Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Sweeney Todd, 2007 film. Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) and Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) at the bloody conclusion of the film.

  Like most of the musical films discussed in acts I and II beginning with the Show Boat adaptation of 1936, Sweeney Todd, and like most of the films with the exception of My Fair Lady and to a lesser extent West Side Story, the musical film Sweeney Todd does not attempt to present a faithful and complete version of its stage sources. In addition, for the most part, stage musicals exceed “the two hours’ traffic” announced by Chorus at the outset of Romeo and Juliet. Sweeney’s stage traffic is about three hours. Film musicals, whether original or adaptations from the musical stage, generally take Shakespeare’s estimated performance time more seriously. Burton’s film realization of Sweeney Todd contains even less than two hours of traffic congestion, 116 minutes to be exact.

  In order to perform Sweeney Todd so succinctly, some material had to be cut, including some of the 80 percent that was taken up by music. Sondheim thus went into the Sweeney Todd project knowing that some songs would have to go, especially those songs that did not keep the action moving. For example, the Beadle’s “Parlor Songs” served the dual purpose of creating a diversion to keep this character from inspecting Todd’s basement and giving a tenor something substantial to sing in the course of an evening, but it slowed the action and could be slashed with impunity in order to “shave” close to four minutes. Since the lyrical middle section of “Ladies in Their Sensitivities” was also removed, the Beadle’s vocal contribution to the film is greatly reduced. We have earlier remarked that Sondheim for a long time regretted not adding music for this scene with Mrs. Lovett in the scene with the Beadle.

  Another cut was Anthony’s “Ah, Miss,” which appeared on stage between Johanna’s solo song “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” and Anthony’s “Johanna,” the show’s great love ballad. To create greater plausibility as well as a few minutes of film time, the Beggar Woman and her “Alms” music no longer welcome Sweeney and Anthony when they get off the boat in the first scene. Instead she sings her “Alms” when she stumbles upon Anthony in front of Johanna’s house (a more logical place for her mother to hover, although we do not yet know her identity). In some newly inserted dialogue after the “Alms” music Anthony gives her some money and the Beggar Woman in return informs the young man, who has seen Johanna in the upstairs window and is clearly smitten, that Judge Turpin is the owner of the house and that the young woman Johanna is his ward. She then warns Anthony of dire consequences should he pursue the beautiful ward in the window.61

  Before Rodgers and Hammerstein acquired control of their own film adaptations, stage properties were at the mercy of producers and directors who simply did not believe in the material and were given carte blanche not only to cut mercilessly but to add songs by studio composers. Sondheim’s contract allowed him the authority to approve or reject the proposed changes. Since he agreed with the premise that cuts would be needed whenever the music held up the action and that the film should be primarily cinematic rather than theatrical, Sondheim himself assumed the major role in the decisions of what to include, delete, or rework.

  One of the deleted songs in the film, the Judge’s version of “Johanna”—a completely different song from Anthony’s “Johanna”—was also deleted in the stage version of the show and relegated to the Appendix of the published vocal score (although it appears on the cast recording and in the revised vocal score in its originally intended position). Prince either found the song offensive or thought others would object to the depiction of masochism and self-flagellation in the song and urged Sondheim to take it out. A few years later, however, Sondheim persuaded Prince to reinstate the Judge’s “Johanna” in the New York City Opera production (1984) and has continued to advocate its inclusion in future productions.62 In the film, the Judge’s perverted nature could be observed more directly in the privacy of his room where screen audiences watch as he fondles his leather-bound volumes of pornography and spies on Johanna through a peephole in the wall. Within a few seconds the film captures what it takes the Judge nearly four minutes to sing, and although the Judge now has nothing of his own to sing, this is less of an expectation for a major character in a movie than on a stage.

  Much of the material involving the chorus also vanished from the screen version, although some of this music, so important to the stage effect, found its way into orchestral underscoring. The most audible example of this non-vocal use occurs over the extensive Opening Title sequence in which “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” can be heard without either words or voices (there are, however, some chorus-like synthesized vocals during an orchestral climax). The orchestral vamp from the “Ballad” recurs throughout the film and contributes greatly to the melodramatic atmosphere. Other ensembles, including “The Letter” quintet, the “City on Fire!” chorus of Fogg Asylum lunatics, and a good slice of the “God, That’s Good!” pie, join the discarded “Parlor Songs” among the major deletions of act II.

  In his interview with Jesse Green in the New York Times, Sondheim estimated that about 20 percent of the remaining songs were trimmed and “in all fewer than 10 of the stage show’s 25 major numbers survived substantially intact.”63 Add up all the time saved and the result is a leaner and meaner Sweeney approximately one-third shorter than its staged predecessor. When interviewed for a special feature of the DVD, Sondheim extends the 80 percent–20 percent ratio he offered for the first act twenty years earlier in “Author and Director” to encompass the entire show: “There are very few moments of silence from the orchestra pit in the show. I’d say the show is probably about 80% sung, 20% talk, but even the talk, about half of that, is underscored, and it’s the way to keep the audience in a state of tension, because if they ever get out of the fantasy, they’re looking at, you know, a ridiculous story with a lot of stage blood.”64

  Burton’s Sweeney Todd gathered a lot of critical attention and audience appeal for casting the popular Depp, an enormously talented and versatile actor who had worked with the director on six previous films (e.g., Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood) but had never sung anything other than backup vocals in a rock band. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of film technology, it was not necessary for Depp—or Helena Bonham Carter, who had never sung at all, in the arguably more demanding role of Mrs. Lovett—to be able to project in a theater or even to have to sing all the notes of a song consecutively with the correct rhythms and pitches.

