton and Rosser versions introduce us to a murderer already steeped in crime and vice. Their Sweeneys have few honourable qualities. Bond, however, introduces Sweeney in the company of the eager and honest Anthony Hope, a man who calls Todd ‘friend’, treats him affectionately, and says that ‘[he]’ll pray for [his] good fortune’.⁹ The very first story we hear in this version is that of Sweeney’s false imprisonment, his love for his virtuous wife and his almost deadly escape from an Australian prison colony. Bond’s sympathetic introduction teaches the audience how they ought to see this new, improved Sweeney, asking us to look at him with compassion rather than distaste.

All of this is a stark contrast to earlier versions of the barber’s story, in which we might hear Sweeney telling the audience frankly that ‘When a boy, the thirst of avarice was awakened in me by the fair gift of a farthing’,¹⁰ while stealing his string of pearls, or unabashedly singing lyrics such as ‘When a youth I turned to crime, / And now I’m evil all the time. / I’m evil, I’m evil, as evil can be, / I doubt if there’s anyone as evil as me’.¹¹ Sondheim expressly wanted to avoid this sort of broad characterization, saying that after he had decided to adapt Bond’s Sweeney, he ‘bought all the published versions – which were all terrible’.¹² Bond, too, had found these earlier adaptations in need of ‘a heart transplant’, and for his play he ‘crossed Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo with […] The Revenger’s Tragedy for a plot’, emphasizing England’s class structure and giving his audience a body count worthy of a Jacobean tragedy.¹³ Even more importantly, Bond’s Sweeney oscillates between motivations, actively fighting with his own desires, confused even about what he wants. In Bond’s second act, Sweeney laments ‘Farewell! Farewell, Johanna. My dear daughter whom I have not seen these many years. Whose childish laughter I still hear when sleep doth cloy my brain. […] What would she say now to know her father was a murderer? She must never know, never behold my face’.¹⁴ Bond’s Sweeney is a man who can reflect on the person he has become and, although ashamed of his actions, also articulate the tragic futility of his desires. It is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note
• 1 The throat that gleams
• 2 The throat that sings
• 3 The throat that bleeds
• 4 The throat that swallows
• References
• Index