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

Beggar Woman and her “Alms” music no longer welcome Sweeney and Anthony when they get off the boat in the first scene. Instead she sings her “Alms” when she stumbles upon Anthony in front of Johanna’s house (a more logical place for her mother to hover, although we do not yet know her identity). In some newly inserted dialogue after the “Alms” music Anthony gives her some money and the Beggar Woman in return informs the young man, who has seen Johanna in the upstairs window and is clearly smitten, that Judge Turpin is the owner of the house and that the young woman Johanna is his ward. She then warns Anthony of dire consequences should he pursue the beautiful ward in the window.61

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein acquired control of their own film adaptations, stage properties were at the mercy of producers and directors who simply did not believe in the material and were given carte blanche not only to cut mercilessly but to add songs by studio composers. Sondheim’s contract allowed him the authority to approve or reject the proposed changes. Since he agreed with the premise that cuts would be needed whenever the music held up the action and that the film should be primarily cinematic rather than theatrical, Sondheim himself assumed the major role in the decisions of what to include, delete, or rework.

One of the deleted songs in the film, the Judge’s version of “Johanna”—a completely different song from Anthony’s “Johanna”—was also deleted in the stage version of the show and relegated to the Appendix of the published vocal score (although it appears on the cast recording and in the revised vocal score in its originally intended position). Prince either found the song offensive or thought others would object to the depiction of masochism and self-flagellation in the song and urged Sondheim to take it out. A few years later, however, Sondheim persuaded Prince to reinstate the Judge’s “Johanna” in the New York City Opera production (1984) and has continued to advocate its inclusion in future productions.62 In the film, the Judge’s perverted nature could be observed more directly in the privacy of his room where screen audiences watch as he fondles his leather-bound volumes of pornography and spies on Johanna through a peephole in the wall. Within a few seconds the film captures what it takes the Judge nearly four minutes to sing, and although the Judge now has nothing of his own to sing, this is less of an expectation for a major character in a movie than on a stage.

Much of the material involving the chorus also vanished from the screen version, although some of this music, so important to the stage effect, found its way into orchestral underscoring. The most audible example of this non-vocal use occurs over the extensive Opening Title sequence in which “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” can be heard without either words or voices (there are, however, some chorus-like synthesized vocals during an orchestral climax). The orchestral vamp from the “Ballad” recurs throughout the film and contributes greatly to the melodramatic atmosphere. Other ensembles, including “The Letter” quintet, the “City on Fire!” chorus of Fogg Asylum lunatics, and a good slice of the “God, That’s Good!” pie, join the discarded “Parlor Songs” among the major deletions of act II.

In his interview with Jesse Green in the New York Times, Sondheim estimated that about 20 percent of the remaining songs were trimmed and “in all fewer than 10 of the stage show’s 25 major numbers survived substantially intact.”63 Add up all the time saved and the result is a leaner and meaner Sweeney approximately one-third shorter than its staged predecessor. When interviewed for a special feature of the DVD, Sondheim extends the 80 percent–20 percent ratio he offered for the first act twenty years earlier in “Author and Director” to encompass the entire show: “There are very few moments of silence from the orchestra pit in the show. I’d say the show is probably about 80% sung, 20% talk, but even the talk, about half of that, is underscored, and it’s the way to keep the audience in a state of tension, because if they ever get out of the fantasy, they’re looking at, you know, a ridiculous story with a lot of stage blood.”64

Burton’s Sweeney Todd gathered a lot of critical attention and audience appeal for casting the popular Depp, an enormously talented and versatile actor who had worked with the director on six previous films (e.g., Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood) but had never sung anything other than backup vocals in a rock band. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of film technology, it was not necessary for Depp—or Helena Bonham Carter, who had never sung at all, in the arguably more demanding role of Mrs. Lovett—to be able to project in a theater or even to have to sing all the notes of a song consecutively with the correct rhythms and pitches.

The recording process went through several stages. First, music supervisor Mike Higham created a backing track without voices. Then, after rehearsing with Sondheim, the cast recorded their solos and duets (the only exception was Laura Michelle Kelly in the role of the Beggar Woman and Lucy who sang live on the film set). Each member of the cast was recorded on a separate track. The solitary sounds could then be refined, retuned, and mediated sufficiently that a sung whisper could be heard over a mighty orchestra. Finally, this orchestra of sixty-four musicians, more than double the number that squeezed into the Uris Theater in 1979, recorded the voiceless backing track audiences hear in the film.

In borrowing a major production technique from MTV and rock videos, Burton’s Sweeney departed from two generations of traditional film practice, in which the actors in the film or the singers who dub the actors in the film lip-synch to a finished visual product. Burton’s Sweeney reversed the process (with the professional singer Kelly again the sole exception). The recordings came first.