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

After the recordings, the actors, none of them dubbed, lip-synched to the pre-recorded sounds, which included the sixty-four piece orchestra and any duet partnerships in a given song. Lip-synching to prerecorded sound, the norm in MTV and rock videos, was rare, if not unprecedented in the production of a film musical. The process seemed to help produce a natural and intimate look to the singing without any operatic signs of strain in the final product.

At every turn Burton applies cinematic techniques, some of which would be difficult to capture in the theater. They appear most often in the narrative songs, “Poor Thing,” where Mrs. Lovett’s tale of the Barber and his Wife is shown in vivid flashback; “A Little Priest,” in which the camera zooms in from Mrs. Lovett’s window on people who represent the various occupations of potential victims described in the song; and “By the Sea,” in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney are placed in the locations and situations described in the song. These songs are also set off by adding splashes of color to the grayish tint that pervades the film (other color splashes would appear from time to time such as Pirelli’s garish blue outfit and Sweeney’s specially constructed red barber’s chair). This kind of filmic enhancement of text and story has become more common in recent years, for example, the visual realization of thoughts in Rob Marshall’s award-winning Chicago in 2002). A rare early example of the practice can be seen in the visual images that capture the bridge of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1936 Show Boat (starting with images of stevedores sweating and straining and Joe, played by Paul Robeson ending up in jail looking up at a distorted camera angle). It seems surprising how seldom directors have taken advantage of this cinematic opportunity to tell a story.65 Perhaps the success of Burton’s Sweeney will influence future directors.

In a DVD special feature and in other public interviews, Sondheim makes the case that Burton’s Sweeney Todd is not only different from the stage Sweeney but is different from other film adaptations. He offers this advice to audiences who may be disappointed in this difference: “I’m going to urge them as much as possible to leave their memory of the stage show outside the door, because, as I say, unlike all other movies of musicals that I know, this really is an attempt to take the material of the stage musical and completely transform it into a movie. This is not a movie of a stage show, this is a movie based on a stage show.”66 In a public conversation with former New York Times theater critic and current political affairs editorialist Frank Rich that took place in Portland, Oregon, on March 11, 2008, a few months after Burton’s Sweeney Todd opened nationally and one month before its release on DVD, Sondheim went as far as to say that Burton’s transformation was the “most satisfying version of a stage piece I’ve ever seen.”

The Lapine Years (1984–1994): Sunday in the Park with George

After Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim joined forces with a new, younger creative partner, James Lapine (b. 1949). During the next ten years, Lapine became arguably as important and innovative a collaborator as Prince and his generational peers were in the previous decade and exerted an influence in Sondheim’s post-Prince development comparable to that of earlier collaborators such as Bernstein, Robbins, Styne, and Laurents before the Prince years.

Sondheim’s first show with Lapine was about the art of making art. The first act of Sunday in the Park with George focuses on the painter Georges Seurat, and the creation of the painting lent its title to Sondheim’s musical. The first act also creates the imagined lives of his imagined mistress Dot among others who have become immobilized and immortalized in this famous painting in its permanent residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. In contrast to Franklin Shepard, the fictional composer in Merrily We Roll Along, Seurat was not only an actual historical figure but one of the least compromising artists in any field of art. In this landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning show, Sondheim and Lapine, who wrote the book and directed, explore the relationship between artistic and procreative legacies as embodied in the contrast between the ephemeral cream pies of Louis the baker versus the timelessness of an artistic masterpiece, and the contrasting legacies of children and art.67 In his dedication to art Seurat has foresworn his relationship with Dot, although through her he will leave a human legacy in their daughter Marie and, two generations later, in another artist named George (without the “s”), Marie’s grandson, whom we will meet one hundred years later in act II.

In the song “No Life,” Sondheim creates more characters who voice criticisms that Sondheim himself has been subjected to throughout much of his career. When viewing a tableau vivant of Seurat’s recently completed Bathing at Asnières, his rival, Jules, and Jules’s wife, Yvonne, decry the passionless, lifeless, unlyrical, and inappropriate subject matter of Seurat’s paintings. Yvonne ridicules Seurat for painting “boys with their clothes off,” and Jules responds mockingly that he “must paint a factory next.” Similarly, Sondheim has frequently been indicted for writing about cold, neurotic, and frequently unlikable people and for confronting unpalatable subjects ranging from marital infidelity (e.g., Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park, Into the Woods), the loss of youthful dreams (Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Woods), murder (Pacific Overtures, Woods, Assassins), and even serial murder (Sweeney Todd).

The contrast between accessible and difficult art is powerfully delineated in Dot’s song, “Everybody Loves Louis.” Louis the baker, a man who neither fathers a child nor sings a song in the show, is willing to take Dot and her child by Seurat to America, where the baker can cater to the whims of a wealthy and boorish Texas businessman. In vivid contrast to the unlovable, unpopular, and overly intellectual painter, Louis is lovable, popular, and “bakes from the