the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn version. I was lucky enough to watch that on DVD recently, and it really shows the character going from an individual to something awful and universal.
Yes. And this is partly a function of the script, which elements were included and which for one reason or another cut; and partly of direction.1 (And with all due respect to Len Cariou, Patti LuPone, or Tim Burton, Lansbury and Hearn are still the best the roles ever got.) Depp's rendering of "Epiphany" does not give me the same cold awe and horror as Hearn's; he's a deathwish from the beginning, so coal-eyed and tightly held in on himself that we all deserve to die is not so much a snap as a logical conclusion. Hearn's Todd is no less damaged, rackingly bitter and too easily overtaken by the ghosts of his past ("The Barber and His Wife," "Poor Thing"—in moments of stress, he rubs at his wrists, unconsciously, as though his convict's shackles still chafe there), but he is human enough to thank Anthony for his friendship, it seems genuinely, and if he had come home to the loving wife and child whose memories shored up his sanity for fifteen years in Botany Bay, he might have had nothing worse than scars and bad dreams for the rest of his life. When he first swears revenge, indeed, Mrs. Lovett laughs in his face: "You're going to get them? You? A bleeding little nobody of a runaway convict? . . . Not in a million years." But when all that rage finally shreds itself into the savage keen of my Lucy lies in ashes and I'll never see my girl again, then she sees for the first time—as do we—how dangerous he might be. Burton seems to have made a similar tradeoff for the youth2 and sexiness of his stars in the musical's deliciously black humor, much of which has been excised from the film and which I think is essential. It's so much fun to watch these characters at their wicked work that we are decoyed from its tragic underpinnings, put off guard for the brutality of the finale. That raw edge in the last verse of "A Little Priest," the clanging brass and ferocity of its gleefully lunatic waltz, does not change the fact that it's hilarious; they flourish a butcher's knife and a rolling pin, at once absurd and rather alarming. But fortunately it's also clear / That everybody goes down well with beer! None of which means that I did not enjoy Burton's Sweeney Todd when I saw it for New Year's. The supporting cast were very fine; I was sorry so much of Anthony and Johanna's music was cut because Jamie Campbell Bower and Jayne Wisener impressed me,3 Alan Rickman was as lustful and loathly a Judge Turpin as I had hoped, and Ed Sanders is the best Toby I have ever heard, onstage or off; casting the role as an actual boy soprano was genius. But for the leads, give me the original cast recording or the DVD any day.
1. And set design, really. Burton's London is a Whitechapel fantasia, while Hal Prince sets his in the shadow of dark satanic mills: the sets are rusted catwalks, there is a production-line automatism to the routine of Sweeney's days. Wake up, Johanna! Another bright red day. He is the demonic present the newly industrialized world is grinding us toward.
2. I am aware that Johnny Depp is in his mid-forties, which is not an improbable age at which to have a sixteen-year-old daughter; I think George Hearn was not much older when he took on the role. But one of them is played older and more harrowed, the other more sociopathically smoldering; and while Helena Bonham Carter looks quite fine in her Gothic Lolita corsetry, it is not irrelevant to Mrs. Lovett's characterization that she is in her mid-fifties and still as daffy as a schoolgirl when it comes to Sweeney Todd.
3. And I say this as someone who unreasonably loves Victor Garber. The Anthony and Johanna in the Hearn/Lansbury DVD, alas, not so much. I feel strongly that the lovers need to be real: they may be refugees from an opera buffa, but that is not the same as comic characters.
no subject
Yes. And this is partly a function of the script, which elements were included and which for one reason or another cut; and partly of direction.1 (And with all due respect to Len Cariou, Patti LuPone, or Tim Burton, Lansbury and Hearn are still the best the roles ever got.) Depp's rendering of "Epiphany" does not give me the same cold awe and horror as Hearn's; he's a deathwish from the beginning, so coal-eyed and tightly held in on himself that we all deserve to die is not so much a snap as a logical conclusion. Hearn's Todd is no less damaged, rackingly bitter and too easily overtaken by the ghosts of his past ("The Barber and His Wife," "Poor Thing"—in moments of stress, he rubs at his wrists, unconsciously, as though his convict's shackles still chafe there), but he is human enough to thank Anthony for his friendship, it seems genuinely, and if he had come home to the loving wife and child whose memories shored up his sanity for fifteen years in Botany Bay, he might have had nothing worse than scars and bad dreams for the rest of his life. When he first swears revenge, indeed, Mrs. Lovett laughs in his face: "You're going to get them? You? A bleeding little nobody of a runaway convict? . . . Not in a million years." But when all that rage finally shreds itself into the savage keen of my Lucy lies in ashes and I'll never see my girl again, then she sees for the first time—as do we—how dangerous he might be. Burton seems to have made a similar tradeoff for the youth2 and sexiness of his stars in the musical's deliciously black humor, much of which has been excised from the film and which I think is essential. It's so much fun to watch these characters at their wicked work that we are decoyed from its tragic underpinnings, put off guard for the brutality of the finale. That raw edge in the last verse of "A Little Priest," the clanging brass and ferocity of its gleefully lunatic waltz, does not change the fact that it's hilarious; they flourish a butcher's knife and a rolling pin, at once absurd and rather alarming. But fortunately it's also clear / That everybody goes down well with beer! None of which means that I did not enjoy Burton's Sweeney Todd when I saw it for New Year's. The supporting cast were very fine; I was sorry so much of Anthony and Johanna's music was cut because Jamie Campbell Bower and Jayne Wisener impressed me,3 Alan Rickman was as lustful and loathly a Judge Turpin as I had hoped, and Ed Sanders is the best Toby I have ever heard, onstage or off; casting the role as an actual boy soprano was genius. But for the leads, give me the original cast recording or the DVD any day.
1. And set design, really. Burton's London is a Whitechapel fantasia, while Hal Prince sets his in the shadow of dark satanic mills: the sets are rusted catwalks, there is a production-line automatism to the routine of Sweeney's days. Wake up, Johanna! Another bright red day. He is the demonic present the newly industrialized world is grinding us toward.
2. I am aware that Johnny Depp is in his mid-forties, which is not an improbable age at which to have a sixteen-year-old daughter; I think George Hearn was not much older when he took on the role. But one of them is played older and more harrowed, the other more sociopathically smoldering; and while Helena Bonham Carter looks quite fine in her Gothic Lolita corsetry, it is not irrelevant to Mrs. Lovett's characterization that she is in her mid-fifties and still as daffy as a schoolgirl when it comes to Sweeney Todd.
3. And I say this as someone who unreasonably loves Victor Garber. The Anthony and Johanna in the Hearn/Lansbury DVD, alas, not so much. I feel strongly that the lovers need to be real: they may be refugees from an opera buffa, but that is not the same as comic characters.