Editor's Note: This article was originally written in the Summer of 2005 for inclusion in CIBS 34 (Fall 2005). Deadlines were missed, too much Frank Zappa was heard, and eventually a simple theater review grew to be an abomination of twenty pages. But as abominations go, it is pleasurable. Over the years, the article has bounced around in digital cyberspace, so we took pity on the author and his text, and have offered the article a final resting place: Abomination meet the Abyss. Readers should take note that the article is not without contemporary resonance: the same team that helped to bring Outrage to the Wilma recently brought Brecht's Galileo to the Wilma as well. Included in this edition of ECIBS 36.1, one will find audio interviews with set designer Mimi Lien and dramaturge Walter Bilderback. Additionally, Sweeney Todd has finally come to the big screen with Johnny Depp. We missed the review for this issue, but we will eventually get someone to write about. For now, ruminate upon Sweeney, ca. Philly 2005.

Since the two plays reviewed here, Outrage and Sweeney Todd, are not plays by Brecht, I believe a brief explanatory note is in order. First, Itamar Moses’ Outrage includes Brecht as a character in the play in a twofold manner: he is both a historical character, whose life is broadly traced from Weimar Germany through his exile years in California; and he also serves as the play’s Ansager, commenting on characters, scenes, and history throughout the play. Additionally, the artistic directors of the Wilma Theater, Blanka and Jiri Zizka, have always brought a Brechtian sensibility, if not a Brechtian aesthetic to the their productions, and I was interested to see what they would do with Brecht as character onstage. Second, Scott McMillin’s presentation at the 2004 MLA Conference in Philadelphia, “Brecht and Sondheim: An Unholy Alliance” suggested that despite apparently unbridgeable differences and outright denials, Brecht and Sondheim could indeed be placed within a constructive dialectical framework. So, taking a page from Moses’ play, I played the role of Brecht as Ansager during my critical viewing of Sweeney Todd. Sadly, I was not theatrically inventive enough to wear a placard announcing my role as the actor as Robert Dorfman did in the Outrage production. Perhaps I should wear the placard and smoke a cigar as a gestic pose for a future theater review: Talk about a critical intervention and some great guerilla theater! Third, a few weeks before these productions I had been contacted by the editor of the International Brecht Society’s Communications journal and asked to submit a few thoughts on Peter Monaghan’s article, “For Brecht, An Ironic Encore” in the April 29th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In my brief comments, I stated that the phenomenon of Brecht is a theater phenomenon, and any engagement with Brecht should take place within the dialogical nexus of theater. Significantly, Brecht as a theater phenomenon is capacious enough to include more than just his own plays: Brecht provides us a powerful analytic apparatus for the general understanding of theater and performance. The result of all this is that we do not find Brecht in the stale air of the professor’s office, or the academic classroom, or the dustbin of dramatic history, but rather we find Brecht in theater houses across the globe, and find our Brecht performance texts every year and everywhere. Nor do we find a one-dimensional or dogmatic Brecht in this theatrical experience,  but rather the Socratic Brecht of the theater rehearsal, of the Theaterschriften, of the Modellbücher, and perhaps most of all, of Der Messingkauf; that is, the Brecht who constructed never-ending dialogues with the theater. Just as philosophers must always engage Socrates; the performance critic must always engage Brecht.

Outrage

With these thoughts in mind I attended a production of Itamar Moses’ Outrage at the Wilma Theater, one of the leading regional theaters in Philadelphia. Outrage had premiered at The Portland Center Stage (Oregon) in February 2003 and the Wilma production represented the East Coast premiere of the play. Ticket prices were advertised as ranging from $9 - $48, with the average price of a regular ticket coming in at ca. $30: nowadays, a normal price, but still obscene. No doubt the ticket price was one of the factors that constructed the usual suspects of geriatrics and middle-aged professionals in the audience. From the outset, the playscript and production seemed highly implausible and doomed to failure. The primary story is set within a contemporary east coast university engaged in a difficult funding debate. Should the university accept money from the deep pockets of a corporate donor as well as the attendant technological advances which may threaten the humanistic and textual traditions of the university? Within this storyline we have the usual suspects: the old professor threatened by modern progress, yet Machiavellian enough to protect his cherished traditions; a former student of the aforementioned professor who is now the Dean of Liberal Arts and who sees the money and technology not as a threat to tradition, but a necessary component of the modern academic world; a junior faculty member, who represents the crucial swing vote on the funding decision and is torn between his ideals and desires; and a graduate student who has romantic trysts with both the junior faculty member and an undergraduate student. Included within these complicated character relationships are the usual issues of the pursuit of and the cost of truth as well as the pettiness of academia in the light of its grand ideals.

