The Demon Barber at Your Service [Tracing Sweney Todd - finale]

An article dated June 13, 1934 “Part of the Show,” which was written in response to Sweeney Todd and other productions, suggests how theatre producers engaged the audiences’ attention with various techniques to make sure that they kept following what went on on the stage, and therefore, eventually, to make sure return audiences. “Audiences are waking up to the fact, long recognized on the other side of the footlights, that they play an important role in any kind of entertainment offered them.” This suggested that the theatre would strive to present various effects and elements that would capture the audiences’ senses. Considering the gory material of the story of Sweeney Todd, one could imagine what kinds of effects were produced before the audiences’ eyes. “Every performer, from the clown to the dignified public speaker, knows that the mood and temper of an audience are as important as its contribution at the box office… More direct and obvious is the training given recently by producers of plays which need quick applause and hisses for best effect.” Hinted is the awareness of theatre producers to master audiences’ psychology to be able to control their responses. They would do what they needed to do technically to achieve the desired effects and engage the audiences actively.

The delightful collaboration between stage and pit encouraged by Mr. Morley in Hoboken some time past, the gay participation in old songs between the acts of ‘Sweeney Todd,’ a few years ago, and the lively part taken by the audience in some of today’s shows are all of a piece. It may be too informal for some tastes, but most people like to help in their own amusement.

Involving the audiences to some degree in the dramatic world of the play had been a successful technique. Audiences familiar with dramatic cues felt emotionally involved and participated actively with their spontaneous responses. The same articles gave an example. In a play called The Drunkard (also by Dibdin-Pitt), when “the villain tries to lure the hero to the villain’s ale-house, the latter’s moment of hesitation is the cue for ‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ from all quarters of the house.” We could imagine how emotionally involved the audiences might have been seeing a customer sitting in the barber’s big trap chair, with Sweeney standing behind him holding a sharp razor.

Although criminal stories are always in demand both in paper and for the stage, another demand also came along with it eventually: better quality, which in first decades of the 20th century could also mean embracing some naturalistic style. Another essay written by Charles Morgan in 1932 presented his appreciation of James Bridle’s work The Anatomist, which also told about criminal minds just like Maria Martin and Sweeney Todd. The piece was “a serious and extremely able play, written from the point of view not of the murderers but of Dr. Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon whose researches required a continuous procession of human anatomical specimens.” While the greater part of the play was still made in the old tradition of melodrama, it also presented scenes which made more senses and more authentic to real life, which also paid attention to the language being used. The Anatomist was, according to Morgan, “an ancient melodrama with an overlay of modernity.” The play uniquely combined both melodrama conventions with naturalistic drives. “The blood and thunder came; heredity and the ethics of capital punishment were conveniently put aside; and we were free to observe with interest the dramatist’s and the actor’s compromise between modern naturalism and melodramatic tradition.” At this particular period, attention had been paid to the storytelling details of pieces dealing with crimes and violence in addition to the dramatic plot and visual effects typical of melodrama.

So, the old legend of Sweeney Todd the demon barber has been told, written, adapted to the stage, and revived. Its popularity has been proved undiminished. Starting from an obscure source, it was one of the urban legends that continued to haunt its English public. Born in the era of melodrama and operating in that particular genre, the 19th century Sweeney Todd presented “bigger than life” features of the convention. Playing with the ideas of deepest fears, the productions of this melodrama engaged the audiences in an active emotional involvement to what was going on before their eyes in their battle against a strong, horrifying evil power of the murderous barber. Although the story of Sweeney has gone through some adjustments to suit contemporary audiences, from the penny dreadful versions, Dibdin-Pitt’s stage version, to the most recent Sondheim’s musicals, it still retains some of its melodramatic characteristics: the condition of being trapped in a nightmare where a lot of things happen to the extreme, and the journey ends when we, audiences, are awake from the dream. Although goodness won, it wasn’t an easy winning, and therefore was highly satisfying – which proved to be key in the success of the piece and its subsequent revivals. Quoting Brooks, “melodrama is indeed, typically, not only a moralistic drama but the drama of morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men” (20).

Bibliography

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1976.

