A Different Side of Sondheim/Richard Rodney Bennett (1979)
DRG Records
LP SL 5182
Cassette SLC–5182
Includes: “You Must Meet My Wife,” “Night Waltz I”
Marry Me a Little/Craig Lucas and Suzanne Henry (1981)
RCA Records
LP ABL1–4159 (S)
Cassette ABK1–4159; reissue 7142-4-RG
Includes: “Two Fairy Tales”—Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry; “Bang!” —Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry; “Silly People”—Craig Lucas
Evelyn Lear Sings Sondheim and Bernstein (1981)
Mercury Records Golden Imports
LP MR 75136
Cassette MRI 75136
Includes: “Send in the Clowns”
A Stephen Sondheim Collection/Jackie Cain and Roy Kral (1982)
Finesse Records
LP FW 38324 (S)
Cassette FWT 38324
DRG Records (1990 reissue)
Cassette DSC 25102
Includes: “Send in the Clowns”—Jackie Cain
A Stephen Sondheim Evening (1983)
RCA Records
LP CBL2-4745 (S); 2 record set
Cassette CBK2-4745; 2 tape set
Includes: “Send in the Clowns”—Angela Lansbury; “The Miller’s Son” —Liz Callaway
A Little Sondheim Music/Los Angeles Vocal Arts Ensemble (1984)
Angel Records
LP EMI DS-37347 (S)
Cassette EMI 4DS-37347
Includes: “Overture”—Michael Gallup, Darlene Romano, Delcina Stevenson, Jeffrey Araluce, Rickie Weiner-Gole; “Night Waltz I”/“Night Waltz II”—Janet Smith, Darlene Romano, Paul Johnson, Rickie Weiner-Gole, Michael Gallup; “In Praise of Women”—Michael Gallup; “A Weekend in the Country”—Janet Smith, Michael Gallup, Ensemble; “Send in the Clowns” —Rickie Weiner-Gole, Dale Morich
The Broadway Album/Barbra Streisand (1985)
Columbia Records
LP OC 40092
Cassette OCT 40092
Includes: “Send in the Clowns” (with Sondheim’s revised lyric)
A Collector’s Sondheim (1985)
RCA Records
LP CRL4-5359 (S); 4 record set
Cassette CRK4-5359; 4 tape set
Includes: “Overture”/“Night Waltz I”—Orchestra/John J. Moore, Chris Melville, Liz Robertson, David Bexon, Jacquey Chappell; “The Glamorous Life”—Christine McKenna, Jean Simmons, John J. Moore, Chris Melville, Liz Robertson, David Bexon, Jacquey Chappell, Hermione Gingold; “In Praise of Women”—David Kernan; “A Weekend in the Country”—Diane Langton, Veronica Page, Joss Ackland, Maria Aitken, David Kernan, Terry Mitchell; “Liaisons”—Hermione Gingold; “The Miller’s Son”—Diane Langton (all six tracks from original London cast recording); “Two Fairy Tales”—Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry; “Silly People”—Craig Lucas; “Bang!”—Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry (all three tracks from original cast recording of Marry Me a Little); “The Glamorous Life” (The Letter Song)—Elaine Tomkinson ; “Night Waltz II”—Teri Ralston, Gene Varrone, Benjamin Rayson, Beth Fowler, Barbara Lang (out-take from original Broadway cast recording); “Send in the Clowns”—Angela Lansbury
Sondheim (1985)
Book-of-the-Month Records
LP 81-7515 (S); 3 record set
Cassette 91-7516; 2 tape set
Includes: “Liaisons”—Chamber Ensemble; “Send in the Clowns”—Joyce Castle; “You Must Meet My Wife”—Chamber Ensemble; “The Glamorous Life” (The Letter Song)—Betsy Joslyn (the motion picture version)
Old Friends/Geraldine Turner Sings the Songs of Stephen Sondheim (1986)
Larrikin Records (Australia)
LP LRF-169
Cassette TGLRF-169
Includes: “The Miller’s Son”
(This album was reissued by Silva Screen Records [London] under the title The Stephen Sondheim Songbook LP Song 001, Cassette Song C001
Cleo Sings Sondheim/Cleo Laine (1988)
RCA Records
LP 7702-1-RC
Cassette 7702-4-RC
Includes: “Liaisons,” “Send in the Clowns,” “The Miller’s Son”
Julie Wilson Sings the Stephen Sondheim Songbook (1988)
DRG Records
LP SL 5206
Cassette SLC 5206
Includes: “Send in the Clowns”
The Other Side of Sondheim/Jane Harvey (1988)
Atlantic Records
LP 81833-1
Cassette 81833-4
Includes: “Send in the Clowns”
Symphonic Sondheim/Don Sebesky Conducts The London Symphony Orchestra (1990)
WEA Records (London)
LP 9031-72 119-1
Cassette 9031-72 119-4
Includes: “Send in the Cloums”
Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall (1992)
RCA Victor
Includes: “Send in the Clowns,” “Remember?”
