Sondheim(s) of the Day - "Killers" special: Sweeney Todd, Assassins

Not so much a musical as an opera, truth be told, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - true to its source material in the Victorian "penny dreadfuls" in the UK - is probably one of the bloodthirstiest productions to open on Broadway; although I suppose back in 1979 the "horror genre" [thanks to Hammer Studios, The Exorcist, Carrie, The Omen and so on] was rather popular, so maybe its timing was quite good after all.

Everyone knows the story: psychopathic barber, bent on revenge, pairs up with deranged pie-shop owner who can't get her hands on any tasty fresh meat - with chilling results! Interspersed with a naive love story involving Sweeney's daughter Johanna and the sailor Anthony who rescued him from drowning, and some black-comedy moments involving rival barbers and the simple-minded assistant at the pie shop Toby, it's certainly a tangled web, brimming with wonderful numbers. And, without further ado...Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd!

BBC Concert Orchestra and the Proms Sondheim Ensemble feat. Bryn Terfel - Prelude and Ballad of Sweeney Todd

Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou - The Worst Pies in London

Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter - My Friends

Cris Groenendaal - Johanna

George Hearn, Michael Cerveris, Patti LuPone - Pretty Women

Denis Quilley - Epiphany

Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball - A Little Priest

Christine Baranski and Brian Stokes Mitchell - By the Sea

Bernadette Peters - Not While I'm Around

[Another Sondheim "standard" that has been covered by loads of artistes, in and out of the production, including MegaBabs, Renee Fleming, Michael Feinstein, (ahem) Jamie Cullum, Lea Salonga, Michael Ball with Alfie Boe, Josh Groban and Cleo Laine]

By the way, no surprises; there is no "Happy Ever After" in this tale!

We've never seen the Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter film, but this is another show in Mr Sondheim's estimable repertoire that we've been to see on stage twice - in completely different productions and five years apart. The first was a major "in concert" revival at The Royal Festival Hall way back in 2007, starring the booming Bryn Terfel as "Sweeney Todd" and Maria Friedman as "Mrs Lovett", and also featured Daniel Boys and Philip Quast [NB the format was later revived again in 2014 with Emma Thompson baking the pies]. It was, as one might imagine, very impressive. Bryn Terfel is quite scary when in full voice!

The second version we went to see was the much bigger, well-promoted, and fully staged and dramatised version at the Adelphi Theatre in 2012 - with a surprising and frighteningly convincing Michael Ball in the title role, and Imelda Staunton as "Mrs Lovett". It was utterly mind-blowing! Quite rightly it won three Olivier Awards: Best Show, and one each for Mr Ball and Miss Staunton. We loved it.

All about Sweeney Todd at Everything Sondheim.

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Speaking of "loving it", one of Mr Sondheim's lesser-known [and certainly less-often-revived - although a version is apparently currently showing off-Broadway in 2021] creations is a very weird concept indeed...

I mean, how many "artistic types" would think: "I know what would make a great plot for a musical! Every assassin or would-be-assassin of Presidents of the United States of America implausibly gathered in a Scooby-Doo-style sinister abandoned funfair to sing about their deeds, and to join together in harmony to implore Lee Harvey Oswald to pull the trigger on JFK? That'd go down well."

But. It. Works.

Assassins has had a bit of a chequered history, for sure - its original off-Broadway production in 1990 closed after just 73 performances, and the London run at The Donmar after a mere 76; its proposed revival was delayed for three years after the 11th September terrorist attacks, but once it finally opened (with Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Cerveris), it won a Tony Award. We went to see the 2014 Menier Chocolate Factory version, starring Catherine Tate, the lovely Aaron Tveit, Jamie Parker, Mike McShane and Andy Nyman - where we were in the front row, right in the middle of the action; and we were spooked to bits at having various members of the cast in turn pointing guns in our faces!

It's a twisted idea, but with a helluva score, from which this is merely a soupçon...

Patrick Cassidy and Victor Garber - The Ballad of Booth

John Barrowman and Ruthie Henshall - Unworthy of Your Love

Neil Patrick Harris and cast - Everybody's Got The Right (reprise) [2004 Tony Awards]

Boom!

A comprehensive analysis of the plot, courtesy of the New Line Theatre site; alternatively read more on Wikipedia.

RIP, Stephen Joshua Sondheim (22nd March 1930 – 26th November 2021)

[One of a series of tributes I will be posting to Mr Sondheim this week.]
Previous "Sondheim of the Day" entries:

• Saturday: Company
• Sunday: West Side Story
• Monday: Gypsy
• Tuesday: A Little Night Music
• Wednesday: Follies

Everybody's got the right to their dreams

Hey, pal - feelin' blue?
Don't know what to do?
Hey, pal - I mean you -
Yeah. C'mere and kill a President.

No job? Cupboard bare?
One room, no one there?
Hey, pal, don't despair -
You wanna shoot a President?
C'mon and shoot a President...

Everybody's
Got the right
To be happy.
Don't stay mad,
Life's not as bad
As it seems.

If you keep your
Goal in sight,
You can climb to
Any height.
Everybody's
Got the right
To their dreams...

