Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

best actor (Len Cariou), actress (Angela Lansbury), director (Prince), scenic design (Eugene Lee), costume design (Franne Lee), book (Wheeler), best score (Sondheim), and best show.

Sweeney Todd as Melodrama and as Opera

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.”35Sweeney 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