Out There :: 'Sweeney' Meditations

Out There was in the house for the final performance of San Francisco Opera's "Sweeney Todd" last week, surely one of the highlights of the young fall arts season. We've told this story before, but we'll subject you to it again: OT was in the audience of the last preview performance before opening night of the world premiere of "Sweeney Todd" at the Uris Theater on Broadway in 1979.

It was our senior-class trip to NYC that spring, and our drama teacher had noticed that OT read the Arts section of The New York Times religiously every day. This was unusual only because we went to high school nowhere near NY, but in a weird semi-rural suburb outside Baltimore. But our curiosity about culture was large even then. Upshot was, we got to choose the show for the senior-class Broadway outing.

We'd noticed ads in the Times for this new musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, starring Broadway legends Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury as Sweeney & Mrs. Lovett. At our enthusiastic recommendation, the class got upper balcony seats in the cavernous Uris. The show itself was so big the distance from the giant stage didn't matter. The set, a massive iron foundry, extended into the nosebleed section, with a pipe whistle then went off at each throat-slashing and made us jump in our seats. It was a great theatrical experience for Randallstown High . The next night the show opened, and Broadway history was made.

What does Sweeney Todd look like from the vantage point of what we now know as the barbarous 21st century? After all, its hero is a sociopathic mass murderer who first sets out to wreak revenge on specific enemies, then expands his victim pool to all of humanity, or at least those in close proximity to his razors. Not so different from terrorists with perhaps legitimate grievances who victimize innocents, or deranged schizophrenics with access to weapons who perpetrate mass shootings. Todd sings a paean to his murder weapons, his blades ("My Friends"). In "No Place Like London," he declares, "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,/and it's filled with people who are filled with shit,/and the vermin of the world inhabit it,/and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit,/and it goes by the name of London." Pretty dark stuff all around.

Even the comic relief of Mrs. Lovett, Todd's partner in crime, comes wrapped in the psychopathy of homicide and cannibalism. In "The Worst Pies in London," she sings cheerfully about her competitor, "Have to hand it to her, what I call enterprise,/ popping pussies into pies,/wouldn't do in my shop./Just the thought of it's enough to make you sick,/and I'm telling you, them pussycats is quick!"

What were Sondheim and Wheeler telling us in 1979? It was a dark time in America, the country had just gone through Vietnam and Watergate, and we had yet to be subjected to the "sunny optimism"/union-busting of the Reagan era. We think the key to Sweeney is in its Brechtian undertones. The chorus stands at the very lip of the stage and confronts the audience with our complicity. Some of their lyrics could have been morals from Brecht's own fables. Sweeney croons to Mrs. Lovett, "The history of the world, my love,/Is those below serving those up above."

In the final analysis, this masterpiece for the ages is about life's ultimate conundrum, irony, and operating-system error: death. It isn't any accident that its protagonist's surname comes so close to the German word for mortal demise. Halloween approaches!