A Little Night Music (Royal National Theatre Recording, 1995)
Tring Records
Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music/Terry Trotter (1997)
Varèse Sarabande
Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
MUSIC AND LYRICS BY
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
BOOK BY
HUGH WHEELER
FROM AN ADAPTATION BY CHRISTOPHER BOND
INTRODUCTION BY
CHRISTOPHER BOND
Dorothy Loudon, who replaced Angela Lansbury in the role of Mrs. Lovett
INTRODUCTION
For me there is only one rule in the theater: Does it work? And by that I don’t mean will the show run for twenty years or make X million dollars, but have I come out of the theater feeling more alive than when I went in? Has my imagination been fired, my emotions been aroused, my brain kick-started into life? Is my heart pounding and my mind racing; and, if the show is a musical, do a series of discordant and Neanderthal groans issue from my mouth? (This is known as Chris hums the score.) When I see Sweeney Todd all these things usually happen.
My involvement with the show goes back to 1968—I wrote the play on which Stephen Sondheim based his musical, have directed four productions of the musical in England and Scandinavia, and seen a further six or seven productions around the world. What follows is a highly subjective and partial history that will almost certainly be inaccurate in places—I am writing this entirely from memory as I am in Sweden directing a show and have no access to any notes, diaries, books, or records. A perfect opportunity to be a theater critic for a day and try to force the facts to fit my own prejudices . . .
HISTORY
Sweeney Todd is pure fiction. Plenty of unhinged and vindictive malcontents have worked in Fleet Street over the last two hundred years (until very recently most English newspapers had their offices there), but no one has ever succeeded in finding a shred of evidence as to the existence of a Demon Barber thereabouts. There was one in revolutionary Paris—a Jacobin who cut his customers’ throats, though whether for profit or because of political differences is unclear. In seventeenth-century Scotland there are accounts of a family of robbers led by one Sawney Bean who are said to have eaten their victims. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus kills and bakes two brothers in a pie before serving them up to their mother, Tamora, Queen of the Goths; and every culture has tales of cannibalism from the Gilgamesh of Babylon through Transylvania to the present day. Some would claim that a benign form of cannibalism remains with us in ritualized form in the communion service of the Catholic Church.
It’s against this background that Sweeney Todd started life in the 1830s in London. He was the creation of George Dibden-Pitt, a freelance journalist who wrote an account of Sweeney’s life and crimes for a “penny dreadful,” a broadsheet that sold for a penny and was roughly equivalent to the more preposterous of our present-day tabloids. “Aliens Bonked My Mother-in-Law!” “Vicar Eats Royal Gerbil—Shock Horror!” etc. Sweeney was a psych
opath who killed for profit and Mrs. Lovett a harridan who baked the bodies. The story was widely believed to be true, and aroused such interest that George immediately adapted it for the stage, where it became an instant success.
