yet another in a long string of "hey, this Hamlet thing isn't a bad play..." moments, let's add this one: I just heard Rite of Spring for the first time a few weeks ago. Not bad, huh?

ps: maybe its because I just wrapped up a film project and a realized production in film-realism mode in school that I appreciated the little tiny details in sweeney. Like the lettering painted on the building across the street: "International Spices" to the book Mrs. Lovett was reading when Toby sings "Not While I'm Around": Manners. Perfect.

after seeing it twice, im still processing tim burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The 10 second back story is that I fell in love with this musical in 9th grade (I was a weird one) and the TV version became a mainstay of undergrad life and (thanks to my dad) I saw it performed at Avery Fisher Hall in NYC when I was about to graduate college. To say that the score and story are in my bones is an understatement.

For years I've been pondering how I would do a film version of this piece. First, the ballads and chorus have to go. If anyone's seen the wretched Oliver and the worse Little Shop of Horrors, it's plain as day that a singing chorus of urchins and street-walkers reads campy onscreen. I've always felt that Harold Prince's production of Sweeney Todd was already a deconstruction of an existing property which got away from a personal, small story of revenge. Sondheim approached Prince after he'd already started writing, and Prince's response was that he didn't know how to direct it as a melodrama, but he could do it as a distancing brechtian piece of epic theater. That Sondheim went along with this somewhat counter-intuitive idea and began shaping the score to this interpretation was a pretty brilliant compromise: it could always be done differently and smaller later, to the tune of several tonys.

Indeed, the movie is different and smaller. I felt like I was seeing this story for the first time, almost. The camera can do things that the stage just can't: and the closeups of anguish in "My Friends:" Todd for his stolen family and the only friends he has left in his razors, and Mrs. Lovett for Todd more than cover up for their deficiencies as singers. (After about 20 minutes, I accepted that this was not the film of Sweeney Todd with glorious singing, and proceeded to take what I was getting on its own merits.) The closeups of throat-slashings and chute-fallings defused the distancing effect of the stage play: yes, it's a sight gag, but this is what it really looks like. This is what revenge actually looks like. Not a stage effect glimpsed from the upper balcony, but real brutality and malice. On stage, Pirelli's throat can be slashed in one swooping gesture: in gut-churning closeup, it takes a long time and a lot of strength to kill someone, effort we don't get to cut away from. "You want your kicks? Here!" it feels like Burton is saying.

But in this dark world, not even the villains are completely villainous: reviews keep mentioning Alan Rickman's zeal in playing an out-and-out all-purpose baddie. Were we seeing the same movie? Every frame of him onscreen was full of self-loathing and shame. That the relieved joy the Judge feels upon meeting "a fellow spirit" is genuine after so many years of loneliness and corrosive torment makes his recognition of Todd and his own misdeeds all the more affecting. The judge's love for his ward is so grasping and pathetic that it's hard not to feel for him: this guy is seriously fucked up and has seriously fucked up and there's just nowhere to go but down for him. Literally and metaphorically, unfortunately. The viciousness of his murder - the one murder that isn't committed with suavity and precision, but with unleashed, unbalanced, destabilizing fury - was so upsetting for me that I was still shaking when the closing credits ran.

Bravo to Johnny Depp for going there, going to that place (how many takes did they do to get that scene just right?) of pure fury and to Tim Burton for intuitively knowing that a quick slash and a slide down the chute horribly misreads the depth of desperation in the moment. And bravo again to Burton, for balancing the primal energy of that murder with the heart and gut-wrenching final image: pathetic, futile, and aching with loss.

The film made me re-evaluate the show and what it's all about. I never realized how strange an evening it is: beautiful lullabies set to horrible, bloody events; a universe where absolutely no one is unsullied by a thirst for violence (it's key, i think, that anthony and johanna are both responsible for Fogg's death, though it's slightly tamed in the film); and a story where we're forced to participate in the downward spiral into madness of a character who in another less responsible film would be the hero. Sweeney Todd is in some sense a the flipside of Kill Bill: Beatrice Kiddo is still blonde and pretty and the hero after killing all the people who done her wrong; Sweeney's soul is corrupted before he kills a single person.

But, again, bravo for everyone. But most of all, bravo to Sondheim, for being open to reconfiguring his masterpiece to suit this new medium, for being willing to get to the heart of his own work and showing us what revenge really looks like. It's just as corrosive, corrupting and black as the environs that breed it.

You probably won't read this because you're homeless - m4m - 26 (Midtown)
On the R train

You - Putting newspaper between your butt cheeks, lining up your Gatorade bottles.
Me - Reading my book, trying desperately not to make eye contact.

Let's do it again some time.

certainly not a writer.

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/12/21/sweeney_todd/