A slice of scary tale
Director sees ‘Sweeney Todd’ as murderer with heart
At Stephen Sondheim’s behest, frequent collaborator Harold Prince attended a London play by Christopher Bond entitled “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” Bond had based his play on a 19th-century potboiler featuring a demented barber who goes on a slashing spree, while seeking revenge against an evil judge who’d ruined his life. The year was 1973.
Prince was underwhelmed. “I told Steve, ‘I don’t get it: it’s a hoot and a howl, people’s theater, but why do it? It seems campy to me,’ ” Prince later recalled.
But Prince also wasn’t one to underestimate Sondheim, whose musical adaptation of Bond’s play went on to collect eight Tony awards in 1979, including best musical, best score (Sondheim) and best book (Hugh Wheeler). Prince took home a Tony for best director. And despite its demanding, difficult score, “Sweeney Todd” has become a staple in American theater.
The Skylight Music Theatre has played its own role in making a classic of Sondheim’s musical; following productions in 1987 and 1997, it will unveil its third staging of “Sweeney” on May 19.
“There’s true humanity within every single character. I want to remove any caricature, or any version of it that I’ve seen, to try to get at the heart of why these people are doing what they’re doing.” MATTHEW OZAWA, DIRECTOR
But notwithstanding all that success, Prince’s concern remains valid; Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation was neither the first nor last “Sweeney” to play up the guts and gore, resulting in chills and thrills but simultaneously often failing to deliver fully dimensioned characters.
As Sondheim admitted when writing about “Sweeney” in “Finishing the Hat,” “the problem lay in how to make the flamboyance of the outrageous story believable to a contemporary audience.”
Even as we talked in a Skylight rehearsal hall amid props including body organ parts and a fullfledged, disarmingly realistic cadaver, Director Matthew Ozawa expressed hope that this “Sweeney” will feed more to the audience than Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies, stuffed with the remains of the barber’s victims.
Three-dimensional characters
“There’s true humanity within every single character,” Ozawa insisted. “I want to remove any caricature, or any version of it that I’ve seen, to try to get at the heart of why these people are doing what they’re doing.”
Who was Sweeney, before we meet him and before the Judge sent him to an Australian penal colony? “An unbelievably charismatic guy who loved his wife Lucy and daughter Joanna,” Ozawa said. “He had the wit and charm to create a thriving business as a barber. You wouldn’t go in for a shave with someone who was scary or didn’t know what they were doing.”
Ozawa points out that while Sweeney takes bloody revenge, he’s driven by love, as he remembers both the beautiful wife the Judge coveted and the now-grown daughter the Judge is raising as a ward.
“There’s a lot of thwarted or misdirected love in this show,” Ozawa said, noting that Mrs. Lovett’s demented pie-baking and arguably even the Judge’s growing lust for Lucy involve obsessions that originate in something better (Ozawa is including the oft-cut song in which the Judge wrestles with feelings he knows are wrong).
“We care about the characters in ‘Sweeney’ because they care so passionately about each other,” Bond wrote, in an admiring introduction to Sondheim’s musical that argued much the same point.
Vowing vengeance
But even as characters yearn for love they’re largely denied, the charming and carefree Sweeney of yore is being replaced by the killing machine Sweeney becomes, as he insists “they all deserve to die” while vowing “I will have vengeance.”
Like Prince – who worried that the increasingly unhinged Sweeney’s blood lust wasn’t sufficiently motivated – Ozawa is leaning on the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying class divide to help explain what might drive people to seek revenge against a world they never made.
“Everyone in our ensemble will be from a different class,” Ozawa said. “We’ll have an upper class, a middle class and a lower class, with the second floor of this set only being occupied by the upper class. The lower and middle classes will be moving the set’s various units and doing the labor, all night.”
To an even greater extent than was true with Prince’s then-daring 1979 Broadway set, the Skylight set will be abstract, suggesting a machine that increasingly finds its rhythm, much as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett become more ruthlessly efficient in their killing.
Ozawa is also invoking images of medical operating theaters, further emphasizing ways in which the body was being mapped. Dissected. Domesticated. Packaged.
Immersive Theater
“In medical operating theaters from the period, actual human bodies were dissected before a live audience of upper class people, who’d watch and see brains and hearts being removed,” Ozawa said. “These operating theaters would look like actual theaters, but one wasn’t watching human beings put on a show. One was watching human beings being dismembered.”
Sort of like the slumming Londoners who traipse to Mrs. Lovett’s hole in the wall for a savory meat pie. Or like audiences attending a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” allowing theater patrons to have and eat their pie. “Human beings like horror,” Ozawa said. “It allows them to feel like they’re where it happened, while still remaining safe.”
Even as he promises that the humor baked into Sondheim’s show will bubble to the surface, Ozawa is hoping that this “Sweeney” will draw us in, making it harder to maintain a voyeuristic distance — no matter how much we may laugh.
“We’re becoming desensitized to things that are horrible,” Ozawa said. “We want to find all of them funny or amusing or entertaining. That’s what Facebook and our phones are doing to our culture. Everything has become sensational; if it’s not sensational, it’s not considered newsworthy. We forget that we’re watching – or, in our daily lives, encountering – other human beings.”
“I’m hoping this show surprises people, in ways that feel relatable to their current life,” Ozawa said. “I want them to be a bit scared. And I hope they’re driven to more acutely question things about the way our world is organized rather than just accepting it all as true.”
To invoke Sondheim’s famous opening line, Ozawa is hoping audiences will truly “attend the tale.”