The Rep has a new staff member–Artistic Associate Lauren Shouse, who is also serving as dramaturg for Sweeney Todd. She created a very interesting (and very extensive!) background packet for the cast, and I’ve asked her to choose some interesting highlights to share with you. It’s a bit long, but I think you’ll find it as fascinating as we did. We’ll start with the Literary History of Sweeney Todd. Enjoy!
An unnamed murderous barber first appears in 1795 in an English magazine called The Leisure Hour. Thirty years later, a French version of the story, entitled “A Terrible Story of the Rue de la Harpe, Paris,” is published in London’s Tell-Tale Magazine. In this version, the barber murders a country gentleman and steals a string of pearls before delivering the corpse to his mistress, a chef renowned for her savory pâtés en croûte. The duo are discovered when the victim’s faithful dog leads the police to a cellar heaped with the skeletal remains of three hundred people.
In 1846, writer Thomas Prest relocates the story to Georgian London—setting the barber shop on Fleet Street and the pie shop in Bell Yard, Temple Bar—and centering the story on an invented romance between the dashing sailor, Mark Ingestre, and the virtuous Johanna Oakley. The first of eighteen serialized installments of The String of Pearls—A Romance, appears in November in Edward Lloyd’s weekly penny newspaper, The People’s Periodical and Family Library.
So successful is Prest’s “penny dreadful” with the working class readership that George Dibdin-Pitt dramatizes The String of Pearls the very next year, adding the subtitle “The Fiend of Fleet Street.” Advertised as “Founded on Fact,” the melodrama opens at the Brittania Theatre. Sweeney’s battle cry “I polish ’em off!” and his trick chair attached to a trap-door thrill audiences ravenous for gory entertainment.
Without copyright protection, dozens of adaptations quickly follow throughout the country and the British Empire. Some add music, some restore the heroic dog, but all emphasize the villainous barber. In 1862, Frederick Hazleton fashions a Sweeney Todd novel from his own three-act play. Hazleton has Johanna disguise herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to Sweeney and search for her missing fiancé. In the decades to come, actors like George Yates play Sweeney thousands of times. The aptly-named Todd Slaughter’s performance is captured in George King’s 1936 film, The Demon Barber. There’s even a ballet version produced in 1959 by the Royal Ballet Company.
Then in 1973, playwright Christopher Bond—borrowing from sources as diverse as The Count of Monte Cristo, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy, and Shakespeare—renovates the Todd legend by giving his barber a lost wife, a daughter…and a motivation to kill. Bond’s version, which opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, elevated the story of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett from 19th-century melodrama and attracted the attention of Stephen Sondheim, who was working in London on the premiere of Gypsy. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, adapted from Bond’s play, opened on Broadway in 1979. A critical—if not financial—success in its initial outing, it entered the theatre (and opera) repertory with amazing alacrity.
Leave a comment
No comments yet.
A View from the Booth 
Leave a comment