No one has ever confused a slasher movie with a musical. Until now. Last Friday, Tim Burton’s widely anticipated Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, opened in America after a fever of industry and internet buzz climaxing this month with Golden Globe nominations for best actor, actress, director and picture, even before audiences have seen it. Not bad for an R-rated movie (which means only under-17s with an adult can watch it in America), based on the bloodcurdling Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim about a serial killer with a sideline in cannibalism.
In his sixth outing with his friend Burton, Depp ditches his trademark charm to play a chilling obsessive, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Returning to Victorian London after 15 years of false imprisonment abroad, barber Benjamin Barker disguises himself with the name Sweeney Todd in order to wreak revenge upon the judge who, he discovers, raped his now dead wife and stole his daughter.
But when flamboyant rival Signior Pirelli, played by with cape-swirling gusto by Sacha Baron Cohen, threatens to expose him, Sweeney kills him with one of his cut-throat razors. Faced with a frankly inconvenient yet juicy dead body to dispose of, Sweeney’s pie shop landlady, a beautifully demented Helena Bonham Carter, comes up with a ghastly plan. ‘With the price of meat what it is…’
Whichever way you slice it - and Burton and screenwriter/producer John Logan ensure there’s a whole lot of slicing on display - the material’s mix of galvanic passion, gore and gallows humour is a tough call. And if that weren’t enough, there’s one last inescapable fact: this movie isn’t a story graced by a couple of production numbers: 70 per cent of the movie is sung.
Danny Elfman, Burton’s usual trusted composer, is nowhere to be seen. Every bar of music in this $55m, 117-minute movie is drawn from Sondheim’s almost three-hour Broadway musical, the composer/lyricist’s widely acknowledged masterpiece that won eight Tony awards. That alone could be considered risky when almost every past stage musical has transferred to the screen with the help (or hindrance) of Hollywood composers.
Logan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Gladiator and The Aviator, saw the original production on Broadway three times when he was a teenager. ‘I’d never seen anything that bloody but at the same time so ravishingly beautiful and emotionally harrowing,’ he says. All of which only fuelled his initial feeling of being intimidated by the task of writing the screenplay: ‘My raison d’etre was, “Don’t fuck it up.”‘
He worked alongside Sondheim on the film for four years. They believe everything in this gory glory stands or falls on the reception of the opening sequence, when the 75-piece orchestra thunders out the shiveringly sinister score over gleaming yet looming credits. Not for nothing did Sondheim once say: ‘I wanted to write a musical like a horror movie. I wanted to scare people.’ The sequence not only sets up the dark mood with almost monochrome, Edward Gorey-like sets of Victorian London, but it prepares audiences by giving serious aural scale to the spectacle about to unfold.
From there, the film-makers make their biggest gamble: the movie leaps straight into sung dialogue. Benjamin Barker (Depp) and his young travelling companion Anthony (lean-faced Jamie Campbell-Bower in his film debut) sail into London on the deck of a ship; instead of speaking, they’re singing. But they’re not singing ‘a number’.
Talking after the film’s private first screening in London last month, Logan was upbeat about the route they’d taken. ‘On stage, you can scream and sing,’ he told me. ‘In movies, that sort of declamatory singing looks artificial and fake. Movies use close-up, so you have to whisper.’
That’s the secret of their success. Yes, the sung dialogue tells the story, but having it whispered insinuatingly into your ear stops it feeling horribly unrealistic. Instead, the music amplifies the characters’ thoughts and dramatises their deeds. That’s particularly true with Depp, in his most affecting performance since Edward Scissorhands. On stage, the role has traditionally been played by an actor more noted for aggression. But Burton wanted Depp from the moment he agreed to direct the film, despite the fact that the actor claims never to have sung before.
