The rise and fall and (slight) rise of Lionel Bart

By my calculation, this edition of The South Bank Show dates from 1994. As much of my politics come from reading Oliver Twist too young, and as Oliver! is the great British musical. I had to watch it.

And there is much to enjoy, beginning with Lionel Bart's adventures in the new world of pop music with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.

Then there's Oliver!, whose first night was just as triumphant as Bart makes it sound. On to the film, where I note that Mark Lester was still giving the impression that he sang in it. He didn't.

The disaster of Twang!! caused the crash of Bart's career, but maybe the warning signs were there with his musical Blitz!, which Noel Coward claimed was "twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing".

Note the presence of Mark Steyn, who had yet to reinvent himself as a commentator on geopolitics. As I wrote of him in 2008:

Steyn is a good film critic, able to write intelligently about unintelligent films. But the fact that for several years his was the predominant voice on foreign affairs in the British Conservative press was simply bizarre.

If you enjoy this, it gives me the excuse to give another plug for the superlative South Bank Show on the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. 

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd

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.

Sweeney Todd: Scenes from the Making of a Musical

Here's a holiday treat: a South Bank Show documentary from 1980 that follows Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince as they rehearse the first West End production of Sweeney Todd. It had opened on Broadway the year before.

Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovat are Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock – look out for wine expert Oz Clarke and Michael Staniforth (Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost) in supporting roles.

Follow Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince as they prepare the first West End production of Sweeney Todd

I first posted this in 2010 after watching the film, where "Johnny Depp sounds like David Bowie and you fear little Toby may break into a tap dance at any moment".

Meow.

In those days this wonderful early edition of The South Bank Show was on YouTube in seven parts. Today you can enjoy the whole thing in a single video.

We follow Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince as they prepare the first West End production of Sweeney Todd, which stars Daniel Massey and Sheila Hancock.

Am I getting nostalgic - I watched this when it was first broadcast in 1980 - or do you just not get arts programmes this good on British television any more?

Whatever the truth of that, let's pause a moment to give thanks for Melvyn Bragg.

Sweeney Todd on the South Bank Show

If you enjoyed the film - where Johnny Depp sounds like David Bowie and you fear little Toby may break into a tap dance at any moment - on Channel 4 tonight, you will love this.

This is a South Bank Show from 30 years ago which shows the preparations for the opening of the first London production of Sondheim's original musical. Watch the first part here and Youtube will guide you to the later ones.

When Bragg celebrated and mourned the end of the South Bank Show, an edited version of this was shown. I was a little shaken when I realised I remembered the original.