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Legacy of 'Sweeney Todd' cuts deep

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

December 16, 2007

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Of all Stephen Sondheim's wild and wonderfully unpredictable musical groundbreakers, "Sweeney Todd" has morphed into the most versatile of them all.

When the creep-out revenge thriller began life on Broadway in 1979, Harold Prince staged it as a vast Dickensian epic - a massive 19th century London nightmare of the Industrial Revolution. It won eight Tony Awards, including ones for Angela Lansbury's amorally exuberant Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou's unhinged "demon barber of Fleet Street."

Opera companies, including the New York City Opera, have responded to the ravishing operatic side of the jaunty musical-comedy score, which has almost no spoken words in it. Those productions are big and, in my experience, awfully distant.

In fact, Sondheim always said he meant "Sweeney" to be intimate and scary - qualities that the big screen and Johnny Depp should be able to satisfy with bloody buckets of fun. The story - meant to be both epic and trashy - began in London's "penny dreadfuls," the street-corner tabloids of Victorian London and an ancestor of today's pop-slash violent entertainments.

I interviewed the master of the grown-up literate musical in 1984, after the premiere of his masterwork, "Sunday in the Park with George," which has its first Broadway revival in February. At that time, Sondheim claimed he originally wanted "Sweeney" with just "fog and a few streetlamps. Then if suddenly beside you popped an old beggar woman crying, 'Alms, alms,' you'd be scared out of your wits."

Broadway embraced a smaller version of "Sweeney" in 1990. But the show became a really big hit two years ago, with the Broadway import of John Doyle's stripped-down, modern-dress production from London.

This version, one of the few Sondheim shows to tour America, reduces the original 27 characters to just 10 and, most famously, has the actors play the instruments onstage. The bitterly expressionistic show starred Michael Cerveris as a bald, wiry, ghostly Sweeney and Patti LuPone as a Goth raunchball of a Mrs. Lovett, the landlady who bakes his victims into meat pies.

There is chemistry between these characters, something that never boiled up in the years after Lansbury first created her classic cheerful Pekingese of a villainess. Suddenly, we're not sure there hasn't been some erotic something in the space between her meat-pie cafe and Sweeney's tonsorial slaughterhouse upstairs.

Now that Hollywood has discovered Sondheim, it may be hard to remember that this genius of ironic discontent has been a controversial figure through much of his amazing career. It is hard for his admirers to fathom, but he often has been dismissed as an acquired taste, praised for witty, sophisticated lyrics and vision, but damned for unmelodic music and emotional chill. Could America, finally, be ready for him now?

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