The long-awaited DVD of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) has finally arrived. Alas, there are no extras to be found anywhere, but the remastered score is astonishingly crisp; anyone accustomed to the often-muffled VHS will be pleasantly surprised by the clarity of the vocals, especially in the choral passages. For Victorianists, of course, this is a must-have: based on Christopher Bond's play of the same name, Sondheim's musical turns the legendary villain of the penny dreadfuls into a madman out to revenge himself on the hanging judge who sent him to Australia, raped his wife, and now plans to marry his child. In Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd's London, the upper classes metaphorically devour those beneath them--so Sweeney and his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, turn the tables by literally transforming Sweeney's clients into pies. Not that you can push the allegorical class warfare too far, since Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett take a pragmatically egalitarian view of things:
We'll serve anyone
Meaning anyone
And to anyone
At all
("A Little Priest")
In the end, however, they find themselves devoured by the fallout from their own deeds. Deliberately melodramatic and sensationalist, the musical provoked understandable controversy on its debut, but since then has become one of the past few decade's most acclaimed musicals. Nowadays, the controversy usually boils down to its increasing presence as an opera-house staple. Is it an opera? A musical? Something else entirely?
Sondheim aficionados have always had mixed reactions to this particular recording, which preserves the final stop of the first national tour. George Hearn, Sondheim's favorite Sweeney, is too over-the-top for some, but he's undeniably a superb singer; moreover, the score sits comfortably in his range, which can't be said for the original Sweeney, Len Cariou. Angela Lansbury, the original Mrs. Lovett, somehow manages a certain degree of pathos as the otherwise loopy and happily homicidal pie-shop owner. Also hanging on to their original roles here are Edmund Lyndeck as the very creepy Judge Turpin and Ken Jennings (who has quite possibly the strangest male voice in contemporary musical theater) as downtrodden Tobias Ragg. The other performers are somewhat colorless, and both supporting women have pitch problems at the top of their range.
One odd note about the remastered score: it completely defeated my TV's sound system. At first, I thought that the studio had simply eliminated the audience responses altogether, but things sounded noticeably different once I plugged the DVD into my computer. It might sound strange to complain about absent laughter and applause, but in filmed stage productions the audience is an organic part of the overall performance: it shapes the length of pauses or orchestral vamps, elicits further responses from the performers on stage, and so forth. Without the audience, you just have dead air at really strange moments--e.g., the end of Sweeney's "Epiphany."
(For a brief discussion of the musical's relationship to Christopher Bond's play, see Larry A. Brown. There's more on Sweeney Todd and the penny dreadfuls here.)
UPDATE: Typo fixed.
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