Judging by the way the show has been promoted to the press in advance, one might have been forgiven for thinking that Assassins was a star vehicle for the "national treasure" Catherine Tate. Of course, that is far from the truth, as we found out for ourselves when Al, John-John, Madame Arcati and I went along to one of our favourite theatres in London, the Menier Chocolate Factory on Thursday to see Jamie Lloyd's new production of Mr Stephen Sondheim's most - ahem - unusually themed musical.



For who else but Mr Sondheim would dare to create an entire musical about the imagined interplay between a group of people with nothing else in common but the fact that they had killed or attempted to kill the President of the United States?

This is an eerie enough construct to imagine - for in the classic music theatrical genre, there should normally be at least one character with whom one feels some empathy, surely? But that is the magic of Sondheim, of course. He has us rooting for a psychopath in Sweeney Todd, for a witch in Into The Woods, and for Ethel Merman's mother-from-Hell in Gypsy, after all. And in Assassins, each of the characters, deeply and truly mad as all of them are, has a little something in their character with which we can identify.

This achievement relies as heavily upon the skills of its ensemble cast as it does the writing, of course - and this cast is utterly superb! Two main characters hold the whole thing together, as we are introduced to each disturbed assassin in turn: The Proprietor (a deliciously mad, ever-goading, impressively demonic Simon Lipkin) and the Balladeer (the superbly confident Jamie Parker), and it is through their own interplay that we, the audience, are encouraged to understand (or if it were a panto, "boo", "hiss" or "cheer"; we did none of that, of course - this is Sondheim) what drove seemingly anonymous individuals to want to become assassins.

I think thereby hangs a tale - that word "anonymous". For in most cases, these people drove themselves to wield their fateful guns as a way to gain recognition/notoriety, to ensure they were not ignored or forgotten in history. This was certainly the case for John Wilkes Booth (the fabulous singer and elegantly handsome Aaron Tveit), whose murder of Abraham Lincoln was the first Presidential assassination, and the most earth-shattering, till the 20th century.



Lesser-known madmen followed in his wake - the would-be radical and downtrodden Polish-American Leon Czolgosz (a grandly dramatic David Roberts), who killed President McKinley; the pain-wracked and obsessive Giuseppe Zangara (sung and acted marvellously by the cute Stewart Clarke), who attempted to assassinate Roosevelt; and the hilariously loony Charles Guiteau (film star Andy Nyman), who killed President Garfield. It was the latter performance by Mr Nyman, skipping, dancing and convincingly delusional (adherent of several bizarre pseudo-religious cults, he petitioned the White House believing himself perfect for the role of Ambassador to France), that brought the finest snatches of comedic relief to the potentially very dark proceedings.

The more recent crop of killers included the totally unhinged Samuel Byck (the ever-wonderful Mike McShane), whose outrageous plan to hijack a plane and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon was only balanced in its sheer oddness by the fact that Byck kept leaving voicemail messages outlining his plans for, of all people, Leonard Bernstein. In a shining moment of the production - and there were many! - the odd and lisping loner John Hinckley (played to perfection by by Harry Morrison), the attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan, duets with Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (a very scary Carly Bawden), one of the two women who tried to kill President Gerald Ford (the other being Miss Tate's character Sara Jane Moore) about their obsessive (unrequited) love for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively. Unworthy of Your Love is perhaps the most memorable of the show's songs, and they did it beautifully.



The denouement, of course, comes with the story of Lee Harvey Oswald (also played by "Balladeer" Jamie Parker) - the one assassin whose actions still resonate today, more than half-a-century later, and the final ensemble number, where all the killers pay Oswald their respects, waving their weapons menacingly in a dance macabre.

There are flaws, of course - not least Miss Tate's wobbly West Virginia accent; but we know she's a comedienne (accurately, and skilfully) playing a woman who was the object more of ridicule than of fear, so it didn't jar for me as much as it might for a purist. Some parts of the set and the sound-effects were a little wobbly too, but this was only a preview, so allowances must be made...

With its malevolent Circus/fairground set, and the fact it is staged "in traverse" (with the seating blocks either side and the performance in-between; our seats were right in the front row - in the midst of the action), we in the audience were spooked even before the show started. But at every turning point in the unfolding stories, to have actual guns pointed in one's face at regular intervals is utterly spine-tingling!

In all, this was a magnificent production, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It is no wonder it is selling out rapidly...

As the press night has not even taken place yet, there is no video footage from the Menier. However, as a little taster of the music, here's the cast of the 2004 Broadway production of Assassins at the Tony Awards:

Stephen Sondheim's Assassins

In the words of one reviewer: "It’s madness, but it works."

Assassins is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 7th March 2015.

Assassins

It is the 45th anniversary of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President John F Kennedy, changed the course of American politics and destroyed the world's optimism that there could be a swift end to the Cold War.

To mark the occasion here's a little sample of songs from Stephen Sondheim's lauded but commercially unsuccessful musical Assassins. A weird choice of theme for a musical, it was based around the story of Oswald and other gun-toting mad people who either shot or attempted to shoot US Presidents.

The show was unfortunate in its timing. It was first released in 1990, an era of gung-ho George Bush Snr politics and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, and later attempts to revive it were hit by the events of 11th September 2001. It hasn't been on stage since, and I have never seen it, but any excuse for a bit of Sondheim...

John Barrowman and Ruthie Henshall - Unworthy of Your Love

Assassins cast - Everybody's Got the Right

Assassins: Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Cerveris - The Ballad of Booth