Gil Hates Everything

So in contrast to “Sunset Boulevard”, which probably thought it was tackling some heavyweight nasty characters, here’s what happens when Stephen Sondheim puts his talents to use in service of a strong thriller plot. Of course, being Sondheim, it’s not that simple, but happily the complex aspects are all positive ones. GHM is going to give this one ten out of ten up front, seeing as how I’ve been threatened with social if not physical violence if I don’t rate it highly and quickly, and then I’ll get to the details :)

First, the plot. Because this show is coming to Vancouver in the imminent future, and is a thriller with a good plot, I’ll stick to the first half, to avoid too many spoilers. The show is set in London in 1846. An ominous man known as Sweeney Todd arrives off a ship and meets Mrs Lovett, the unhappy female owner of a crappy pie-shop, who pieces together his story and forces him to admit that years ago he was a London barber who was illegally deported by a judge who wanted to steal the barber’s wife. The daughter is now sixteen and the judge’s ward, and now the judge lusts after her. And now Todd is back, his name changed and his intent murderous, he lays a plan to save his daughter from the judge. That plan ends up with Todd murdering the men he shaves, and Mrs Lovett makes use of the bodies to make better, tastier pies…

Does romance lie in the future for Todd and Mrs Lovett? What happens to the judge, and to Johanna? Why don’t you go see the show and find out… :)

This show is extremely accessible, thanks to the simplicity of its penny-dreadful theme: we see a bunch of bad people who have wronged a man, and we want to see that man get his revenge on them – provided, of course, that he gets his comeuppance afterwards, so we can all sleep soundly knowing that justice has been done all round. The details will unfold naturally from that, and if we’re disturbed by them, we can quickly get back to the humour – of which there’s a lot – and relax a little.

But that’s is the unsettling brilliance of the show, because we don’t get to sleep soundly after seeing this show. Sondheim doesn’t mind breaking the fourth wall (back as far as “Comedy Tonight”, and soon in “Into The Woods”), and here he’s at it right from the start, with the street chorus singing “The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd”… already they know a lot more than they’re letting on: “What happened then – well that’s the play… and he wouldn’t want us to give it away”… already the fiction is bleeding off the stage, through the conduit of a suddenly shrieking, bloodthirsty, omniscient ensemble. You may have heard that the street finds its own uses for things, and that communication is possible only between equals; here we’re immediately invited into that underclass underworld, and given access to the secure channels on which the poor and the dispossessed broadcast their data. The bad people in the upper classes aren’t privy to what we know. From this angle we see how they really are. And we want to see their towering bodies laid low.

But there’s always a cost.

Sweeney proceeds to enact his and our murderous wish-fulfilment. He’s the kind of character who almost gets away with murder in 1930s mysteries (“And there was no-one there at all!” / “Mais non, Monsieur… I submit that there was someone there… an invisible man, if you like… THIS man… the POSTMAN!”) – and in this scenario of 1846 the class divide is wider still. Now, of course, we’re all equal aren’t we, and of course everyone has the same opportunities and the same potential, and shit like this just wouldn’t happen any more, noooo, of course it wouldn’t, and for that matter you can be pretty certain that your dentist earns more than you do. And yet it’s devilishly unsettling to think it through. The man who shaves you… who cuts your hair… who inspects your teeth… close enough, and trusted enough, to turn assassins green with envy. Let me ask you, how do you summon the courage to go to the dentist, knowing that a perceived or actual slight of which you know nothing could prompt him to use the drill to shred your tongue into pulp? Perhaps it’s different now, but not so long ago we looked down upon the people to whom we routinely entrusted our lives, assuming that we were safe because, well, they wouldn’t dare do anything to us, would they? Today you’re protected by the certainty that you’d sue; back then the upper classes would have the man horsewhipped and deported. But what good’s that to you if the barber strikes first? At all times, everyone imagines that the threat of punishment which they could bring to bear will save them from the danger. But Todd is here to tell you that your threats are meaningless, and that if you need to live your life bodyguarded by threats and power, then your life will be deservedly shortened when you encounter a man like him.