  The recording process went through several stages. First, music supervisor Mike Higham created a backing track without voices. Then, after rehearsing with Sondheim, the cast recorded their solos and duets (the only exception was Laura Michelle Kelly in the role of the Beggar Woman and Lucy who sang live on the film set). Each member of the cast was recorded on a separate track. The solitary sounds could then be refined, retuned, and mediated sufficiently that a sung whisper could be heard over a mighty orchestra. Finally, this orchestra of sixty-four musicians, more than double the number that squeezed into the Uris Theater in 1979, recorded the voiceless backing track audiences hear in the film.

  In borrowing a major production technique from MTV and rock videos, Burton’s Sweeney departed from two generations of traditional film practice, in which the actors in the film or the singers who dub the actors in the film lip-synch to a finished visual product. Burton’s Sweeney reversed the process (with the professional singer Kelly again the sole exception). The recordings came first. After the recordings, the actors, none of them dubbed, lip-synched to the pre-recorded sounds, which included the sixty-four piece orchestra and any duet partnerships in a given song. Lip-synching to prerecorded sound, the norm in MTV and rock videos, was rare, if not unprecedented in the production of a film musical. The process seemed to help produce a natural and intimate look to the singing without any operatic signs of strain in the final product.

  At every turn Burton applies cinematic techniques, some of which would be difficult to capture in the theater. They ap
pear most often in the narrative songs, “Poor Thing,” where Mrs. Lovett’s tale of the Barber and his Wife is shown in vivid flashback; “A Little Priest,” in which the camera zooms in from Mrs. Lovett’s window on people who represent the various occupations of potential victims described in the song; and “By the Sea,” in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney are placed in the locations and situations described in the song. These songs are also set off by adding splashes of color to the grayish tint that pervades the film (other color splashes would appear from time to time such as Pirelli’s garish blue outfit and Sweeney’s specially constructed red barber’s chair). This kind of filmic enhancement of text and story has become more common in recent years, for example, the visual realization of thoughts in Rob Marshall’s award-winning Chicago in 2002). A rare early example of the practice can be seen in the visual images that capture the bridge of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1936 Show Boat (starting with images of stevedores sweating and straining and Joe, played by Paul Robeson ending up in jail looking up at a distorted camera angle). It seems surprising how seldom directors have taken advantage of this cinematic opportunity to tell a story.65 Perhaps the success of Burton’s Sweeney will influence future directors.

  In a DVD special feature and in other public interviews, Sondheim makes the case that Burton’s Sweeney Todd is not only different from the stage Sweeney but is different from other film adaptations. He offers this advice to audiences who may be disappointed in this difference: “I’m going to urge them as much as possible to leave their memory of the stage show outside the door, because, as I say, unlike all other movies of musicals that I know, this really is an attempt to take the material of the stage musical and completely transform it into a movie. This is not a movie of a stage show, this is a movie based on a stage show.”66 In a public conversation with former New York Times theater critic and current political affairs editorialist Frank Rich that took place in Portland, Oregon, on March 11, 2008, a few months after Burton’s Sweeney Todd opened nationally and one month before its release on DVD, Sondheim went as far as to say that Burton’s transformation was the “most satisfying version of a stage piece I’ve ever seen.”

  The Lapine Years (1984–1994): Sunday in the Park with George

  After Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim joined forces with a new, younger creative partner, James Lapine (b. 1949). During the next ten years, Lapine became arguably as important and innovative a collaborator as Prince and his generational peers were in the previous decade and exerted an influence in Sondheim’s post-Prince development comparable to that of earlier collaborators such as Bernstein, Robbins, Styne, and Laurents before the Prince years.

  Sondheim’s first show with Lapine was about the art of making art. The first act of Sunday in the Park with George focuses on the painter Georges Seurat, and the creation of the painting lent its title to Sondheim’s musical. The first act also creates the imagined lives of his imagined mistress Dot among others who have become immobilized and immortalized in this famous painting in its permanent residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. In contrast to Franklin Shepard, the fictional composer in Merrily We Roll Along, Seurat was not only an actual historical figure but one of the least compromising artists in any field of art. In this landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning show, Sondheim and Lapine, who wrote the book and directed, explore the relationship between artistic and procreative legacies as embodied in the contrast between the ephemeral cream pies of Louis the baker versus the timelessness of an artistic masterpiece, and the contrasting legacies of children and art.67 In his dedication to art Seurat has foresworn his relationship with Dot, although through her he will leave a human legacy in their daughter Marie and, two generations later, in another artist named George (without the “s”), Marie’s grandson, whom we will meet one hundred years later in act II.

