Sweeney Todd

by Stephen Sondheim

Background

Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street came about almost by accident. Sondheim, in London to supervise a production of Follies in 1973, decided to take in an evening at the theatre and ended up watching a Christopher Bond play: Sweeney Todd, written for the Stoke Experimental theatre company.

So impressed was Sondheim with the production that he decided to try and convert it into a musical. With Bond’s permission he embarked on the six year journey that would eventually see the production arrive in Broadway, at the Uris Theatre on 1st March 1979, starring Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou.

Sondheim’s score to Sweeney is one of his most complex to date, considered by many to be an English language opera. He relies heavily on counterpoint and rich, ‘angular’ harmonies in the show. Sondheim quotes the ancient Dies Irae Gregorian chant as part of the eponymous ballad that runs throughout the score.

Although Sondheim always denied any Brechtian influence on his work, Bond’s original script was actually devised by combining a renamed version of Brecht’s Man is Man, with an 1847 one act folk play by playwright George Dibdin Pitt based on a story called The String of Pearls: A Romance, which had appeared in one of the notorious Penny Dreadfuls, called The People’s Periodical, issue 7, 21st November 1846. It was probably written by Thomas Prest, who tended to base his gruesome villains and horror stories on grains of truth, sometimes gaining inspiration from real crime reports in The Times. Pitt’s play opened at the Hoxton Theatre with the subtitle The Fiend of Fleet Street and was billed as ‘founded on fact’. It was something of a success, and the story spread by word of mouth taking on the quality of an urban legend.