THE SONDHEIM REVIEW Presents - Ghosts of Sweeney Todd

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Ghosts of Sweeney Todd
Hauntings on stage and screen
By Paul M. Puccio
The Sondheim Review (Spring 2009)

Shortly before the release of Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd (Dec. 21, 2007), Stephen Sondheim was quoted in The New York Times cautioning audiences, "I'm hoping people will just forget what they know and enjoy the movie or not. If they go in counting the things that are missing, they're going to be very distracted." This remark reflects Sondheim's conviction that the screen and the stage tell stories in enormously different ways. For him, the most unsatisfying film versions of musicals are those that "underestimate the distance between the languages" of film and theatre. A successful film adaptation of a musical, for Sondheim, never forgets that it is a film, and it takes full and appropriate advantage of cinematic technique to tell its story. It is not a mere "transcription" of a staged performance. To accomplish this, the film's creative team must be ready to cut, shorten, rearrange and re-envision the original stage material - to be "ruthless," as Sondheim himself allows.

If we accept Sondheim's view of both the process and the product of cinematic adaptation, then judging the relative merits of Burton's film, as compared to the stage play, might be a pedantic and even unfriendly exercise: pedantic because all that would result is a catalog of rather inevitable discrepancies, unfriendly because the intention would clearly be to claim that one version of Sweeney Todd is superior to the other. Revisiting the film a year after its release, and after Sondheim's fans and Burton's fans have had ample opportunity to cool their initial passionate responses to the project, we might consider the differences between the film and stage versions and ask, "What difference do the differences make?"

The differences I am interested in are not of performance style or polish. Other critics have judged the acting and singing in the film, and while those performances, of course, shape our views of the characters and our responses to the film, they do not so much alter the substance of Sweeney Todd. This "re-view" is more concerned with some of those "ruthless" ejections - what, in light of the subject, becomes too easy to refer to as the "slashing" of the score. I will pay special attention to the removal of the chorus and "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," and how that removal changes the way we are invited to think about the story itself.

The film's credit sequence, a collage of ominous horror-film-Victorian-London images in which blood drips and spills, introduces familiar musical themes from the stage score, but there is no singing. The first dramatic scene takes place on the ship delivering Todd and Anthony to London, and the film's first words are sung by Anthony ("I have sailed the world"); Christopher Bond's play, on which Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler based their version, begins with this same scene and with precisely those words.

The prologue and the "Ballad," which punctuate many of the play's most dramatic moments, were developed by the musical's creative team. Nothing in the Bond play corresponds to these elements, which is perfectly understandable: Rarely are there choruses in non-musical theatre. The chorus in Sweeney Todd, moreover, plays a number of important roles, both dramatically and theatrically. Usually depicted as members of the urban underclasses, chorus members observe and comment on many of the events in the play. In the original Hal Prince staging, their identity as "workers" was emphasized by their assuming the labor of moving the complex system of platforms, ladders and set pieces that comprised much of the stage machinery - stage traffic that becomes a kind of industrial choreography. The chorus also has the first and last words in the stage play, and they sing those words directly to the audience.

Indeed, the audience is the implied subject of the opening line of the play, as the chorus addresses us: "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" is an invitation - or perhaps a command. "Attend" has three relevant meanings here: It is a call to listen, a call to take heed and a call to be in a particular place. The last of these three meanings is especially rich: The place we share with the chorus is, of curse, the theatre itself. Audience and actors are located in the same physical place, at the same moment in time. When the stage chorus sings, they sing to us then and there, while on film, singing has always already happened. This invitation further suggests that the events and characters in this play are not as comfortably remote as we might like them to be; after all, attending the tale is as easy as attending the theatre.

The musical's epilogue returns to this idea, again turning its attention to the audience and laying the claim that there are Sweeney Todds sharing our world:

Sweeney wishes the world away,

Sweeney's weeping for yesterday,

Hugging the blade, waiting the years,

Hearing the music that nobody hears.

Sweeney waits in the parlor hall,

Sweeney leans on the office wall,

No one can help, nothing can hide you -

Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?

The chorus again acknowledges our presence in the theatre and disturbingly reminds us that there are people in our homes and our offices whose past losses and injustices turn them to seek revenge. (Mrs. Lovett later reminds us that everyone hopes for revenge, but desiring it is not the same as pursuing it or effecting it.) With this universalizing message, the play shortens the intellectual and emotional distance between the Victorian events and our own lives. Hugh Wheeler's final stage direction also dismantles the theoretical "fourth wall" that separates the action on the stage from the audience in the house: "He [Todd] glares at us malevolently for a moment, then slams the iron door in our faces." Could there be anything more hair-raising than being noticed by Sweeney Todd?

And so the chorus and the "Ballad" (especially as sung in the prologue and epilogue) bridge the gap between the world of the play and our own world. But they do more than this; they also summon the events of the tale, even beckoning Sweeney to appear before us. Wheeler's stage directions for the prologue explain that during the verse of the "Ballad" that begins "Swing your razor wide, Sweeney!" two men enter with a body in a bag, which they "unceremoniously" drop into a grave on the stage. (In the commercially available video recording of the touring production, they slide the body into the pie oven.) In Prince's original staging, as the chorus repeats his name, Sweeney Todd rises from his grave, on a hydraulic platform, to the stage.

