Word: sweeney
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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...
...Horror coexists with humanity, once we see the damage of a soul driven mad by a love lost and defiled. There will be blood, plenty of it, cascading, spurting, spuming from the throats of the men unlucky enough to sit in Sweeney's barber chair. And there will be food, for the demon barbershop is just above Mrs. Lovett's pie store. The corpses are filleted, cooked and served to unsuspecting customers. Cannibal canapes, if you will...
...Burton takes a purchase on our more elevated emotions by showing the source of Sweeney's rage. Fifteen years earlier he was a sweet young man, named Benjamin Barker. His beloved wife and young daughter were ripped from him by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who exiled him to Australia. So Sweeney is a romantic tragic figure; he has fallen from a great height -off the cloud of his belief that love can last forever. Now he knows better, and throws himself into this amorality play. It's man devouring man, vengeance destroying ideals...
...director assured some measure of audience sympathy for Sweeney by handing the role to Depp, a magnificent star at the apogee of his powers. Depp's voice may be on the reedy side, but he's a true singing actor, making every note as persuasive as his words and gestures. Sporting an Elsa-Lanchester-as-the-Bride-of-Frankenstein streak of white in his full dark hair, Sweeney is, in a way, the monster created by the Judge's turpitude. Benjamin is effectively dead; Sweeney is his remorseless spirit, the deft hand of fate wielding a razor - shouting, "At last...
...original, Angela Lansbury played Mrs. Lovett as a deranged kewpie doll, inanely flirtatious toward Sweeney yet heartless toward the human remains she pounded into patties. The wonderful singer-comedienne Judy Kaye, in last year's Broadway revival, saw Lovett as the flip side of Sweeney: they're both killers, but he's in it for retribution, she for the sick fun. Bonham Carter, though, is a figure of crafty scorn, and nearly as misanthropic as her demon lover. Ill fortune has ground him down; for her, it's the long slog of surviving among London's lower and criminal classes...