Fall 1991: Sweeney Todd

 

Book by Hugh Wheeler
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

A sweeping tale of romance, vengeance, and murder, Sweeney Todd is an extraordinary musical based on the 19th century legend of a half-mad English barber. Escaping from unjust imprisonment, Sweeney returns home to exact a peculiar revenge on his customers with the help of his enterprising accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, whose meat pies are suddenly the tastiest in London. Winner of 8 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Sweeney Todd is a grand musical of comedy and thrills with a riveting and melodic score by Stephen Sondheim, one of musical theatre's most brilliant composer/lyricists.

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Director's Notes

The obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy on his neighbors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in handfuls out the window. The warrior sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save."

Antonin Artaud's words describing people's actions during a plague speak of a chaos and a madness which is present in everyone, just waiting to surface. It also speaks of the need for theatre to explore unexplored territory: to reveal what we all have inside of us.

We go to the Corner, to the Downtown Mall, we see the homeless - we look the other way; we pass on by. Tonight, allow these people to speak to you, to tell you the story of someone else who was marginalized by society. And allow yourself to listen. Open yourself to Sweeney, and know that he is everywhere.

Over the last 150 years, Sweeney Todd has become one of the most famous characters in British folklore. While scholars disagree whether or not Todd was an actual person, certain things are known for sure. One of those is that the first appearance of Sweeney Todd in print was in November, 1846 in The People's Periodical and Family Library, which was called a Penny Dreadful - a short weekly newspaper (not unlike current Tabloids) which printed romantic stories, letters and the like, usually intended for women. In the serial, called "The String of Pearls," Todd was only a secondary character, however, his activities earned him the title of "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" right from the first publication.

Dramatized the next year on the stage of the Britannia Theatre in London, Todd began to emerge as a more significant character, and through the next few years, different authors and playwrights continued to plagiarize the original story, ultimately making the story entirely about Sweeney Todd, and his neighbor Mrs. Lovett. Up until the 1970's, however, Todd was always presented as an unsympathetic character, as purely a stock melodramatic villain, and the plays always ended with good triumphing over evil.

However, in 1973, Christopher Bond presented a new production of the Todd story in the East End of London which radically reworked the earlier story, introducing revenge and social commentary into the plot. Todd becomes a sympathetic character, a victim of society only driven to his acts because of injustice. The production you see tonight is Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, and High Wheeler's musical adaptation of that play.

Whether or not Sweeney Todd ever set up practice at 186 Fleet Street (the legendary address of his nefarious shop) we will probably never know - however, there is evidence which suggests he may have existed. As written by Peter Haining in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (W.H. Allen, London: 1980) in the 1880 publication of the Annual Register for England, "during the renovation and/or removal of some very old houses at the Temple end of Fleet Street, a large pit of bones was found under the cellars of 186 - the site of Todd's shop."

~David Tarleton, Director, Fall '91