MELODRAMA
The theaters George’s play was performed in were known as “Blood Tubs” on account of the fact that their repertoire was almost exclusively devoted to shows of the most lurid and sensational kind. Large helpings of sex and violence, with a perfunctory spoonful of Christian humbug at the end. The atmosphere these shows were performed in was rough and boisterous, and whilst we can speculate on the standard of the performances when measured against today’s menu at the bourgeois culture trough, there is no doubt that they possessed at least some of the essential ingredients that go to make good theater: energy and commitment crackling between the stage and the audience; involvement; passion and fun. Nowadays the word melodrama is usually used pejoratively, as if there were something inherently cheap and phony about it, and modern revivals usually seek to poke fun at the form rather than attempt to get to grips with the subject matter. Such exercises seem to me to be pointless and depressing; mocking and distorting the past may make us feel superior, but it can give us no understanding of the present. Having said that, there is no doubt that on the printed page most melodramas seem lifeless and stilted and give very few clues as to how they must have been in action. And the original script of Sweeney Todd is no exception.
THE PLAY
In 1968 I was working as an actor at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, an excellent repertory theater in the Midlands—the center of England. The theater announced Sweeney Todd as a forthcoming attraction; no one had read the script but another melodrama, A Ticket-of-Leave Man, had been a success two seasons before, and we thought that if the script needed doctoring we could sort it out in rehearsals. Due to a series of cock-ups we didn’t get hold of a copy of the play until two weeks before rehearsals were due to begin, and on the page the show was crude, repetitive, and simplistic—hardly any plot and less character development. It didn’t need doctoring, it needed a heart transplant. And preferably new lungs and balls as well. I had had a novel published the year before and with the optimism/arrogance of youth (I was twenty-three), cheerfully volunteered to write my first play: It would retain the title, the razors, the pies, and the trick chair and be delivered in a week’s time. Fortunately it wrote itself. I crossed Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy for a plot; added elements of pastiche Shakespeare in a sort of blankish verse for Sweeney, the Judge, and the lovers to talk; borrowed the name of the author of The Prisoner of Zenda for my sailor boy; remembered some market patter I’d learnt as a child; and adapted the wit and wisdom of Brenda, who ran the greengrocer’s shop opposite my house, for Mrs. Lovett’s ruminations upon life, death, and the state of her sex life. I met my deadline with a couple of hours to spare and started rehearsals playing Tobias Ragg, which I’d written for myself, a week later. The show was well received and was subsequently produced several times in various theaters in England, and eventually, due to the efforts of my agent, Blanche Marvin, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in London in the mid-seventies. It was there that Stephen Sondheim saw it. And perhaps that’s where the real story begins because whilst I have great affection for the play, until Steve performed his alchemical miracle on it, it remained a neat pastiche that worked well if performed with sufficient panache, but base metal nevertheless. But the transformation to pure gold was about to begin.
SONDHEIM
Blanche told me that someone named Stephen Sondheim had seen the show—I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him at that time. There had been talk of doing the play in New York, but the American producers who were interested in the project, Richard Barr and Charles Woodward, were now asking if we would be willing to shelve that idea in favor of a possible musical that Steve would write. Blanche was very enthusiastic about the idea. I took her advice. I remember two meetings round about that time but can’t remember which order they came in.
I think the first was with Steve’s agent, Flora Roberts, and I’m fairly certain I was drunk (a semi-permanent state until 1984 when I knocked it on the head and joined AA). I remember being terrified of her (I still am) and thinking that she reminded me of a cross between Mae West and a New York version of Lady Bracknell. She was extremely direct and straightforward and in attempting to match these qualities I swore a lot and ended up by saying (expletives deleted): “Look, if he [Steve] is any good, and she [Blanche] says he is, then let him do what he likes with it [my play].” Which with the benefit of hindsight is one of the more spectacularly sensible things I’ve said in my life.
