Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (71 page)

Within a short time
Sweeney Todd
also earned classic status among critics and cognoscenti as perhaps Sondheim and Prince’s finest effort. Even those who prefer other Sondheim shows regard this score as one of the composer’s richest. In 2007,
Sweeney Todd
gained hordes of new converts via its acclaimed and reasonably popular (by Hollywood standards) transfer to film by director Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp. While many regard the work as one of the great musicals of the post–Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, others consider it to be one of the greatest operas composed by an American. It will be helpful to try to understand what genre
Sweeney Todd
represents and what is at stake in the formulation.

With the exception of national comic opera traditions, which alternate between spoken dialogue and songs (the latter known in operas as arias)—the
Singspiel
in Germany and Austria (
The Magic Flute
), the
opéra comique
in France (
Carmen
in its original form), the ballad opera in England (
The Beggar’s Opera
)—opera in the European classical tradition tends to be through-sung (i.e., sung throughout without spoken dialogue). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers presented a strong contrast between arias and sung speech (recitative). Although less so for Verdi and Puccini than for Wagner and Strauss, as the nineteenth century progressed and moved into the twentieth, recitative often became more like arias and the arias more like recitative. For the most part—we have already looked at two such exceptions,
Porgy and Bess
and
The Most Happy Fella
—Broadway musicals adopted the national comic traditions that go back to
Beggar’s Opera
in the eighteenth century and Gilbert and Sullivan in the nineteenth: spoken dialogue interrupted by song, or vice versa, depending on your point of view.

In distinguishing between operas and musicals, what is arguably more important than measuring amounts of song and speech is asking whether
significant
dramatic moments are sung or spoken. After the death of Tristan, his beloved Isolde must sing, and sing she does. Until a late stage in the creative process, Maria was going to sing, and Bernstein remained hopeful that he would be able to come up with effective love-death music to serve the dramatic moment after the death of Tony. For Bernstein, spoken dialogue for Maria was an option. If
West Side Story
were unequivocally an opera, Maria, like Isolde, would have no choice. She would sing.

The fact that by Sondheim’s estimation 80 percent of the first act of
Sweeney Todd
is through-sung seems to locate the work more in the direction of opera.
³⁴
Furthermore, much of the dialogue (the other 20%) is delivered over an orchestral backdrop. Dialogue over underscoring in fact is a key component in the traditional definition of melodrama, a word frequently used to describe
Sweeney Todd
—and used by Sondheim. Melodramatic story lines also are expected to be “thrilling,” with the audience in on violence to come (while the characters on stage are unaware) and occasionally moved to yell remarks such as “
Don’t
open the door” at evidently clueless players. Well-known operatic examples of early nineteenth-century melodrama include portions of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
and Carl Maria von Weber’s (not Lloyd Webber’s)
Der Freischütz
. Schoenberg adapted the technique to create a spooky heightened speech known as
Sprechstimme
in his chamber song cycle
Pierrot Lunaire
in 1912.

Sondheim loved melodrama. In fact, he found not only the inspiration but the source for his own version of
Sweeney Todd
when he attended a telling of the tale in an exceptionally artful melodramatic play by Christopher Bond at a theater known for putting on the genre in London. Perhaps idiosyncratically, Sondheim also considered the melodrama compatible with high art. At the same time, he acknowledges that in calling
Sweeney Todd
a musical thriller instead of a musical melodrama, he could circumvent some of the genre’s negative connotations, including its extravagant theatricality, the emphasis of plot over characters who are prone to be one-dimensional, and the sensationalism of the form. For Sondheim, “Melodrama is theater that is larger than life—in emotion, in subject, and in complication of plot.”
³⁵
Sweeney Todd
admirably fits this description.