Depp was, however, musical enough to have been a guitarist in a variety of rock bands, a fairly essential quality given the notorious complexity of the almost operatic score. Having worked on a demo in a friend’s garage to see if he really did have the vocal chops, he clearly found a voice. Even industry sceptics devoted to the much-loved original Broadway cast album have been surprised by the sheer expressive power issuing forth from Depp’s lungs. By the time the full sung-out passion arrives - heralded by Todd’s riveting, shockingly full-throated moment of self-realisation when reunited with his cut-throat razors: ‘At last, my right arm is complete again!’ - you’re so hooked into his story that the musical pitch of emotion he hits is not just plausible but gripping. There are other memorable sequences such as the suspense-filled duet he shares with Alan Rickman’s deliciously saturnine judge before he leans in to murder him.
Depp partly attributes his inspiration to what he describes as the ‘aggressive crooning’ of Iggy Pop. His chillingly insinuating tone is mirrored by Helena Bonham Carter, who, despite being Burton’s partner since 2001, reportedly had to audition for the role against stiff competition from a dozen Hollywood A-listers, including Annette Bening.
Angela Lansbury’s original Mrs Lovett on stage in 1979 was a memorable monster, a fire-breathing cockney wisecracker. Bonham Carter retains the character’s big hair in a pile-up of curls, but in all other respects she scales everything back. The result is quietly lethal. She almost breathes the music out, as if letting the audience in on her private musings as she reveals her secret passion for Sweeney. She also gets the lion’s share of the laughs. In spite of a bloodspilling plot, both stage and screen versions are startlingly funny.
The seamlessness of the film winningly disguises the fact that it could easily have gone horribly wrong. Even Phantom of the Opera and Rent, two of Broadway’s biggest-ever hits, were disappointing movies. As for the much-trumpeted screen remake of The Producers, it bombed, Susan Stroman’s camera seemingly content merely to record the outlandishness that was so enjoyable in the theatre. On stage, seeing virtually the entire cast dressed up as sex-obsessed little old ladies tap-dancing with Zimmer frames in front of you was deliriously funny because it seemed so impossible. But editing makes everything possible on film, so the same gag did not work. Not only did it appear to have no cinematic reason to exist, but the whole sorry spectacle only revealed how stagebound the material had become.
Mercifully, no one on Sweeney Todd, least of all its composer, was interested in enshrining the stage version. Musical numbers have been excised, verses removed from songs and the iconic chorus threaded throughout the piece narrating the action has been removed entirely.
‘Stephen Sondheim had contractual approval,’ Logan points out. ‘It could have been highly problematic. It wasn’t. From the very first discussion, he said, “I don’t want a version of the stage show.” I had no idea how cinematically he thinks - he understands the language and knew a translation had to occur.’
Sondheim told me that despite growing up as a film buff (his knowledge remains encyclopaedic) there was one genre he didn’t like. ‘Musicals. There were inventive exceptions, like Singin’ in the Rain or Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, but usually I liked the scores but not the movies.’ His reasoning helps illuminate why Sweeney Todd works.
‘On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that’s the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that’s the point. Static action - if that’s not an oxymoron - is accepted. It’s what writer Burt Shevelove used to call “savouring the moment”. That’s a very tricky business on film. It’s fine if the songs are presentational, as in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style movie where you watch them for the fun of it, but not with storytelling songs. When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.’
Sondheim’s instincts are all about dramatic pace. ‘In movie versions of shows like West Side Story [for which he wrote the lyrics] or My Fair Lady, the songs are supposed to involve you. But watching them I get uninvolved.’
He cites the former’s famous but cinematically inert ‘Tonight’ quintet. ‘There’s nothing to shoot because there’s no action.’ West Side Story went on to win 10 Oscars, but Sondheim remains less than happy with it.
‘You can’t do a musical about gang warfare when the gangs dance down street with colour co-ordinated washing and sneakers: it’s candyland. On stage, you accepted they were menacing, but movies are a different medium.’
That’s something he has learned to his cost. In 1973, he and Anthony Perkins wrote the quirky but less than successful mystery movie The Last of Sheila and he has watched directors turn his hit musicals A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and A Little Night Music into film flops.
