Word: sondheims
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theater-savvy friend Victor Nelson asked me a few weeks ago about Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tim Burton's film version of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical. He wondered if Helena Bonham Carter was up to the vocal challenge of the Mrs. Lovett role. She's excellent, I replied; but aren't you anxious about Johnny Depp as the mad barber? He's not a trained singer. "Oh," Victor said with a knowing laugh, "Johnny Depp can do anything...
...revenge, has never seemed so human or so bleak. It's no longer just a Guignol songfest, staring at its creatures, with fascination but not pity, from an Olympian distance above the cage in which they claw at one another. Inside this sarcophagus of a play, beneath Sondheim's cold-steel lyrics, Burton finds a pulsing, mournful heart...
...checked out Broadway lately? I believe the "fogey" audience has become accustomed to situations that are more violent than the graveyard scene in The Sound of Music. The true problem with the upcoming version of Sweeney Todd is whether the principal players can do vocal justice to Stephen Sondheim's powerful score...
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as the full title has it, has quite a history. It's the film version of the hit Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical, which was based on a '70s play based on a 19th century melodrama. All of those appear to have drawn on an urban myth about a barber who found an unconventional use for his straight razors and then an even more unconventional use for the bodies of his victims...
...Oscar-winning Annie Hall, renounced comedy to make Interiors, his first of several dramas in the Bergman style and somber mood. Also in the '70s, indie director Wes Craven remade The Virgin Spring as a low-budget, highly regarded horror film, The Last House on the Left. Stephen Sondheim brought the stately domestic deceptions of Smiles of a Summer Night to Broadway with A Little Night Music (and its worldly-wise ballad, Send in the Clowns...