Todd is the avenging death-saint of the poor… but he’s far more dangerous than the Count Of Monte Cristo, who lucks into a fortune and then simply outspends his rivals. Todd is no Batman, beating up on the poor, no Robin Hood, infinitely skilled and equipped with a fine sense of moral justice. Todd thinks no-one is special, no-one is good or right: for him, life is a sin visited upon men and women who are sinners; we are all damned. And the blood he spills runs right off the stage to pool at our feet, to stain our shoes, to splash across our hems. By the time the show ends, Sweeney has transcended his origins as a fictional character, and is quite capable of coming to take his revenge on us. He’s the office worker who goes postal, the new Jack The Ripper. No-one is safe. Sweeney could be anywhere, and anyone could be Sweeney. It may take a village to raise a child, but to raise a Sweeney all you need is a city, where people think anonymity or respectability will protect them. Well, it won’t. And the ensemble knew that all along. Maybe they even tried to warn us. The horror-hum of their repeatedly-reprised theme is one of the more memorably terrifying things you’ll ever hear in the theatre.

At least Todd knows he should be doomed alongside his victims. Has Mrs Lovett gone insane by the time she sings the “Company”-esque “By The Sea”, picturing bourgeois respectability with a murder or two every year just to keep their oar in? Or is she just eternally and selfishly optimistic – the kind of person who builds her life around things which fall off the back of a lorry? At least Todd has a motive of personal revenge; Mrs Lovett just wants to make money from selling pies, and couldn’t care less about a murder or twenty; she doesn’t commit them, they’re just the status quo around her. Then there’s the judge, sexually gross, excoriating himself for lusting after the daughter Johanna – except that’s not stopping him, and it’s not like he didn’t already commit this sin sixteen years earlier. And his creature the Beadle, casually joining with the judge in horrific dismissal of women as a species worth any real respect. Ick, ick, ick. Todd is an honest monster; pretty much everyone else doesn’t realize how monstrous they are.

Slowly you realize that Sondheim’s London is a stratification of evil. The handful of good characters in the show are drawn into the maelstrom and emerge transformed. A show that starts as a buckets-of-blood melodrama, encouraging you to feel sympathy for its protagonist, becomes an epic judgement. You can see why I’m so exasperated by the historical chirpy-Cockney crap you get in other shows. Is this any the less entertaining than “Oliver”? No. (And it’s marginally less frightening, too ;-) But this show doesn’t mind skewering the audience as well as its own characters. I guess that could come across as a bit unpleasant.

I haven’t said a lot about the music and lyrics. They fit the show excellently, maintaining the ominous, untrustworthy mood. When not immersed in fluttering reeds and rippling, bass-heavy piano, the lyrics are like rats scuttling for freedom in the alleys; Mrs Lovett has some unbelievably fast and rhythmically complex songs. The bad characters’ voices are smug, their lyrics fat and slow and content until provoked. It’s an exquisite job of mood-setting and representation. It’s almost a shame to take songs from this show and sing them out of context; they’re so much of a piece of it.

For its internal cohesion of vision alone this show would be admirable; contentwise, Sondheim and bookwriter Hugh Wheeler really go for it, and the result is fabulous. Like the comic “From Hell” or the game “Half-Life 2”, the text won’t stay on the page; its tendrils are writhing against the margins, reaching out into our world; the characters speak, and we are spoken to.

“Sweeney Todd” is a tremendous achievement and one of the most intellectually and viscerally satisfying shows I’ve ever seen and heard. I’ve listened to the score several times now and it’s a keeper. I’ve seen it once and I’ll go see it again. Random Panda awards it ten out of ten pieces of bamboo. What are you waiting for? Off you go!

(originally posted 2009)