https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeney_Todd:_The_Demon_Barber_of_Fleet_Street
Where did the character originate?
How did future adaptations change the story?
How did Hal Prince's production contextualize the character?
How did Sondheim's vision differ from Prince's?
Terms to know: Penny Dreadfuls, Victorian England, Grand Guignol, Industrial Revolution
The character of Sweeney Todd had its origins in serialized Victorian popular fiction, known as "penny dreadfuls". A story called "The String of Pearls" was published in a weekly magazine during the winter of 1846–47. Set in 1785, the story featured as its principal villain a certain Sweeney Todd and included all the plot elements that were used by Sondheim and others ever since. The murderous barber’s story proved instantly popular – it was turned into a play before the ending had even been revealed in print. An expanded edition appeared in 1850, an American version in 1852, a new play in 1865. By the 1870s, Sweeney Todd was a familiar character to most Victorians.
Sondheim’s musical was, in fact, based on Christopher Bond’s 1973 spooky melodrama, which introduced a psychological background to Todd’s crimes. In Bond's reincarnation of the character, Todd was the victim of a ruthless judge who raped his young wife and exiled him to Australia. Sondheim first conceived of a musical version of the story in 1973, after he went to see Bond's ghoulish take on the story at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Sondheim felt that the addition of music would greatly increase the size of the drama, transforming it into a different theatrical experience, saying later:
“What I did to Chris' play is more than enhance it. I had a feeling it would be a new animal. The effect it had at Stratford East in London and the effect it had at the Uris Theater in New York are two entirely different effects, even though it's the same play. It was essentially charming over there because they don't take Sweeney Todd seriously. Our production was larger in scope. Hal Prince gave it an epic sense, a sense that this was a man of some size instead of just a nut case. The music helps to give it that dimension."
Music proved to be a key element behind the impact of Sweeney Todd on audiences. Over eighty percent of the production is set to music, either sung or orchestrated underneath dialogue. The score is one vast structure, each individual part meshing with others for the good of the entire musical machine. Never before or since in his work has Sondheim utilized music in such an exhaustive capacity to further the purposes of the drama.
Sondheim has often said that his Sweeney Todd was about obsession – and close friends seemed to instinctually agree. When Sondheim first played songs from an early version of the show for Judy Prince (wife of the show's director), she told him: "Oh God – I didn't know this was what [Sweeney Todd] was about. It's nothing to do with Grand Guignol. It's the story of your [own] life."
What Sondheim thought of as "a small horror piece" eventually became a colossal portrait of the Industrial Revolution in the hands of director Hal Prince. At first, Prince was not interested in directing the show; to him it was just another melodrama, not very experimental structurally. Then he discovered a metaphor which expanded the story into an essay on the human condition.
On the stage of the Uris Theater in New York, this tale of horrors was transformed into a mountain of steel in motion. Prince's scenic metaphor for Sweeney Todd was a 19th-century iron foundry moved from Rhode Island and reassembled on the stage, which critic Jack Kroll aptly described as "part cathedral, part factory, part prison, that dwarfed and degraded the swarming denizens of the lower orders."
The massive scope of Prince's setting went beyond even Sondheim's intentions. Sondheim admits that his conception of the show differed from that of Prince: "Hal's metaphor is that the factory turns out Sweeney Todds. It turns out soulless, defeated, hopeless people. That's what the play's about to him; Sweeney Todd is a product of that age. I think it's not. Sweeney Todd is a man bent on personal revenge, the way we all are in one way or another, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the time he lived in, as far as I'm concerned.”