Early in their collaborative process Sondheim and his librettist Hugh Wheeler “wanted to make a melodrama but with a twentieth-century sensibility,” and they wanted audiences to take the subject as seriously as audiences took nineteenth-century versions.
³⁶
Sondheim wanted both the story and the music “to scare an audience out of its wits,” but not with cheap theatrical thrills.
³⁷
In Sondheim’s view, “The true terror of melodrama comes
from its revelations about the frightening power of what is inside human beings.”
³⁸
He also expressed his intention to achieve in a musical what Christopher Bond achieved in the play that inspired Sondheim, “which is to make Sweeney a tragic hero instead of a villain, because there is something of Sweeney in all of us,” even if most of us elect not to become serial killers.
³⁹

Sondheim’s interpretation of what
Sweeney Todd
is all about differed from Prince’s initial concept. Prince wanted the show to be about “how society makes you impotent, and impotence leads to rage, and rage leads to murder—and in fact, to the breaking down of society.”
⁴⁰
Sondheim credits Prince with developing this socially critical perspective in his setting of the story but does not identify with it. Instead, Sondheim interprets
Sweeney Todd
as a musical about an individual’s psychological obsession, an obsession that leads to revenge and murder.

Bernstein was not alone in his inability to find a musical solution for a major dramatic moment, in his case a final aria for Maria. Sondheim too has acknowledged that he was originally unable to determine how to musicalize eight scenes of
Sweeney Todd
, five of which he found solutions for after the fact: “I sort of figured the five, but I’ve never gotten around to doing them. I thought I would do them for the National Theatre production in London [1993], but Julia McKenzie said: ‘Oh, please don’t give me anything new to learn.
Please
don’t give me anything new to learn.’ That was all the incentive I needed not to work, so I didn’t do it.”
⁴¹
Sondheim specifically identifies one of these scenes as “the trio in the second act, which I’d always wanted to do, where Mrs. Lovett tries to poison the Beadle.”
⁴²
Bernstein faced a creative impasse and Sondheim a time crunch and, as a result, dramatic moments in
West Side Story
and
Sweeney
are today spoken rather than sung.

Some critics consider the absence of music for such important moments a dramatic flaw or a lost opportunity, especially the final moments of
Sweeney
, which are occupied by a speaking rather than a singing Tobias. Sondheim scholar Stephen Banfield considers the brighter side of the musical respite: “Sondheim says that there are five spoken sections of the show that he would like to set to music one day. One of them is the ending. The last three minutes of plot involve very little music: after Todd has sung his last word, even the underscoring peters out and leaves the stage to Tobias’s last speech and still more to the silence of mime. It remained unsung and unplayed simply because Sondheim did not have time to add music before the production opened.” And yet: “
Sweeney Todd
, even if by authorial default at this point, demonstrates the dramatic potency and rightness of music’s self-denial in this genre that is not opera, just as Maria’s final speech does in
West Side Story
.”
⁴³

Bernstein’s lack of inspiration and Sondheim’s lack of time may have played a role in the musical silence of Maria and Tobias, and some may
continue to lament the absence of music within the finales of each show. It is also worth mentioning that in its present form Tobias may have the last words but Sweeney has the last
musical
word (in
West Side Story
Maria’s speech is similarly followed by a moving musical death procession). When Sweeney dies, so does the music. Only in the epilogue do the characters (including Sweeney) return to sing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” one last time. On stage, Tobias needs to kill Sweeney, but he does not need to sing. In the film version, his final speech is also removed. As with Maria and
West Side Story
, if
Sweeney Todd
were an opera, neither Tobias nor Sondheim would have a choice; everything would be sung.

Banfield insightfully captures a crucial distinction between opera and musicals that gets lost in the shuffle when brooding critics focus with Sweeney Todd-like obsession on how much is sung and whether trained opera singers or singing actors are best equipped to handle the demands of the latter genre:

Yet we must again stress that Sondheim’s way of privileging music within melodrama is not opera’s way. The pacing of his sung verbal language remains that of spoken drama, rather than being, as in opera, subservient to the slower and longer-spanned emotional arcs of music. Thus, unlike most opera composers, he does not draw out syllables to unnaturalistic length, nor does he repeat verbal phrases except in a refrain context; the book of
Sweeney Todd
is consequently a good deal fatter than a printed opera libretto. Coupled with this verbal fecundity, he retains wit, colloquialism, and (taking the word in a neutral sense, as building action into the delivery) pantomime as governing
Affekts
in his songs, whose verbal values thereby remain those of the musical theater.
⁴⁴

In the case of
Sweeney Todd
, Angela Lansbury in the role of Mrs. Lovett was an actor who could also sing, but other roles could profit from a singing actor who also possessed a trained voice. It is not the voice that defines the work as an opera or musical but how the work weighs the balance between words and music.

