SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

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SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

Posted: 4/1/17 at 7:23pm

SWEENEY TODD has been my favorite musical for over a decade, but there is one thing about it I hadn't thought of until today. It's not a nitpick, but it's something that has me puzzled.

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Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett have the oven lit in the Final Sequence to burn the corpses of the Judge and the Beggar Woman, and Sweeney eventually throws Mrs. Lovett into the oven to kill her. What I'm wondering is why the oven was on in the first place. We see it lit when Mrs. Lovett takes Tobias into the bake house, which happens after Tobias says the store is sold out, so they shouldn't be cooking any more pies. Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett may have tossed the Beadle's corpse into the oven since he is not there in the Final Sequence, but I doubt they would take that time when they are trying to find Tobias. Is there some reason Mrs. Lovett would need to keep the oven lit, like for warmth?

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SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

Posted: 4/1/17 at 8:10pm

I suspect because it wasn't a modern oven which is lit and turned off so quickly. And pies were being baked throughout the day, right?

SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

Posted: 4/1/17 at 8:51pm

For the number needed to stock the shop, the pies would have to be baked at all hours.

Earlier in Act Two, the Beggar Woman sings "Smell it, sir, an evil smell / Every night at the vespers bell / Smoke that comes from the mouth of hell" Vespers is the sunset prayer service.

Also, Todd's letter instructs the Judge to "hurry, after the night falls" to retrieve Johanna.

So we know the oven is usually baking at sunset and we have the Judge arriving shortly thereafter. Seems to me that the timing works out perfectly.

SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

Posted: 4/1/17 at 11:39pm

I suspect both answers are true for the period: the oven takes awhile to fire up. As busy as they are, it probably doesn't pay to start over every day from scratch.

And given the climate in London during the Coal Age and the fact that heat rises, the basement oven probably also helped keep the entire building livable. (I only recently learned that London has never had a "fog" problem. What they used to call a "foggy day" was actually a bad smog day caused by all the coal stoves and an atmospheric inversion.) (I once lived in a top floor walk-up apartment in NYC where we turned off the radiators and left the windows wide open all winter and the two rooms were still plenty warm from the heat rising through the building.)

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But speaking of quibbles, I was listening to the score the other night and as Mrs. Lovett met her fate it occurred to me that the victims would have been "dressed" (in the sense of the word used by hunters), but the play lets us assume they were all just thrown into the oven, clothes, hair, teeth and all. I don't think we're supposed to worry about such trifles in SWEENEY's genre of "Penny Dreadful".

Updated On: 4/1/17 at 11:39 PM

SWEENEY TODD Question - Spoilers

Posted: 4/2/17 at 6:34am

I don't think the regular victims were thrown in clothes and all. The regular bodies were dismembered and ground 3 times, the meat put in the pies and then the pies baked in the oven. Mrs. Lovett and ST were trying to dispose of the "special" bodies quickly as neither wanted them to be seen by others. Mrs. Lovett wanted to get rid of the Beggar Woman so ST wouldn't see her and ST needed to get rid of the high profile bodies as he knew Joanna as the sailor knew about his crimes and that they could be discovered at any time.

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