I posted a video of the South Bank Show film on the staging of Sweeney Todd a few days ago and have been obsessed with Stephen Sondheim's musical ever since. I didn't see Sweeney in 1980, but I have strong memories of watching that film about that production, with the result that I cannot quite accept anyone but Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock in the lead roles.
Someone has made the video above by pulling out some of the scenes of the finished show from the film, and if you are as obsessed as me you will want to listen to the audio recording of the whole of the closing performance of that first London production.
The closing performance came after four months, and a lot of money was lost. It was an expensive production, including a full orchestra, and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was a huge venue to fill.
Stephen Sondheim was not then, at least in Britain, the acknowledged master of musical theatre that he became. Side by Side by Sondheim had recently been a success in the West End, but it was a revue and had been staged in a theatre less the half the size of Drury Lane. Nor was Sweeney Todd's subject matter calculated to bring the coach parties in.
But it was the lukewarm response of the critics that got most of the blame - you can hear Quilley mention them in his brief speech at the end of the audio recording. And even in the ecstatic response of Michael Billington, you can make out the factors that helped keep the crowds away:
Sweeney Todd is the reversal of everything we traditionally expect of a musical. It has a powerful and gripping story, hardly a single extractable tune, a fierce sense of social justice. Yet, after seeing it on Broadway 18 months ago and now at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, I would call it sensationally effective.
Indeed, burning a boat or two, I would say it is one of the two (My Fair Lady being the other) durable works of popular musical theatre in my lifetime.
Even if that was going it a little, he was a better predictor than most of his colleagues. Sweeney Todd is now accepted as a stone cold classic.
A true story?
In one of his few narrator's incursions into the South Bank Show film, Melvyn Bragg says that the legend of Sweeney Todd is based on a true story that happened in Paris around 1800 and first appeared in print in Britain in 1846.
But The Singing Organ-Grinder has found a version of the legend that sets it in 17th-century Calais. And Charles Dickens assumes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) that his readers will know and smile at stories of people being turned into pies in London:
Tom's evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis.
So I suspect that Sweeney Todd and his Continental equivalents are urban legends with a long history.
Not the first musical
Searching the British Newspaper Archive, I discovered that Sondheim's was not the first musical about Sweeney Todd to be staged in London. In 1959, a musical called The Demon Barber was staged at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
The Stage didn't much like it:
A pompous introduction to the programme of "The Demon Barber," at the Lyric, Hammersmith, states that this new musical has roots which "reach to 'The Beggar's Opera', the music hall, and D'Oyley (sic) Carte". Be that as it may, the result is a feeble adaptation as a musical of the Sweeney Todd story, the blood and thunder gone and replaced by burlesque which flies wide of its mark.
It seems no one else much liked it either, as a member of cast recalls:
My first theatre job in London was in 1959 at the Lyric Hammersmith. I was Jonas Fogg the madhouse keeper (who else?) in Donald Cotton and Brian Burke’s The Demon Barber. It was quite an elaborate little musical about Sweeney Todd which Stephen Sondheim had never heard of. Sondheim didn’t know of this version when he composed the 1979 musical/opera Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
It closed on Christmas Eve after 14 performances. Not very long after, this exquisite theatre was demolished at a time when borough councils felt it was their duty to continue the work of Reichsmarschall Goering in the destruction of London. They brought a new ferocity to the task, and many of London’s theatres that had survived the Blitz were gleefully pulverised by the advocates of Progress.
The Lyric was cynically reconstituted, but it was never the same.
The writer is Barry Humphries. At least the swift demise of The Demon Barber left him free to appear in Oliver! the following July.
Don't worry. I'll have found a new rabbit hole soon.
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