Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
heroine, Victor Garber's sailor hero, a Jack Tar straight out of Sweeney Todd is no Brecht-Weill musical, however. It is a period illustration. There are last-minute escapes, locked ...
...The Tobias, long before he suspects anything, has a favorite oath to "Ballad" is not cautionary after all...
...This was the best of the studio cycles done don," is one that lets him embrace 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 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...
...In flat, presentational delivery the disaster on the television news...
...I don't mean that the films were necessarily the best...
...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...
...Musi- makes a door-slam exit...
...Ballad" seems at first a cautionary tale which the actors will But it is never parody melodrama...
...Lovett "By the Sea...
...It works more directly...
...It lures...
...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...
...The laughter and the perform...
...That's why we got a rare opportunity to see, for if he can...
...There are last-minute escapes, locked diagnosis without cure...
...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...
...asks Mrs...
...Angela Lansbury's Mrs...
...He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole sentative...
...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...
...At the end, however, after the avalanche of melohorror go together, each reinforcing the other...
...It is a period illustration...
...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...
...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...
...or, The Ruffian Barber (New York, then another performer picks up the "Ballad...
...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...
...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...
...The Threepenny Opera springs to mind not simply instance, Cimmaron (1931) starring Richard Dix, a film Anbecause the story of Mrs...
...At this ever thinks of polishing anybody off as I do" and innocent point, for me, the musical becomes genuinely scary...
...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...
...More strategically in "The Worst Pies in musical has point not because it punctures corrupt officials, London," which lets Mrs...
...Sondheim's Bringing Up Baby...
...Sweeney, affirm his loyalty, "may I be made into one of Lovett's pies...
...On suggestion as a perfect image of the way men live...
...What the contrary, the Film Department's Adrienne Mancia and keeps a man alive...
...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...
...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...
...again because a museum retrospective ought to do more than 8 June 1979: 339...
...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...
...Lovett, looking like a slightly presents a cannibalistic society...
...First one, Merry's Sweeney Todd...
...he mixes his comedy with character and plot...
...Lovett's culinary so far...
...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...
...is-caught me in his trap...
...In Captain dramatic deaths, everything comes to a sudden halt...
...I swear he did, or may I be made into Sharing the laughter with the villains muddies the clean, one of Lovett's pies...
...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...
...Still, it was worthwhile to see Cimmaron Weill-in tone at least-all through the musical...
...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...
...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...
...it is accusatory...
...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...
Vol. 106 • June 1979 • No. 11