Juxtaposed with the primary storyline are three intersecting tales of historical figures: Socrates, Menocchio (a 16th century intellectual dissident made famous by Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Cheese and the Worms), and Bertolt Brecht (A fourth historical figure, John Milton, could easily be included in this mix. Although he does not appear as a character, the junior faculty member is a Milton scholar who rehearses his Milton lectures onstage. Moreover, just as the other historical figures lend dramatic form as well as intellectual content to the play, e.g. the Socratic dialogue, the Brechtian Ansager are enacted onstage, the epic poetic style of Milton animates the structure of the play). All these figures experience “outrage” as they suffer for the kingdom of knowledge. If this sounds like an undergraduate masturbatory fantasy, well to a certain degree it is: much of the material comes from Moses’ undergraduate days at Yale. Indeed, the production at times felt like a historical review, or perhaps better a historical “revue,” of western civilization. Unquestionably, Moses bit off more than he could chew. At the same time, he showed that he also has an undeniable gift as a playwright, and through clever dramatic organization, and deft, humorous language, and a large dose of chutzpah, he was able to make this monstrosity work.

The script was greatly aided by the Wilma production which did much to mediate, simplify, and synthesize. Surprisingly, at least by American Theater standards, the theater program for the show was one of those elements. Usually American Theater programs are little more than an afterthought which provide a bit of background material for the play and its cast, while spending most of the time prostituting themselves to corporate sponsors. Infrequently do programs augment the production, creating another level of dialectical engagement for the spectator. In contrast, the Wilma program included its newsletter in the program, which provided background for the historical figures, interviews conducted by the dramaturge, Walter Bilderback, with the playwright and the set designer, and a sampling of images and sketches for the set design. Granted, such material is not groundbreaking, but it was enough to provide a forum to re-visit and re-think the production, which is central to the reviewer’s task when he / she writes a review. 

The most interesting element of the program was the interview with the set designer, Mimi Lien. According to Lien, the set design was meant to be a “historical collage,” but an unstable, chaotic one. Lien drew inspiration from a line in the script: “It’s like a bomb exploded in the center of history and we’re stranded in the debris.” This comment, which easily could have come from Kushner’s Angels in America, as well as artistic renderings of the Tower of Babel, sketches by Breughel, and the industrial sculptures of Jean Tinguely, led Lien to construct a set of historical fragments and debris welded together in haphazard fashion. Stage center stood a massive, hollowed-out, column ruin, suggesting the ivory tower of academia and the classical heritage of civilization. Cobbled to the column were various classical references: a large Trojan horse, a Parthenon-like frieze, a Renaissance wheel, and assorted ruins of marble columns and stones strewn across the lower stage. Visually the set was compelling, but it also proved quite functional in terms of choreography as it allowed for clear demarcation of scenes, yet retained the flexibility needed to navigate the stunning number of scenes. In the end, the set created an uncanny syncretic space, in which the material set seemed to be collapsing in on itself, as the characters tried to resist this centripetal force.

Outrage. Itamar Moses. Set Design: Mimi Lien. Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA. June 7, 2005. Photo: Jim Roese

Out of this set design, four major performance areas were constructed. On the lower stage right, stood a large wooden desk, surrounded and supported by massive books, with a lone computer, and to the left of the desk an old-fashioned bike jerry-rigged as an elaborate stationary bike. The space around the desk supported most of the scenes between the dean and the two professors as well as many of the Brecht scenes. In the exile scenes for Brecht, the stationary bike was used to indicate the constant yet fruitless movement of the exile and also evoked Brechtian stage practices, especially the famous Piscator-Brecht adaptation of the The Good Soldier Schweyk. On the opposite end of the stage from this area were marble ruins scattered on the floor and a giant Renaissance wheel. This area was primarily used for the scenes with Socrates, the scenes with Menocchio (with the wheel later serving as torture rack for the Inquisition), and several university scenes between students and professors. An elevated center stage was place in the hollowed-out column, which served as the junior professor’s library and office, and included an additional walkway extending to the wings stage left. In this area, the scenes with the junior professor were conducted, and the column and walkway were used for ritualized moments with the Oracle at Delphi and the Inquisition (clad in purple robes and voiced with technological enhancement that sounded like the Borg Collective from Star Trek: The Next Generation).  To the right of the column, slightly lower, a small platform on which stood a telescope, was used for a variety of small scenes, including scenes with Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Eric Bentley, and Galileo.

Combine the loaded playscript and complex set design with ensemble performance, in which ten actors played twenty-six roles, and the result was that it was a bit hard to focus on individual performances. As an ensemble, the cast was consistently excellent, with no major gaps in skill or delivery, which is quite astonishing considering the number of roles each actor had to play, the enormous amount of scenes in the play, and especially in the second act, the increasing conflation of roles. This latter point merits a bit more attention, because some Philadelphia critics singled out this element for criticism. After intermission, the various storylines and characters began to fall apart and intruded into each other. Actors from one storyline wandered into another storyline and started to notice strange people dressed oddly, or they could not understand why a character they knew in one way was dressed so inappropriately. Instead of muddling the production, this narrative element provided a nice bit of ironic metacommentary, and most importantly, reinforced the centripetal pull of the set and story. Everything was being sucked toward the black hole of history and in the process storylines crossed and merged. I will grant, however, that the sheer amount of material (storylines, characters, history, ideas) did not easily allow for such a critical conclusion.