  In the song “No Life,” Sondheim creates more characters who voice criticisms that Sondheim himself has been subjected to throughout much of his career. When viewing a tableau vivant of Seurat’s recently completed Bathing at Asnières, his rival, Jules, and Jules’s wife, Yvonne, decry the passionless, lifeless, unlyrical, and inappropriate subject matter of Seurat’s paintings. Yvonne ridicules Seurat for painting “boys with their clothes off,” and Jules responds mockingly that he “must paint a factory next.” Similarly, Sondheim has frequently been indicted for writing about cold, neurotic, and frequently unlikable people and for confronting unpalatable subjects ranging from marital infidelity (e.g., Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park, Into the Woods), the loss of youthful dreams (Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Woods), murder (Pacific Overtures, Woods, Assassins), and even serial murder (Sweeney Todd).

  The contrast between accessible and difficult art is powerfully delineated in Dot’s song, “Everybody Loves Louis.” Louis the baker, a man who neither fathers a child nor sings a song in the show, is willing to take Dot and her child by Seurat to America, where the baker can cater to the whims of a wealthy and boorish Texas businessman. In vivid contrast to the unlovable, unpopular, and overly intellectual painter, Louis is lovable, popular, and “bakes from the heart.” “Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow,” his “art is not hard to swallow,” and, unlike George, the baker is “not afraid to be gooey.” Also in contrast to George, Louis “sells what he makes.” In return, Louis, like his pastries, will perish without producing either art or (in a plot twist) children of his own. Louis also has the potential to become a better father than George, as well as a better provider and companion.

  Putting It Together

  In the final scene of act I, the uncompromising Seurat completes his great painting Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte after two years and many months of Sundays, an act marked musically by the completion of the opening horn melody that represents Seurat’s blank canvas (Example 15.2a) and its transformation into the song, “Sunday” (Example 15.2b).

  Act II centers on a contemporary artist, still confronting old dilemmas of popular versus personal, more “sincere” art (remember Hammerstein’s emphasis on this quality in a song’s genesis). But this new George is a lot more like Louis in some respects. In stark contrast to the painter’s exceptional meticulousness, his great-grandson is rapidly turning out a series of similar and risk-free high-tech sculptures known as Chromolumes. The new George also shares with his forefather an inability to connect the dots of human relationships (a central task for both artists), but unlike Seurat, the modern George has managed to successfully negotiate the politics of art and has gained all the trappings of success, including the profit and fame denied the greater artist. Nevertheless, he is deeply dissatisfied with his own work.

  Like the characters in Lady in the Dark who appear metaphorically in Liza Elliott’s dreams, many characters in Seurat’s life and painting reappear in the life of the present-day George. Seurat’s mistress, Dot, lives on as her daughter, the aged Marie. Seurat’s unsympathetic rival, Jules, metamorphoses into Bob Greenberg, the director of the museum that now houses Chromolume #7. Perhaps most tellingly, the Old Lady who turns out to be Seurat’s hypercritical but supportive mother in act I returns in act II as the perceptive art critic Blair Daniels, who, like Seurat’s mother, is able to see that the emperor has no clothes, but also like her act I counterpart believes in George’s talent and promise.

  Example 15.2. Sunday in the Park with George

  (a) Opening horn melody

  (b) Opening of “Sunday” based on the opening horn melody

  Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. George, the painter based on Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) (left), finishing his painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.

  The connections between act I and act II are also musical ones, in which key musical material develops character and plot through dramatically meaningful thematic melodic reprises and transformations. One of the most audible examples is the music Seurat uses in the act of painting his mas
terpiece (“Color and Light”) in act I, which returns in an electrified version that marks the Chromolume music in act II. When the ghost of Dot returns at the end of act II to resolve her personal issues with George and to help the modern George “Move On” artistically, her music shares several prominent motives heard in “We Do Not Belong Together” that Dot sang in act I when she left the great artist in order to start a new life in America with Louis. To cite but one prominent example, “Stop worrying where you’re going” is set to the same music as the title and opening phrase, “We do not belong together.” The gossips in the museum in act II sing the same “I’m not surprised” motive in discussing the Chromolumes (“Putting It Together,” Part II) as Seurat’s contemporaries in act I (“Gossip Sequence”). The textual and musical phrase that George uses to express his discomfort at the heat in his studio in “Color and Light” becomes the foundation for the song the characters, now imprisoned and frozen forever at the Art Institute of Chicago, sing to open act II, “It’s Hot Up Here.” The obsessively repeated musical motive of “Putting It Together” (Example 15.3a) can be traced to the music associated with the phrase “Finishing the Hat” in the song of that name (Example 15.3b), and at the end of act I with its one note extension—from four shorts and a long to four shorts and two longs—as Seurat completes his canvas before the characters in the painting start to sing “Sunday” (Example 15.3c).68 These examples are only the most prominent of a much longer list.69

  Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. The picture frame descends to enclose the finished painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.