Director’s Notes by Robert Kelley Astonishing experiences bear repeating. As we celebrate TheatreWorks’ 45th Anniversary, the astonishing Sweeney Todd joins a small list of plays and musicals that we have found worthy of a second production. Not surprising, the list includes several masterworks by Shakespeare and a wealth of Sondheim classics, from A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures to Into the Woods. Since we first produced the then-controversial Sweeney Todd in 1992, it has become an international phenomenon, a highlight at opera companies around the world, a recurring Broadway regular, and a blockbuster film. With all that attention elsewhere, why Sweeney redux? Why now? Among its intertwined themes, Sweeney Todd is about humanity’s fascination with evil and its corollary, violence. Some part of us thrives on conflict; some genetic trait encourages us to force our point of view (or culture, or religion) upon another. When that instinct leads to violence it becomes the fodder of our nightly news: a punch in an elevator, a gunshot in the back, a village destroyed, a country overrun. We are at once repelled and transfixed. And that’s how I see Sweeney Todd, played out against a background of violence, a background of war. Our first production was in 1992, prompted by the bombings of Baghdad displayed nightly on national TV. It was set in London, 1916, the year the first bomb was ever dropped from an airplane on a city. That was then. Now, a sea of wars engulfs the world again. The advent of evil seems ever greater, our involvement ever deeper, whether our boots are on the ground or under a desk as we guide drones to distant human targets. I’ve long wondered how my parents felt about World War II, about a single culture seeking to dominate all, about the decision to use the atomic
bomb, about the appalling premise of “ethnic cleansing.” I wish I’d asked, for what seemed beyond belief then seems commonplace today, when anyone can download a beheading on his or her phone, tablet, or even wristwatch. In our inter-connected world of instant communication, we are inevitably drawn into what once seemed distant disputes, increasingly threatened by conflicts we can neither resolve nor escape. My reaction to such a world is Sweeney Todd. It is a play about the darkest corners of human existence. It’s also about our ways of dealing with evil: countering it with virtue, disarming it with humor, crushing it with force, or transforming it into art. Picasso’s Guernica, Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs, Spielberg’s haunting Schindler’s List—Sweeney Todd belongs among these unforgettable transmutations of evil. This time out we’re in 1940 amidst the defining war of our time, as Londoners “carry on” even when forced underground by the nightly bombings of The Blitz. Often that subterranean world included entertainers, perhaps even entire theatre companies determined to continue rehearsal for an upcoming production—a production of Sweeney Todd. Slashing through the 1848 serial novel A String of Pearls, the first Sweeney was a maniac on the loose, and each installment proved more shocking than the last. By the time Sondheim turned Sweeney into the greatest villain of the musical theatre, the demon barber had become a complex everyman driven beyond reason by the injustices of the British court and class system. That we understand him, as well as his entrepreneurial cohort Mrs. Lovett, makes the face of evil fascinatingly human, even as we condemn it as thoroughly inhumane. With two such unforgettable, almost lovable protagonists to engage us, Sondheim shows evil’s slippery slope, its rationale, even its comic side marching in tandem with its tragedy. This is humanity, for better or for worse, its poles of good and evil intertwined until some resolution is found at last, some victory declared. Or perhaps it’s just an armistice, temporarily reached, aware that there’s always more to come.
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