‘Attend The Tale Of The Tale Of Sweeney Todd!’: Rick Pender’s newest book dives into the twisted history of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s ‘dark operetta’ (1979) that redefined the subjects appropriate for a Broadway musical (p. 40). Through a clear, chronological set of 8 chapters that begins with the origins of the demon barber myth and ends with Sweeney Todd’s impact on musical theatre, Pender gathers together archival research, interviews, reviews, and documentary evidence to provide a complete portrait of the creation, distribution, and appreciation of one of Sondheim’s most ambitious projects.
The language is largely accessible, and fans of the musical will find much to enjoy, from anecdotes about Angela Lansbury slinging balls of dough to the origins of the now-iconic woodcut on the Original Broadway Cast Recording – allegedly ‘the ad agency wanted much less blood’ (p. 69). Insights into the surprising circumstances that can shape a stage show are a particular highlight; for example, Christopher Bond wrote the adaptation that inspired Sondheim in about a week, when his acting company planned to put on an older version of the tale but didn’t receive the script until two weeks before rehearsal. This approachable tone makes the book a swift read and is sure to delight academics and popular audiences alike.
Moreover, this relatively accessible language does not diminish the text’s scholarly contributions to the field. Pender weaves together primary and secondary sources for a multifaceted view of the musical and its cultural moment it represents. Starting Chapter 1 in the archives, Pender vividly recounts penny dreadfuls from 1784 and pulpy paperbacks claiming to have found the ‘real’ Sweeney Todd. He meticulously tracks changing mores of authorship, publishing, and crime reporting that certainly justify the cloud of sepia-tinged obfuscation that, spoiler alert, still conceals the barber’s ‘true’ origins at the end of Pender’s investigation. Nevertheless, his careful documentation is invaluable to the modern scholar of Sweeney, providing plenty of analytical ground for why this particular story, likely sourced from a half-paragraph of London crime news, continues to be produced around the world.
Likewise, a collection of interviews with many of the cast and crew from the original Broadway production forms a tremendous contribution to the history of Sweeney Todd, and a fascinating insight into how Broadway musicals were created in 1979 (the cast’s complaints about the lack of an out-of-town tryout seem almost quaint to our modern world of sing-or-swim limited previews). Importantly, Pender does not stop with the Broadway production but devotes equal attention to the movie, revivals, and reinterpretations of the work. This remarkably thorough approach centres Sondheim’s contributions by following the text of the show, while still recording the many ways that other artists have interpreted it over the years.
This focus is also the source of one of the few flaws in the text. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a book titled ‘Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd,’ the text focuses on Sondheim’s genius sometimes to the exclusion of his collaborators. I was particularly struck by the occlusion of bookwriter Hugh Wheeler. Part of this might be due to Sondheim’s own perspective, buried in a footnote, where he tantalisingly implies that one of the reasons Sweeney is nearly sung-through is that ‘Hugh […] changed every given sentence of Christopher Bond, just to make it his own, and it was all for the worse. So the only way to retain the territory is to sing it’ (p. 242). In the chapter that features interviews with each member of the original creative team, the majority of Wheeler’s section is taken up by a summary of Sweeney Todd, leaving the reader to wonder what the collaborative process looked like from Wheeler’s perspective. However, this omission is a relatively minor one in an otherwise comprehensive book, and does not impede its function as either a scholarly or popular text.
In contrast to the relative lack of information on the writing process itself, the text occasionally repeats details about the show’s productions, particularly in the last three chapters (beginning with Chapter 6 , ‘Sweeney Settles the Musical Score’). What I expected from this chapter was an in-depth analysis of Sweeney’s score, which had previously been described but not read into in detail. However, this chapter and the ones after were peppered with recapitulations of details – from descriptions of John Doyle’s minimalist production, to who operated the original factory whistle, to the casting process of Angela Lansbury – that the attentive reader would have already picked up from the first 5 chapters, leaving the impression that Chapters 6, 7, and 8 were intended to be read in isolation from the rest of the book. In fact, an excellent track-by-track analysis of the score is sadly relegated to an appendix.
Finally, I was expecting the book to do more interpretive work on the subject of Sweeney. Its research into Sweeney’s revivals, reinterpretations, and recordings is admirable, but it is occasionally unclear why each fact is significant (for example, the length of the extras included with each of the physical Sweeney cast recordings). At the conclusion, I found myself still curious about why Sweeney was so popular in the 1980s, why it continues to connect with audiences when it does, and how opinion on it has shifted over time. However, this text accomplishes its goal of recounting the history ‘Behind the Bloody Musical Masterpiece’ with flying colours. It is a history waiting to be interpreted, the way Sondheim’s inclination to make a horror movie onstage became a skewering of class inequality, a chilling commentary on mental illness, and a quirky Gothic thriller in different hands. I am grateful that this text exists, and excited to see the streams of scholarship that will spring from it. I am almost certain those streams will be tinted red.
