Hello! Welcome back to our exploration of adaptation! Today, I wanted to discuss Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and the adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 stage musical into Tim Burton’s 2007 film of the same name. 

(I would also like to acknowledge that I am referring to most of these works as the creation of one person, i.e. Tim Burton’s film, even though some of these are the products of multiple people; I acknowledge and am not actively taking an auteur-theory stance in approaching works as the creation of a single visionary. I have decided to do this to more simply, for our discussion of adaptation, speak of how adaptational change is by choice, in attributing this choice to a single agent. We could discuss the death of the author, but another time—this blog is about adaptation.) 

Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 stage musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is itself an adaptation of Christopher Bond’s 1973 play; I have not read or seen a production of Bond’s play, and in this post, I will be discussing only the adaptation of stage musical to movie musical.

Sondheim’s stage musical is a revenge and grief story, following the titular protagonist, Sweeney Todd. Sweeney, a barber, fifteen years ago had a wife and a one-year old daughter. A judge in the city of the setting, London, lusting after his wife, Lucy, unjustly imprisoned Todd with a fifteen year sentence to get to his wife. Returning after this, he finds that Judge Turpin raped his wife, driving her insane and to seek and to ingest arsenic from an apothecary, and that he took his daughter, now sixteen-years-old, as his ward, who, in her aging self, looks a lot like her mother, and is now getting the same gaze from Turpin that her mother did. Sweeney Todd proceeds on a revenge path, aiming to take revenge for the loss of his wife and his daughter, the latter of whom he hopes to recover in his own care. Sweeney Todd forms an alliance with Nellie Lovett, a baker who works in the shop underneath the loft that used to be his barbershop, and he begins practicing murdering people who come in for a shave in preparation to kill Judge Turpin. 

To summarize Sweeney Todd through Shakespearean tragedies., it’s the revenge tragedy of Hamlet, with the Lady Macbeth-Macbeth dynamic of Ms. Lovett and Sweeney Todd, and the final last crypt-like plot- and death- heavy scene of Romeo and Juliet. The stage musical can be seen as the first horror musical of its kind, leading to the likes of Carrie, Little Shop of Horrors, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Addams Family, none of which I’ve actually seen or known but all of which I am acutely aware exist. The stage musical’s score borrows from the scores of Alfred Hitchcock movies, composed by Bernard Herrmann, and from the dramatic tradition of Brechtian theatre, forcing the audience, not to suspend disbelief, but see the world as it is through the employment of a chorus that periodically narrates the action. 

The original production of Sweeney Todd, was a production of a director, who put the work in a large theatre and made use of a grand and elaborate set that set the musical in the industrialization of Victorian London, amidst a backdrop of mechanical capitalism, as seen in Ms. Lovett’s action of turning the bodies of Sweeney’s victims into meat pies to sell in her shop. 

Sondheim’s musical was adapted for film by Tim Burton, into a heavily stylized production, the macabre shadows of light and dark, with the pops of color being in the orange-red blood of Sweeney’s victims. (The blood was meant to be more bright red than orange, but with consideration for the color grading that was expected to happen in post-production, bright orange liquid was used in filming, a shade that overcorrected for the color-grading and resulted in a melodramatic carrot-esque hue spilt over floorboards and staining white shirt, which lends to some sort of dream-like quality to the film.) I will admit that this movie is my second favorite, and this musical is my second favorite—grief stories are something I love, and this is one done expertly. 

Something that I believe I alluded to in the Gatsby post is that I believe that film is the most superior medium of storytelling, among plays, musicals, novels, short-stories, songs, operas, poems. Sweeney Todd is largely the reason why. 

One thing that we must discuss, in continuation of how the conventions of mediums are different, is how this applies to acting and performance, especially in the musical genre/medium. A notable thing in the adaptation of Sweeney from stage to screen is how the performance of the characters is different; I say this as someone who has spent a lot of time pouring over videos of different performances from different performers and productions of the same musical, for this and many other works. In general, to put it plainly, stage acting is a lot more exaggerated and larger-than-life than acting for the screen, which is sometimes, say, smaller-than-life. This is due to the frame of perception for the audience, where actors for the stage move with exaggerated gesture and movement and speak with projection and emphasized diction to ensure that their performance is communicated in full to every member sitting in the auditorium of a theatre, acting for the back row; whereas, for film, the frame of the camera is set much, much closer than that which can be seen with the naked eye in theatre. The camera can be set in a more natural human scope, or sometimes closer than one would see with the eye, in incredible close-ups, where the subtle lift of an eyebrow can convey the emotion that a full turn of the head and body would need to be conveyed on a stage. With this principle, Sweeney Todd adapts for the screen the revenge tragedy of Sweeney with the subtle performances of film that many movie musicals don’t, creating a work that is not simply a filmed adaptation of a musical, but a complete film in its own right. Johnny Depp’s singing for the character of Sweeney Todd would be wholly inappropriate, in tradition and function, for a stage Sweeney, where his lack of diction and quiet dynamics would hardly convey anything; however, for the intimate camera and audio of movies, Depp’s Sweeney conveys the character with an emotional and moving touch, subtle and overwhelmingly effective. 

In regards to the filmic nature of the work, and my film-supremacy views, (gosh, am I a supremacist? Cancel me, I dare you), Sweeney Todd makes use of the nature of film, the ability to frame the visual view of the narrative, in ways that other forms of drama cannot. 

I hope you enjoyed this discussion of Sweeney Todd! Thank you so much for joining me on the exploration in this leg of our adaptation journey!

Sources: Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Tim Burton’s 2007 film, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Peter Manning’s 2014 Masters’ in Music thesis, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: A Study.