Sweeney Todd

Villanova University Theater's production of Sweeney Todd demonstrates that the theater's confidence in Terry Guerin, who during the last several seasons has been its musical specialist, is not misplaced. This grisly musical is difficult to cast, difficult to sing and difficult to stage. Choosing among semiprofessional and graduate-student actors, Guerin has assembled a remarkably able cast to stage a stylishly decadent, darkly driven and grimly humorous version of this tale of vengeance, murder and madness.

With this production, the Arden Theater Co. has come of age. I consider it significant that the now-concluding Arden season has brought forth, back to back, one of its worst-ever productions ("The Tempest") and perhaps the best of them all, the newly opened "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. " From an effort laced with symptoms of compound benign neglect, the Arden, over an interval of just a few weeks, has effected a miracle cure upon itself, snapping back with a show that is everything that theater should be. Using fewer than half the players employed in the 1979 Broadway production (13 against 27)

Sweeney Todd cultists have been saying for years that the horror-show musical could be done small with no loss of its power to give people nightmares. Grateful as we were for Harold Prince's spectacular original production in 1979, we were convinced that the demon barber of Fleet Street did not absolutely need all that many people or that much scenery to accomplish his murderous ends. The point has been proved rather more than less by Off-Off-Broadway's York Theater, whose production of the Stephen Sondheim shocker has moved to Broadway.

The history of the world, my sweet, Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat. - Sweeney Todd Never accuse the Arden Theatre Company of faintness of heart. Having cleansed its palate with such sorbets as Godspell, Working and Echoes of the Jazz Age, the enterprising Center City company has now tucked into the first full-scale musical in its five-year history. The show is nothing less than Sweeney Todd, the Hugh Wheeler-Stephen Sondheim collaboration that represents the high-water mark of the musical stage - the Beef Wellington to most musicals' Swanson Pot Pie. But such aspiration shouldn't be surprising.

In 1993, when the Arden Theater Company was the first local troupe to produce Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol musical, the accomplished, well-received production directed by Terrence J. Nolen demonstrated that the young company was capable of meeting the considerable demands of a big Broadway musical. The Arden went on to present an annual run of musicals by Sondheim and others that, for the most part, continued to show Nolen's mastery of the form. Now, 12 years on, Nolen, the Arden's artistic director, has decided to return to Sweeney Todd - which, incidentally, no other local professional theater has presented in the interim - and he has not in any way lost his deft touch with the tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

When the musical Sweeney Todd played Broadway in 1979, its huge, much commented-on set filled the stage of the Uris Theatre. When the show toured in 1980, a replica of the New York set also filled the stage of the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. Terrence J. Nolen, the director of the Arden Theatre Company's production of Sweeney Todd, which opens tomorrow, was 17 when he saw the show at the Forrest. He was swept away by both the set and the musical. "It made an indelible impression on me," he said.

I'm a bit baffled at the astonishment expressed in some quarters that Tim Burton shows a knack for the movie musical in "Sweeney Todd. " This is the same guy, after all, who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas," one of the best and most popular movie musicals of recent years - also a production whose visual style and palette is strikingly similar to "Sweeney Todd. " Burton's taste for the garish, macabre musical number (see also "The Corpse Bride") goes all the way back to the "Banana Boat" sequence in "Beetlejuice": Any guy who turns shrimp cocktail into grasping zombie fingers is, for my money, the right guy for this job. In fact, it's no surprise to learn that Burton, as a student, fell in love with the power of drama watching "Sweeney Todd" performed on the London stage; he liked it so much he went back to see it three times, eagerly absorbing every minute in each three-hour production.

Broadway is hardly known for originality or innovation, yet this mecca of theatrical commerce can be hugely effective at bringing such things into the mainstream. So it is with the new revival of Sweeney Todd at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Though there's nothing here that hasn't happened in German opera houses over the last 20 years, this England-originated production arrives on Broadway - aided by the star power of Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris - as a landmark event that challenges and overhauls the core idea of Broadway storytelling.

So you've landed a role in the chorus of Sweeney Todd, the musical about the London barber who gives customers a ve-r-r-r-r-y close shave, then sends their bodies down to the floor below his shop. There, Mrs. Lovett, the baker, makes them into meat pies, which become the culinary toast of London. Life is often a matter of context; this plot is highly interesting in the Arts & Entertainment section, but patently disgusting in the Food section. Bear with us, because you are going to get some decent pies out of the bargain.

