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Preview review of ‘Sweeney Todd’
It’s only the paramount Broadway musical from our paramount Broadway artist.
So initial concerns from purists about Tim Burton’s storybook adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” skittered from mildly charmed to wildly alarmed.
The faithful can now rest easy. Burton’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a work of art. Radically different from the stage show that steam-rolled critics and audiences in 1979, it will be remembered for its macabre cinematic vision and the way it nevertheless retains the original’s musical charge.
The material was born of a urban rumor, then grew as a stage melodrama about a London barber who murders customers, high and low, avenging his abducted wife and daughter, while his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, bakes the victims into meat pies. For the musical, Sondheim, along with librettist Hugh Wheeler and stage director Harold Prince, magnified the native gruesomeness of the story, while adding a gritty, alienating view of dog-eat-dog Victorian London parallel to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera.”
Subsequent stage productions stripped “Sweeney Todd” of its spectacle (“Teeny Todds,” they were called) or subdued Jonathan Tunick’s churning, pounding orchestrations (in the recent Broadway revival, the actors also played the instruments; effective but deliberately underwhelming). Still, the musical has almost always triumphed on stage, even when produced by opera companies with oversized voices or community theaters with undersized acting talents.
Altering the pacing at every step, Burton slices off some verses and replaces the choral passages with animated credits and other filmic devices. He elevates, however, Tunick’s crucial orchestrations to dominant status, almost as if to make up for the smaller, lighter voices of his stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter.
Depp is in his element. Todd is the older, madder version of his Edward Scissorhands, whose haggard, dour expression can be played for melodrama, or, in the case of the brilliantly pastel “By the Sea,” for laughs. His voice never boils with volcanic anguish or vengeance, but it trips lightly, roughly, expertly over Sondheim’s clever lyrics. Bonham-Carter, despite scare make-up, is probably the loveliest Mrs. Lovett ever, yet she manages creepiness and warmth at the same time.
Alan Rickman recycles his jerky villain from the “Harry Potter” series and other movies as Todd’s arch-adversary, Judge Turpin, and Sacha Baron Cohen makes Todd’s temporary professional rival — and first victim — silly and accessible.
The real headliner, however, is the art direction by Dante Ferretti, Oscar winner for “The Aviator,” and a quirky seer with exactly the right sensibility for Sondheim’s operatic tendencies and Burton’s fascination with Edward Gorey-esque animation.
Black-bricked, gray-shrouded London never looked more menacing, while buckets of scarlet blood burst from Ferretti’s limited palette, finally giving the musical its missing link to Grand Guignol, the 19th-century stage equivalent of today’s slasher movies.
Quibblers will find fault, haters of musicals will not be converted, but Burton’s “Sweeney Todd” will linger in the shadowy dreams of many a unsuspecting viewer.
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