Posted: 11/3/07 at 11:24pm
"SOME time in 1980, during the five months that the grim and glorious musical “Sweeney Todd” played the Theater Royal Drury Lane, a California college student visiting London bought a ticket. And another and another and another.
Tim Burton, obsessive watcher of horror movies and a worshiper of Vincent Price, had discovered “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” not to mention Stephen Sondheim. And after stewing in his imagination on and off for some 25 years, that encounter has been channeled into Mr. Burton’s new film version, scheduled to arrive Dec. 21, with Johnny Depp as Sweeney, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett and the smoke-blackened streets of Victorian London as the setting for their danse macabre.
Any way you slice it, it’s a gamble.
Transferring a stage work to the screen is always dodgy; for musicals, so dependent on the artificial world of the proscenium, the risks are multiplied. To further complicate things Mr. Burton entrusted the lead roles in this operatic, difficult-to-sing work, which scooped up no less than seven Tony Awards in 1979, to two movie stars whose vocal abilities, like those of all but one of the supporting players, were untested. (They include Sacha Baron Cohen, as the competing barber Pirelli.)
There’s also the little matter of the R-rated plot, which revels in the throat-cutting, meat-chopping proclivities of a serial killer whose victims are funneled from a trick barber’s chair into a giant meat grinder, processed and then baked into tasty little meat pies by his cooperative landlady.
Even less bloody shows by Mr. Sondheim have not been served well by the movies. Some — “Pacific Overtures,” say, “Sunday in the Park With George” or “Assassins”— are so intrinsically theatrical in conception that they seem virtually unfilmable. Of the others for which he has also written both music and lyrics, only two, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966) and “A Little Night Music” (1978 ), had made it to celluloid (and not very happily) before Mr. Burton tackled “Sweeney.”
“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” may seem a more likely candidate for film success, given its origins in melodrama and Grand Guignol, the slasher movies of the 19th century. Still, “It took courage and a certain lunatic leap of faith to think we could really bring this wild beast to the screen,” the screenwriter, John Logan, said via e-mail.
Mr. Burton was not making films when he first saw “Sweeney Todd.” But he was struck, he recalled in a recent telephone interview, by how cinematic it was. Propelled by Mr. Sondheim’s extensive underscoring, Harold Prince’s production flowed from scene to scene within a cavernous metal cage, using revolving set pieces housing Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, Sweeney’s tonsorial establishment and the show’s other locations. When Mr. Burton’s film career took off, in the late ’80s, he approached Mr. Sondheim about a film .
“I said fine,” Mr. Sondheim said by telephone recently. “Then he went off and did other things.”
Mr. Burton explained, “You get sort of sidetracked.” But, he said, it was all for the best. “Back then, I didn’t really know Johnny.” And he hadn’t yet met Ms. Bonham Carter, with whom he now lives. (They are expecting their second child next month.)
Around five years ago, he said, he stumbled on an old drawing he had made of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. To his surprise, “they kind of looked like Johnny and Helena.” The wheels began to turn. “Those kinds of things mean something to me,” Mr. Burton said. “Johnny had gotten to the point where he was the right age. There was something about it that felt really right, even though I didn’t know if he could sing.”
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Updated On: 11/3/07 at 11:24 PM
