Attend the Tale of

Sweeney Todd

Go see it, but be prepared. It’s a horror film, no question about it. How much fun to watch a treatment of a show that I’ve known and loved for decades in its stage form, get all of that Hollywood glitz and glamour. And then to get the amazing artistry and point of view of the best sick and twisted director of our time, Tim Burton, is just gravy. This movie is cinema as high art catapulted into high pop. I haven’t enjoyed a film this much since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. Chicago was great, Dream Girls was a joy, but this is something else altogether. It’s new and fresh and deeply disturbing. It is also deeply satisfying.

I have to admit I went into it with a little trepidation. I’d been listening to the soundtrack and the thin and reedy voices of the leads was quite a departure from the power and character I’d been used to from the stage performances and recordings. But I also knew going in that film is its own medium and that the requirements for a quality performance on celluloid are quite different that those for an actor on the stage. And as it turns out yes the voices of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are indeed thin and reedy but it doesn’t matter. Even at the point where this weakness is most obvious, when Mrs. Lovett is singing a duet with Toby, this kid with an obviously very well trained voice who sang circles around her, the disparity just didn’t matter. The power of her performance as a veteran of the screen, and the balancing of the sound in the editing room made up the difference . . . and the result was poetry.

There are a lot of obvious limitations that are just the nature of the film beast. Directors call the camera the “one eyed idiot” and that’s pretty appropriate. You can’t recreate the sweeping power of a stage full of actors singing the Ballad of Sweeney Todd on a screen. And the split stage action and choral intricacies that are what makes Sondheim, well . . . Sondheim are completely lost in the two dimensional world of cinema. But the beauty of a film is its utter repeatability (all of us can have a nearly identical experience watching it wherever we may live) and the way it can be so literate in everything it is trying to relate. When you talk about the seaside, you can be right there at the seaside. Then instantly when you are cutting someone’s throat with a razor, you are there in close up gore with speakers screaming the orchestral decibels and assaulting all your senses. When it’s done right, it’s a visceral experience.

Don’t wait for Netflix for this one. Catch it while its hot.