In an interview with David Savran about a decade after
Sweeney Todd
Sondheim expressed his lingering distaste for opera: “I’ve never liked opera and I’ve never understood it. Most opera doesn’t make theatrical sense to me. Things go on forever. I’m not a huge fan of the human voice. I like song, dramatic song. I like music and lyrics together, telling a story.”
⁴⁵
Despite this fundamental antipathy, Sondheim has also readily acknowledged that after seeing a production of Bond’s transformation of George Dibdin Pitt’s
Sweeney Todd
play of 1847 his original intention was to make an opera out of Bond’s entire script rather than a more traditional cut-down libretto version of the play. When Sondheim had reached only page five of Bond’s text after twenty minutes of music, however, he turned to
Night Music
librettist Wheeler and director Prince to convert the work into a musical, but a musical with a lot of through-singing (almost like an opera).

The sheer amount of music—nearly four hundred pages in the published vocal score—as well as its continuity was also greatly influenced by another subgenre, the musical film score. Sondheim has often referred to his intense enjoyment of
Hangover Square
(1945), a thriller about a composer who becomes deranged when he hears certain high pitches and, in a stupor induced by these sounds, unwittingly murders people. At the end of the film the composer-serial killer, played by the legendary film noir star Laird Cregar, collapses while performing the piano concerto he was composing during his saner moments. The film score, including the concerto, was composed by Bernard Herrmann, who during this period was also creating masterful scores for director Orson Welles’s masterpiece
Citizen Kane
and several suspense thrillers in the 1950s and 60s directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including
Vertigo, North by Northwest
, and
Psycho
. The film, and especially Herrmann’s score, had a powerful effect on the fifteen-year-old Sondheim, and since that time he had “always wanted to [write] an answer to
Hangover Square
.”
⁴⁶
In the end, the “Musical Thriller”
Sweeney Todd
, the first show idea generated by Sondheim himself, offered its rich and often continuous score, not to emulate opera, but to emulate film:

“What I wanted to write,” Sondheim says, “was a horror movie. The whole point of the thing is that it’s a background score for a horror film, which is what I intended to do and what it is. All those chords, and that whole kind of harmonic structure … the use of electronic sounds and the loud crashing organ had a wonderful Gothic feeling. It had to be unsettling, scary, and very romantic. In fact, there’s a chord I kept using throughout, which is sort of a personal joke, because it’s a chord that occurred in every Bernard Herrmann score.”
⁴⁷

In a later interview Sondheim elaborates on the connections between Hermann’s score for
Hangover Square
and the musical requirements for a “musical thriller.” His remarks reinforce the position that the plentiful score
of
Sweeney Todd
was due more to the requirements of mid-twentieth-century American horror film scoring and harmony than the demands of nineteenth-century European opera:

I wanted to pay homage to him [Herrmann] with this show, because I had realized that in order to scare people, which [is] what
Sweeney Todd
is about, the only way to you can do it, considering that the horrors out on the street are so much greater than anything you can do on the stage, is to keep music going all the time. That’s the principle of suspense sequences in movies, and Bernard Hermann was a master in that field. So
Sweeney Todd
not only has a lot of singing, it has a lot of underscoring. It’s
infused
with music, to keep the audience in a state of tension, to make them forget they’re in a theater and to prevent them from separating themselves from the action. I based a lot of the score on a specific chord that Herrmann uses in almost all his film work, and spun it out from that. That and the “Dies Irae,” which is one of my favorite tunes, and is full of menace.
⁴⁸