Content area
Full Text
This article details the evolution of Sweeney Todd plays-from George Dibdin Pitt's 1847 villain play through Christopher Bond's 1970 melodrama to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's "Musical Thriller"-to demonstrate the effect of restructuring the plot along the lines of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, initially by Bond and more fully by Sondheim and Wheeler. These adaptations have helped to transform the dramatic materials as well as the ethical considerations of the theme into the stuff of true tragedy in Sondheim and Wheeler's musical play.
When Sweeney Todd first trod the boards of the Britannia Theatre in George Dibdin Pitt's 1847 melodrama, the Fleet Street barber was a villain, pure and simple-well, not so pure, to be sure, but certainly simple. Pitt's play was a villain play, and his central character a murderer motivated merely by greed: Pitt's Todd slew his victims only in order to rob them. Indeed, Pitt's original title for the first of what was to become a long string of Sweeney Todd melodramas was A String of Pearls. This title was retained for at least four other of the Victorian theatrical renderings of the Sweeney story and one that indicates a preoccupation as much with theft as with serial slaughter.1 True, the central trappings of the Sweeney legend are first dramatized in Pitt's play-Todd's mechanical chair that propels his victims to the cellar of his shop and the barber's collusion with Mrs. Lovett, the meat-pie maker, to turn his victims' remains into comestibles-but both Todd's chair and his grisly collaboration with Lovett have clearly been in place for some time prior to the rise of the first-act curtain. As a matter of fact, even though Pitt portrays a few attempted murders onstage, for the most part he is little concerned with dramatizing the ghoulish parade of Sweeney's deeds and even less concerned with revealing the causes for or motivating forces behind Sweeney's life of ingenious crime. Rather, he weaves a convoluted tale whose chief end is to show Todd's comeuppance and the happy reuniting of a pair of long-separated lovers. Indeed, in Pitt's Sweeney Todd (it was finally produced under that title, as were most of the subsequent Sweeney plays), the multiple story lines are as labyrinthine in their complexity as Todd's...