Hair inky as night, face pale as the moon, Sweeney Razorhands - excuse, Sweeney Todd - skulks into London with intent. For the 15 years he was wrongly imprisoned, sentenced by the pious vulture of a London judge who coveted his wife, Sweeney Todd (a spectral Johnny Depp as the barber of DeVille) dreamed of slashing said judge's jugular. Who knew that Sweeney also fantasized about the geysers of blood that would fountain forth? With Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street , Tim Burton gives new meaning to the term "director's cut. " In adapting Stephen Sondheim's dissonant musical into a splatter operetta, Burton delivers a movie that might well be too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd.

Look, I Made A Hat Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany By Stephen Sondheim Alfred A. Knopf. 453 pp. $45 Reviewed by Lewis Whittington   Look, I Made a Hat is the second volume of Stephen Sondheim's show-by-show, song-by-song compendium of his life in the American musical theater. It comes out just a year after his Finishing the Hat , which was hailed not only for its candor in describing the art of writing lyrics, but also as a wily backstage account of Sondheim's spectacular career.

Every great composer has a white elephant - a piece as grand as it is unsuccessful, a flop that only genius can create, and all the more embarrassing for that. Adventurers like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, whose output is marked by an almost compulsive search for new ground, were fated to have at least one. Bernstein's was the gargantuan 1971 Mass written to open the Kennedy Center. Sondheim's case stretched over 15 years with a musical whose titles ranged from Wise Guys to Bounce to Gold!

Movies in 2007 were full of stories about unplanned pregnancies (Knocked Up; Juno; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), poorly planned wars (any of the innumerable Iraq docs, Charlie Wilson's War) and elaborately planned acts of vengeance (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; No Country for Old Men; The Bourne Ultimatum). What no one could have planned - or predicted - before the year began was that 2007 would turn out to be the best movie year of the young century, taking its place beside 1999 as a veritable feast for film lovers (even if a rat had a hand in preparing it)

Hair inky as night, face pale as the moon, Sweeney Razorhands - excuse, Sweeney Todd - skulks into London with intent. For the 15 years he was wrongly imprisoned, sentenced by the pious vulture of a London judge who coveted his wife, Sweeney Todd (a spectral Johnny Depp as the barber of DeVille) dreamed of slashing said judge's jugular. Who knew that Sweeney also fantasized about the geysers of blood that would fountain forth? With Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tim Burton gives new meaning to the term "director's cut. " In adapting Stephen Sondheim's dissonant musical into a splatter operetta, Burton delivers a movie that might well be too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd.

I'm a bit baffled at the astonishment expressed in some quarters that Tim Burton shows a knack for the movie musical in "Sweeney Todd. " This is the same guy, after all, who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas," one of the best and most popular movie musicals of recent years - also a production whose visual style and palette is strikingly similar to "Sweeney Todd. " Burton's taste for the garish, macabre musical number (see also "The Corpse Bride") goes all the way back to the "Banana Boat" sequence in "Beetlejuice": Any guy who turns shrimp cocktail into grasping zombie fingers is, for my money, the right guy for this job. In fact, it's no surprise to learn that Burton, as a student, fell in love with the power of drama watching "Sweeney Todd" performed on the London stage; he liked it so much he went back to see it three times, eagerly absorbing every minute in each three-hour production.

Charlie Seymour Jr. doesn't recall much about his first appearance with the Players Club of Swarthmore as a 6-year-old with no lines. "All I know is I was on that side of the stage with a lollipop," Seymour said, pointing to stage right. "And I sat there, and because I behaved myself, I was invited to do the next show. " Seymour, who sees running a business and directing a play in a similar light, has been hooked on theater ever since. He has acted, directed, founded two theater clubs and written a musical, and in March, he launched an online business designed to help theaters fill their seats.

What songs! What witty lyrics and complicated melodies! Stephen Sondheim's genius is on generous display in the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio's production of Side by Side by Sondheim. The show is a collection of some of his best- and least-known songs, sung by four good voices, accompanied by two good pianists. It's an entertaining evening and makes you want to run out and see all those Sondheim musicals again. The revue includes songs from West Side Story and Gypsy (Sondheim wrote only the lyrics for both)

Broadway is hardly known for originality or innovation, yet this mecca of theatrical commerce can be hugely effective at bringing such things into the mainstream. So it is with the new revival of Sweeney Todd at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Though there's nothing here that hasn't happened in German opera houses over the last 20 years, this England-originated production arrives on Broadway - aided by the star power of Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris - as a landmark event that challenges and overhauls the core idea of Broadway storytelling.

So you've landed a role in the chorus of Sweeney Todd, the musical about the London barber who gives customers a ve-r-r-r-r-y close shave, then sends their bodies down to the floor below his shop. There, Mrs. Lovett, the baker, makes them into meat pies, which become the culinary toast of London. Life is often a matter of context; this plot is highly interesting in the Arts & Entertainment section, but patently disgusting in the Food section. Bear with us, because you are going to get some decent pies out of the bargain.