“Concerning the Vernal Habit of Play Reviving.” The New York Times 11 April 1926

Duncum, Paul. “Attractions to Violence and the Limits of Education.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006): 21-38.

Fell, John L. “Dissolves by Gaslight: Antecedents to the Motion Picture in Nineteenth Century Melodrama.” Film Quarterly 23.3 (Spring 1970): 22-34. JSTOR. U of Kansas Libraries. 21 November 2006

Frank, Leah D. “Hissing the Original Sweeney Todd.” The New York Times 22 July 1984: LI 13.

Kanfer, Ethan. “Creepy friends.” The New Leader 88.6 (2005): 65.3. Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. U of Kansas Libraries. 15 Dec. 2006

“Literary Reform Urged.” The New York Times 17 October 1897

McConachie, Bruce A. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1992.

Mollin, Alfred. “Mayhem and Morality in Sweeney Todd.” American Music 9.4 (Winter, 1991): 405-417. U of Kansas Libraries. 21 November 2006

Morgan, Charles. “Melodrama as an Art: A Study in Contrasts.” The New York Times 1 April 1928
_____________. “Touching Up an Old-School Melodrama.” The New York Times 10 January 1932

“One Opening.” The New York Times 13 July 1924: x1.
“Part of the Show.” The New York Time 13 June 1934
“Rialto Gossip.” The New York Times 20 July 1924
“Robert Vivian of Sweeney Todd.” The New York Times 3 August 1924

Simpson, Jacqueline. “Urban Legends in the Pickwick Papers.” The Journal of American Folklore 96.382 (1983): 462-470. JSTOR. U of Kansas Libraries. 8 December 2006

“Sweeney Todd.” <http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp?ID=9544>

Tanner, Michael. “Blunt edge.” Spectator 295.9184 (August 14, 2004): 38(1). Expanded Academic ASAP. Thomson Gale. University of Kansas Libraries. 15 Dec. 2006

Thompson, Alan Reynolds. “Melodrama and Tragedy.” PMLA 43.3 (1928): 810-835. JSTOR. U of Kansas Libraries. 21 November 2006

Here comes the “Niagara of blood” [Tracing Sweeney Todd - part 5]

Charles Morgan wrote for New York Times an article “Melodrama as an art: a study in contrasts, Sweeney Todd and Mary Dugan as exponents of diverse styles,” on April 1, 1928, four years after the premiere of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. He compared and contrasted the two plays that shared a similarity of presenting criminals at the heart of the stories. From this essay we can find some information about the style of the Sweeney production, at least based on this writer’s review. By the time he wrote it, it seemed that melodramatic style had become somehow outdated as realism came to the contemporary theatre. However, Morgan said that there were still good things about Sweeney Todd that were worth appreciation. The Trial of Mary Dugan, according to Morgan, claimed to be “the exact reproduction of an American murder trial,” while Sweeney Todd, he argued “on the contrary, does not aim at being an ‘exact reproduction’ of anything in heaven or on earth,” which he thought to be its “outstanding merit.” He went on describing that the piece as obeying an artistic convention of melodramatic style, which was indeed different from realist convention, and therefore, deserved objective judgment. Unlike naturalism’s “slice of life” rules, it presented selected high moments of a life course, and this guaranteed a highly dramatic plot.

The convention of Sweeney Todd is roughly this—the high lights of the picture are required to suggest the whole picture. This is the opposite of the genuinely naturalistic convention that is derived from Ibsen—a convention which often requires imagining of the whole to expand from an accumulation of details each of which, considered separately, might be insignificant and undramatic.

Further, Morgan said that melodrama is “a means of creating emotion by fantastic enlargement, and has nothing in common with plain photography.” He also defended melodrama as a convention having its own privilege despite the change of theatrical trends. “It is true that to us who are experienced in realism and pseudo-realism the melodramatic convention is now so unfamiliar that we are inclined to laugh at it, just as we are inclined to laugh at a Chinese play done in the Chinese manner; but that is the fault of our unfamiliarity, not of the convention itself.”