‘No matter how poetically you film, screen is realistic and it doesn’t acknow- ledge the audience,’ he says. ‘But John Logan is sensitive to both mediums: his rule was not to allow extended singing that would hold up the storytelling.’
The irony of a film that feels so indisputably like a Tim Burton picture is that it was originally to have been directed by Sam Mendes. He put the idea to Sondheim in 2003 when they were working on the Broadway revival of Sondheim’s show Gypsy.
At their first proper meeting with Logan on board, the discussion was all about how to get an audience to stomach watching people singing. ‘He had the notion of starting it in a theatre, like Olivier’s Henry V,’ remembers Sondheim. ‘But,’ according to Logan, ‘he very graciously withdrew after two years’ work because he couldn’t find a way into the material.’
With Mendes off the project, it didn’t look good. ‘We had an R-rated movie musical about a serial murderer with no director and star,’ said Logan, who moved up to become one of the producers in order to make it happen.
The switch to Burton was governed by two things. As Logan puts it: ‘That grand guignol sensibility isn’t just an aroma that hangs around Tim’s work: it’s in his DNA.’ Better still, as a fan of the stage musical, Burton had approached Sondheim over a decade ago to ask for the rights, a meeting that had come to nothing.
Fast-forwarding to this September, after seeing the first cut, Sondheim was telling friends that much of it was already spectacularly good. But now with the release imminent, he is more circumspect. ‘Maybe it will be too operatic for the young and too bloody for the old?’ He’s considerably cheered, however, to learn of a test screening in California after which college-age audiences besieged Logan with positive comments along the lines of: ‘I forgot they were singing.’
‘That’s exactly what I wanted!’ cries Sondheim. ‘When the show played on Broadway, I used to wander up the aisles and by the second act I could tell from the expressions on people’s faces that they had stopping noticing that characters were singing. They didn’t make the distinction. They clearly thought they were listening to dialogue and were held by the story.’
If that’s the case and Sweeney Todd works, there may be more. There’s already talk of Mendes making a film of Sondheim’s 1970 show Follies with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Meanwhile, in Hollywood to promote the movie, the composer found himself in conversation with Steven Spielberg. The director talked about wanting to film a musical himself. Sondheim’s immediate response? ‘Write one - don’t take one from the stage.’ Sage advice, generally speaking. But Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd looks like being the exception to the rule: don’t mess with a masterpiece.
Stage to Screen
Milestones or Millstones?
The Sound of Music (1965)
Nuns, Nazis, Alps, Julie Andrews… these are few of the world’s favourite things. The stage musical wasn’t Rodgers and Hammerstein’s finest show, but the movie remains a tearjerking sensation.
Paint Your Wagon (1969)
From the songwriters who gave you My Fair Lady came this Wild West musical. Those, er, chart-topping song-stylists Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin couldn’t save this. Two hours and 44 minutes, it seems much, much longer.
The Boy Friend (1971)
Ken Russell turned Sandy Wilson’s Twenties pastiche into a tribute to Thirties Hollywood crossed with a story of understudy Twiggy (right) going on stage when star Glenda Jackson breaks her leg. Alternately dazzling and dire.
Cabaret (1972)
The other Nazi musical. Bob Fosse powerfully revamped (in all senses) Kander and Ebb’s stage smash.
Grease (1978)
Unknowns Richard Gere and Elaine Paige played Danny and Sandy when the Broadway hit played London. This bubblegum movie version didn’t hurt John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It’s the highest-grossing musical ever.
Chicago (2002)
The stage show, smartly reimagined as the fantasies of leading lady Renee Zellweger, won six Oscars and its box-office is second only to Grease
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
The stage musical opened in London on 9 October 1986. It’s still on. Joel Schumacher’s movie didn’t linger. ‘If you ever longed to know what it feels like to be asphyxiated by brocade, here is your chance,’ opined the New Yorker. DB
Sweeney Todd opens in the UK on 25 January
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