Stage:

...In Captain dramatic deaths, everything comes to a sudden halt...

...Now, the Khomeini revolution in south if, by chance, it is re-established...

...the tian controlled areas or follow a route through Palestinian-held Lebanese...

...The Tobias, long before he suspects anything, has a favorite oath to "Ballad" is not cautionary after all...

...There are last-minute escapes, locked diagnosis without cure...

...In an author's note in the program, Sondheim says that which will most likely be sacrificed for an overall accord...

...What Johanna flattens her sailor with words, for all the world like a kind of world is it that lets me, knowing the possibilities in that musical Katherine Hepburn mowing down Cary Grant in voice, still frolic with Mrs...

...and France have done everything possible to particular revival than about the complex appeal that the grisly cultivate Syria, hoping to draw her into an overall settlement in story has had for audiences since early in the nineteenth centhe area...

...The Palestinians want to be sure their blockish body...

...The laughter and the perform...

...At the end, however, after the avalanche of melohorror go together, each reinforcing the other...

...It lures...

...TRAPPED BY SWEENEY TODD Meanwhile, the UN and its financing powers chafe at the inefficacy of the operation...

...and oiliness Obviously, it is not just the power groups in Lebanon who are is a function of character rather than style in the newest playing charades...

...And Jennings's sweetly boyish Tobias, Sarah Rice's picturebook Commonweal: 338 heroine, Victor Garber's sailor hero, a Jack Tar straight out of Sweeney Todd is no Brecht-Weill musical, however...

...The Israelis did withdraw The sudden romance of Syria and Iraq and the moderate tone finally, leaving the border area in the hands of the "friendly" of the Baghdad summit in December are signs that it is not only army detachment there and Christian and Shiite militias...

...At one point it was proposed that the Army be flown in by helicopter to avoid this problem...

...The Christians, with very good reason, do not touches most of those bases and, surprisingly, comes across as want to be absorbed into Syria and become the second-class a unified piece-a funny, scary tract for our time...

...If the Lebanese Army is sent to collabo- basic problem-the Palestinians...

...Lovett's celebrated-meat pies...

...In their attempt to bury the rate with or relieve the UNIFIL will they pass through Chris- Palestinian problem in Lebanon, the powers have created...

...Will the Army go south to assert Lebanese sovereignty over the Palestinian Resis- Stage tance, or to clear out the forces collaborating with Israel...

...the last renewal of the UNIFIL " WHIMSICAL TALE," Robert Benchley said of the mandate, for 5 and not for 6 months, was a reminder to the 1924 revival of Sweeney Todd, "and told with Lebanese government...

...asks Mrs...

...The immediate source of the musical is Screen Christopher Bond's 1973 adaptation, which Sondheim calls I "the most expert and the most unnerving" version of the play...

...The musical opens with "The Ballad cellars, madhouse prisons, and so many cut throats that the of Sweeney Todd," returns to it to bridge the segments of the final pile-up of death and madness seems as commonplace as story, uses it at the end...

...Sondheim's Sweeney oughly partisan...

...Peachum in The Threepenny Larry Kardish, who selected the programs, purposely chose Opera, at least in Marc Blitzstein's Brechtian words: "He some clunkers because they wanted the showing to be reprelives on others...

...is-caught me in his trap...

...sometimes he is a madman, sometimes a villain...

...At this distance, the unctuous was so savage that even Washington was embarrassed, but whimsy that Benchley's review conjures tells us less about a publicly, the U.S...

...territory...

...Neither appears ready to make any fuss over Lebanon tury...

...simple greed...

...First one, Merry's Sweeney Todd...

...It does not take much imagination to guess how the various parties line up on these questions...

...INVENTING THE 'FILM NOIR' There is conventional satire in "A Little Priest," which suggests that every man is unappetizing in his own way, but the central social point lies in the composer's having chosen to FOR THE last few years the Museum of Modern Art has tell the Sweeney Todd story...

...Lovett's pies is the perfect vehicle of drew Sarris once described as the worst ever to win an a man-eats-man drama, but because there are echoes of Kurt Academy Award...

...population of a Muslim country...

...I don't mean that the films were necessarily the best...

...Lovett's culinary so far...

...he mixes his comedy with character and plot...

...Whimsical may not be the exact word to describe the gral, sovereign and independent Lebanon, and they stand fully story of a homicidal barber whose victims become the chief behind legitimate authority as represented by President Sarkis...

...again because a museum retrospective ought to do more than 8 June 1979: 339...

...I find myself remembering an earlier, cal comedy needs more than double-entendre, as Sondheim shivery moment when Angela Lansbury, her voice full of knows...

...Angela Lansbury's Mrs...

...His Sweeney is motivated by been doing retrospectives of the films of different revenge for a heinous wrong done him by corrupt officials and, studios, the most recent being "Rediscovering RKO...

...The Threepenny Opera springs to mind not simply instance, Cimmaron (1931) starring Richard Dix, a film Anbecause the story of Mrs...

...Musi- makes a door-slam exit...

...The United Nations Interim Syria wants at least indirect control of Lebanon and the PalesForce in Lebanon (UNIFIL) came into the south in March to tinians as a defense against Israel and as a means of dominating assure the application of UN Security Council Resolution 425, the Middle East which has been lacking a leader since the namely evacuation of Israeli forces and the re-establishment of political death of Nasser in 1967...

