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

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).

Bernard Herrmann and the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath)

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