He returns from the dead in order to tell his story to us. Later in the play, when Todd arrives at Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, she will exclaim, "I thought you was a ghost," but in the prologue, it is the audience who sees a man return from the dead. We are the ones who are haunted by those who refuse to stay quiet in their graves. Todd sings:

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

He served a dark and a vengeful god.

What happened then - well, that's the play,

And he wouldn't want us to give it away.

Notice that Todd refers to himself in the third person here and, furthermore, knows he is in a play. This sort of self-conscious theatricality raises a number of questions that invite us to reflect on the art of the stage itself. Is this Todd himself rising from the grave or an actor playing Sweeney Todd? What does it mean for an audience to witness such a return of the dead? Is this a metaphor for the capacity of the theatre to bring tales from the past back to life? Does it remind us that the stage is always a place where the "dead" walk and talk - giving three-dimensional life to stories and characters that otherwise exist only on (two-dimensional) paper? Is all theatre the performance of nightly resurrections?

The urgency of Todd's return from the grave also implies that there is some serious obligation for this story to be told, as if the storytellers themselves take us by the collar and insist that we listen. John Doyle's 2005 actor-musician production of Sweeney Todd captures this obsessive quality. In his staging, asylum inmates, led by Toby, are compulsive narrators, who evidently pick up their instruments and tell this tale. By putting Toby at the center of that storytelling, Doyle's production reminds us that, of all the characters in Sweeney Todd, he is the one who most closely observes the events and survives to tell them. By the end of the play, Toby comes to a brutal knowledge of "the history of the world," which drives him mad; moreover, it is Toby who begins the singing of the "Ballad" in the epilogue - the first voice to call us back, self-consciously, to the theatre where this tale is told.

None of this survives in Burton's telling of the tale. At one point in the film's development, the "Ballad" was to be sung by the ghosts of Todd's victims, but that plan was dropped. Very likely, such a ghostly chorus would have produced considerable confusion in film audiences, and in any case, in the musical play it is not only members of the chorus who are ghosts - Todd also returns from death. The music of the "Ballad" is retained across the film's soundtrack, but gone are the self-conscious storytelling and ghost-raising that the chorus performs in the stage play. The audience of the film may confront the tragic tale of Sweeney Todd - and certainly Burton and his cast offer us intimate acquaintance with their damaged and hungry souls - but we no longer witness the resurrection of the dead. Sweeney Todd may still see ghosts in the shadows of the city, but the audience does not encounter ghosts in the shadows of the theatre. And while Burton's film does, by virtue of its over-the-top atmosphere and gore, remind us of its own unreality - its artificiality, its condition of being a film - there are no integrated commentaries about the nature of storytelling itself.

Lest we neglect Sondheim's own guidance regarding the distinctions between stage and screen, we ought to acknowledge that the more literal quality of cinematic narration would not easily allow for the incorporation of a chorus that functions as the stage chorus does. In the theatre, after all, we can see all that happens onstage; we can observe the chorus members on the margins of the action, themselves observing that action. We can also more easily absorb multiple frames of action - a scene taking place in the barber shop, for instance, and the chorus singing about that scene elsewhere on stage. The more realistic frame of the camera shot makes such layering of activity difficult to accomplish without a great deal of self-consciousness. To incorporate a commenting chorus into the film's mise-en-scène would have likely resulted in either a film that parodied the stage musical or one that merely replicated it.

This is not to say that Burton's film is not about ghosts. Production Designer Dante Ferretti has created a grimly atmospheric London, with images that evoke the moody paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw and the chiaroscuro of illustrations in late Dickens novels. Let there be no doubt, this is the city that launched a thousand horror movies. Burton's camera often races over cobblestones and through alleys in an unsettling manner that might be even more menacing if it didn't so much resemble the high-speed animation of current video games. Certainly screenwriter John Logan has preserved and also embellished the references to ghosts in the original Wheeler book. But in Burton's Sweeney Todd, only the characters are haunted. The audience is not.

This assessment might appear to put me in the camp of those who "go in counting the things that are missing." In fact, I grant that Burton's more relentless focus on the dark emotions of the major characters can be seen as accomplishing something that the stage play, with its theatrical self-consciousness, has a harder time doing. Moreover, the intimacy of the camera ensures that we see the nuances in performances that this score invites: the Judge pausing a guarded moment before humming in "Pretty Women," as if he knows that his humming will reveal the sudden sexual charge that he is feeling; the passing recognition in Mrs. Lovett's face of her own vulnerability to Todd's violence when he tells her, "You told me to wait," in "Epiphany"; the poignancy of an actual child singing "Not While I'm Around" and the tangle of Mrs. Lovett's mixed reactions to Toby's fears.

Nevertheless, there is always the danger of "distraction," as Sondheim puts it - how an attentiveness to changes wrought by adaptation to film can interfere with our enjoyment of the film on its own terms. For those of us whose memories operate a bit like built-in iPods, such distraction may be inevitable. Sweeney Todd's score tells so much of the story, and the cast recordings are such close-to-complete reproductions of the theatrical soundscape. How does anyone familiar with the score not hear in their minds the words of the choral segments that appear only instrumentally in the film? We hear those singing voices where they are not. And perhaps that is the ultimate way in which Sweeney Todd haunts us.

TSR Associate Editor Paul M. Puccio is a professor of English at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. He has been a contributor to the magazine since 2001.