How exactly was the look of the Sweney Todd production that some reviewers considered melodramatically laughable? We can infer from Morgan that it must be “bigger than life,” exaggeration here and there, something that in the course of naturalist fashion had become ridiculous. Morgan gave examples of the use of elements in the show that indicated the style: the window shadow, the barber chair, the razor and the cut throat. “When Todd lures a victim into his shop, we see the barber, the customer, the razor and the whole tragic event thrown in gigantic shadow on the frosted panes of the shop.” Morgan was aware of how some people might think how absurd it was to do such a horrendous act near the window, risking people witnessing it, even only through the shadows.

And the barber’s chair, which throws men into the vaults, is much bigger and more elaborate machine than ‘exact reproduction’ requires; it is the centre of a huge see-saw, and when it moves, half the floor moves with it. And when Todd cuts a lady’s throat, he turns her straight toward the audience, uses a razor a couple of feet long, and lets loose a Niagara of blood.

All of these descriptions show the exaggeration qualities of the presentation, as comic as they sound, all meant to shock the audience beyond their natural everyday reactions, which was exactly what melodrama aimed at doing to the audiences who came to the performance to be affected particularly in this manner, which is not to be compared to, or confused with, means of naturalism.
The bombastic tendencies of melodrama should also be understood within the socio-economic context under which those techniques emerged at the first place. John L. Fell quoted a melodramatist who explained the “writing for the eye” technique he had learned.

One of the first tricks I learned was that my plays must be written for an audience who, owing to the huge, uncarpeted, noisy theaters, couldn’t always hear the words, and who, a large percentage of them having only recently laded in America, couldn’t have understood them in any case. I therefore wrote for the eye rather than the ear and played out each emotion in action, depending on my dialogue only for the noble sentiments so dear to audiences of that class (25).

And thus, melodrama had its own justification to appear bigger than life to the point of being considered rough and unsophisticated by the high middle class audiences. It was meant to be highly visual because it was demanded to be so. A loud performance for a loud audience, melodrama had been long associated with working class group of audiences.

Blood + some laughs = that meat pie [Tracing Sweeney Todd - part 4]

A review, which also served as an ad of the show after the opening night described the eighty-year-old melodrama’s “motivating force was in all probability the success of Fashion. Sweeney Todd corresponds to the American piece in period. It turned out to be a flavorous old melodrama, which, as is the way with these old pieces, has turned comic in the spots where it was most seriously meant.” There are a couple of things we can find from this statement. First, by the time Sweeney Todd was produced in 1924, American audiences might have been enjoying the more recent theatrical trends than melodrama, possibly naturalism. While Sweeney was a classical melodrama in structure, they could still enjoy it because it was “flavorous.” Secondly, it seems that treating serious matters, such as murder and violence, comically was key element in promoting success of a piece like Sweeney Todd – like a way to lighten it up, or to compensate for its horror images. Still according to the ad, the play “probably was not ever regarded as representative English entertainment, even in the 1842 of its original production, but the English stage was a somewhat more polished institution than the American in those days.” So, again, there was an interesting mixture of violence and comedy that had been used for decades of years as a formula in Sweeney Todd that seemed to work very well, both with English and American audiences that had somewhat different characteristics from one another. The review went on, “At all events, its tale of a murderous barber who drops his customers through the floor to the cellar, there to make them into veal pies—even in those days the Englishman had his sense of humor—furnishes not a few laughs as it is acted at the Frazee at present.” It was also indicated that the producer of this Broadway performance had made sure to present details of the period probably to go after authenticity.

Here and there, particularly in a scene in a madhouse, the old melodramatic flavor shows up through, and the story actually holds for a few minutes. Chiefly, however, Sweeney Todd is of interest as an exhibit of what we escaped. It has been produced by Wendell Phillips Dodge with much care and due attention to the period.

A notice two weeks prior the premiere, said that the production would be presented “in faithful imitation of the manner of their production at Covent Garden and the Britannia Theatre in London two hundred years ago.” I wasn’t sure of which Sweeney Todd version the writer compared the Broadway production to. Could it be that he made a mistake about the time because Dibdin-Pitt’s Sweeney was first produced in 1840s, (about 80 years before the Broadway one)? I would rather he did.