...They are the various powers that the border villages controlled by the army and militias col- are trying to solve the Middle East crisis while avoiding the laborating with Israel...

...Anyone who can single out the forces of good and the In some cases, the horror is laced with macabre humor, in powers of evil in the Lebanese_ embroglio is deluded or thor- others, by a compulsion to preach...

...Cheer- sweetness and threat, reprises Tobias's "Not While I'm fully in "Kiss Me," the lovers' duet in which the effervescent Around," lines that promise protection but offer death...

...On suggestion as a perfect image of the way men live...

...Sunni and Shiite Muslims To begin with, there is the melodrama...

...Lovett "By the Sea...

...Ballad" seems at first a cautionary tale which the actors will But it is never parody melodrama...

...By the Sea," in which she conjures an idyllic retirement with Philosophically, I may question the world of Sweeney a little recreational murder on the side...

...the last character on stage, moves through the long pause after A giggle and frisson in a single line because Merry's readers "Fleet" and on "Street," a snarl, he glares at the audience and knew all about Sweeney Todd before the plot unfolded...

...They remain committed to a united, inte- 1840...

...His view of society made at that studio from 1928 through 1958, when RKO voiced at the beginning of the show in "No Place Like Lon- ceased production...

...demented doll, gets the splashiest numbers in the show-"A the audience into the theater with the promise of merry Little Priest," the duet with Sweeney in which they make mayhem and, then, in the final delivery of the "Ballad" playful jokes about the taste of the various professions, and accuses the audience for having risen to the bait...

...At this ever thinks of polishing anybody off as I do" and innocent point, for me, the musical becomes genuinely scary...

...considerable unction in the manner of plays of And the powers...

...These songs have so Todd, I may deny the truth of the mirror the musical holds much gaiety in them that they seduce the audience into com- before me, but Sondheim-clever man that he is, artist that he plicity...

...The Palestinians and Iran introduces a new factor which is difficult to evaluate...

...Still, it was worthwhile to see Cimmaron Weill-in tone at least-all through the musical...

...He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole sentative...

...failing to kill his tormentors, he decided to get even with the Over a period of five months the museum presented 135 films whole world by cutting throats at random...

...about the possibility when he publicly declared, on the eve of There is more to it than that...

...But the forces in Lebanon that are waiting for some dramatic the problem is, who will assert Lebanese sovereignty in the development in the area...

...The government would be content to put a merely symbolic force in the area which would in fact do nothing-but the DINNER MUSIC various forces involved cannot even agree on a symbol...

...Sweeney, affirm his loyalty, "may I be made into one of Lovett's pies...

...Some400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon be absorbed into the times Todd is motivated by a desire for revenge, sometimes by Lebanese population...

...The dead, the 1853), Sweeney is given to lines like "there ain't a barber that red marks of their cut throats plainly visible, join in...

...ingredient of Mrs...

...National Movement militias control most of the area from the Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for culprits, the real ones Litani river south, except for the points held by UNIFIL and do not appear on the scene...

...the original melodrama's "admirable objective was to stun its French Foreign Minister De Guiringaud removed any doubts audiences with a holocaust of thrills, horrors and shocks...

...It is possible that Washington and Paris did Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's musical return to the put some pressure on Syria after the October shelling which Demon Barber of Fleet Street...

...I have neither seen nor read Bond's Sweeney, but on the evidence of Sondheim's musical I assume that he has drawn to STUDIO STUDIES it for qualities that transcend the frightening and the funny...

...It works more directly...

...The Leftists want to clean out the political deadwood borrowed by mid-century publishers, has shocks of hair jutting (especially in the Sunni community) and open the way to new out from a head like a wood block, sitting on an even more and younger forces...

...It is a period illustration...

...Lovett set the scene-emotionally, nor because it uses its elaborate set to suggest some connection economically-for the casual transition to the people pie busi- between industrialism and inhumanity, nor even because it ness...

...Lebanese sovereignty in the area...

...Sondheim's Bringing Up Baby...

...What the contrary, the Film Department's Adrienne Mancia and keeps a man alive...

...or, The Ruffian Barber (New York, then another performer picks up the "Ballad...

...Lovett, looking like a slightly presents a cannibalistic society...

...In flat, presentational delivery the disaster on the television news...

...it is accusatory...

...GERALD WEALES old-fashioned melodrama line, but that line takes twists of its own, pulled off the straight and narrow by the social implications of the show...

...White-faced, menacing even in repose, he is "revolution" is not strangled before a Palestinian state is almost a puppet scare figure, a calculated contrast to Ken created-a solid base in Lebanon is their only assurance...

...That's why we got a rare opportunity to see, for if he can...

...More strategically in "The Worst Pies in musical has point not because it punctures corrupt officials, London," which lets Mrs...

...This was the best of the studio cycles done don," is one that lets him embrace Mrs...

...The intention alters, just as the President Sarkis's visit to Paris in December, that the only plot does, from one version of Sweeney Todd to another, from reasonable solution to the Palestinian problem is that the play to penny dreadful, from novel to music hall song...

...Len Cariou, looking would like to profit from the mess to get a fairer share of rather like the Sweeney Todd in the British Museum print power...

...I swear he did, or may I be made into Sharing the laughter with the villains muddies the clean, one of Lovett's pies...