The other meeting was with Steve at the Granada studios in Manchester where they were filming numbers from Side by Side by Sondheim for TV. I was moving house at that time, and, since I was driving a large lorry full of furniture, was sober for once. We talked about the play in some detail and what struck me most forcibly was his complete lack of bullshit. “What a lovely bloke,” I remember thinking. “What’s he doing working in the theater?” I find it difficult to write about someone whom I admire so much without it sounding soppy; suffice it to say that since I’ve become familiar with his work I find it difficult to sit through a show that isn’t by Stephen Sondheim without wishing that it was. I have also been known to pick fist-fights with people who complain that his work has no heart. For their information the heart is a large and powerful muscle that pumps blood, a singularly inappropriate organ to tie up in a pink ribbon or fit with a neat attachment for wearing on the sleeve. And from “Being Alive” to “No One Is Alone” and at all points in between I hear the double thump of a heart as big as a house. And if in Sweeney the blood it pumps is sometimes black with bile it nevertheless remains hot, strong, and foaming with life. Steve has always been generous about my contribution to Sweeney: it’s nice to be able to say thanks.
THE MUSICAL
Steve’s original intention was to write a sung-through show without dialogue, but when this proved impractical he approached Hugh Wheeler, with whom he had collaborated on previous shows, including A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures, to write the book for the show. It’s no secret that Hugh Wheeler and I had our differences: professional rather than personal, but since he died in 1987 I don’t feel it’s appropriate to discuss them here as there were doubtless faults on both sides, and he’s unable to put his point of view. What is indisputable is that Sweeney Todd is a book-heavy musical. Its storyline and character development run directly parallel to those in the play; the plot and subplots are complicated and all major characters interlock and interrelate. Indeed, were one feeling pretentious one could even subtitle the piece Aspects of Love, for that is what everyone in the show is looking for. It is Sweeney’s love for his wife and daughter that sustains him through his fifteen-year exile and brings him back to London; it is Mrs. Lovett’s love for Sweeney that makes her keep his razors and forges anew their fatal partnership. Judge Turpin and Anthony both love Johanna in their different ways; and Johanna reciprocates. The Beggar Woman once loved and now “loves” professionally. Tobias has never known love but desires it above all else. Add to all this Sweeney’s relationship with his razors and Mrs. Lovett’s with the coin of the realm and you have just about covered the entire spectrum from necrophilia through rape and filial duty to romance. We care about the characters in Sweeney because they care so passionately about each other; and on a good night we plunge headlong to triumph and disaster with them. The music sees to that. I’m not competent to comment on the score (I’ve been known to ask a conductor if he could cut three and a half bars of Verdi to help me stage an aria; when the wind is from the north I can still feel a piece of his baton lodged somewhere up my left nostril) beyond saying that for me it perfectly mirrors and distills the particular people and precise situations in the show. And lifts them to another plane.
SWEENEY IN PERFORMANCE
M
y only quarrel with Hal Prince’s original Broadway production at the Uris Theatre is that it was at the Uris Theatre. It seems a strange place to tell stories in; and that’s what we do, isn’t it? But then I have very seldom enjoyed a show in a venue that seats many more than a thousand people. A lot depends upon the architecture, but generally speaking if you go much beyond that number I find it difficult to get involved in what’s happening. The sets get larger, the amplification gets greater, the hype begins, the tickets get more expensive to pay for it all, the hype increases, and eventually the event begins to take on all the subtlety and humanity of a Roman circus. Theater is a personal and human activity and I think it’s usually best on a human scale. It’s a tribute to everyone concerned with the original production that it worked so brilliantly, but I’ve always felt it did so in spite of, rather than because of, where it opened.
As with any worthwhile and complex show there are many ways of interpreting it and balancing its component parts. There is no right or wrong way, only, “Does the end result add up to a graphic realization of the authors’ intentions? Does it successfully tell their story here and now?” Within these parameters directors, designers, actors, and technicians make the choices that give their particular production its particular emphasis and dynamics. What follows are some highly personal preferences.
Four by Sondheim Page 24