Outrage. Itamar Moses. Set Design: Mimi Lien. Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA. June 7, 2005. Photo: Jim Roese

The performances that most stood out were those of Peter Pryor, Matthew Humphreys, and Robert Dorfman. Pryor, a local Philadelphia actor / director assayed the roles of the dimwitted Polites in the Socrates scenes, the priest Stefano in the Menocchio scenes, and the roles of Walter Benjamin and Eric Bentley in the Brecht scenes. As Benjamin, Pryor had the word “Stimme” (and later as Bentley, the word “Voice”) embroidered across his suit coat, and true to the word, he would often appear first as a far away voice in response to the Ansager Brecht, until he eventually would appear onstage. Matthew Humphreys played the role of the computer nerd, Brett, in the contemporary university scenario, Alcibiades in the Socrates story, and the surfer dude, Lars Ericksen, in one of the many cameo scenes strewn throughout the play. Alcibiades only turns up in one Platonic Dialogue, the Symposium, where he recalls his love affair with the elder Socrates, but Moses utilized Alcibiades as a primary character as he riffed through other Platonic dialogue scenarios (Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and the Allegory of the Cave from the Republic). The cameo scenes were also worth mentioning. There were perhaps six or seven of these cameo scenes interlaced throughout the play all of which provided hilarious comic snippets. All the cameos were Ph.D. students working on some outrageous topic of scholarship; for example, Humphreys’ Lars Ericksen was a white, blonde surfer dude in African-American Studies whose dissertation was on “The Origins of Jazz in Medieval Minstrelsy.”

Dorfman played the role of Brecht as well as the much smaller role of Galileo from the play. Dressed in a gray worker’s suit and carrying a leather briefcase or a typewriter (but no cigar!), Dorfman’s Brecht served two roles in the play: as Ansager and as historical figure. As Ansager he opened up the play by announcing himself with a placard and then cutting out any suspense of mystery by telling what was about to happen onstage. Throughout the play, Dorfman would perform Brecht in this Ansager role, having him comment on the historical figures and the misrepresentation of history. It was a delicious role that was obviously embraced by the playwright, director, and actor, and which was received well by the audience. As historical figure, we first meet Brecht in the last days of the Weimar Republic where he discusses with Walter Benjamin the resistance that can be offered to the Hitler regime as well as the elements of his epic theater. In the first scene between Benjamin and Brecht we are treated to a wonderful Vaudeville skit in which epic theater is both enacted and parodied onstage. Forced into exile, he mounts the stationary bike, and pedals furiously to his various stops. Along the way, he begins to mention his ideas for a play about Galileo. Finally, he ends up in Santa Monica where we see him conducting rehearsals of Galileo trying to make the American actors appreciate the alienation effects of epic theater, and discussing with Eric Bentley the historical judgment on Galileo.

Although a wonderful indulgence for the Brecht scholar, the characterization of Brecht as Ansager and historical figure is not without its problems. It is a very conventional and sympathetic portrayal of Brecht. Nothing of John Fuegi’s 1994 biography, Brecht and Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of Modern Drama, in which Brecht is exposed as a grubby, sex-obsessed scumbag who ruthlessly claims credit for dramatic works, largely written by his female collaborators (Elisabeth Hauptmann, Ruth Berlau, and Margarete Steffin) shows up in the production. Instead we get a heroic Brecht who stands up to the outrage of Nazi barbarism, and who at the same time, unbelievably, comes across as crotchety, yet lovable: something akin to a favorite uncle or a Yiddish-comedian with an acerbic wit, yet a heart of gold. For the most part this characterization came across as melancholic, with forays into the melodramatic. The scenes between Brecht and Benjamin brought out these moments most of all. Benjamin serves not only as a Stimme, but also as a conscience for Brecht; in the process, “humanizing” Brecht. When Benjamin’s death is announced, we are treated to a brief but emotionally poignant moment, where the cool observational behavior of Brecht breaks down.

Although I would have preferred to see more of a historically-edgy Brecht, I should have welcomed the characterization presented by the production. After all, Moses basically “Socratized” Brecht; that is, he made him a universal figure capable of speaking beyond time to the contemporary world. All the “hang-ups” the 21st century has with Brecht (Communism, Cold Personality, Body Odor, Misogyny etc...) were filed down and the figure of Brecht presented issues which cut across human history. This is the Brecht that I carry with me to theaters and into classrooms. But it just didn’t seem appropriate or effective. In the end, it was a nostalgic characterization, perhaps appropriate for the classroom or the museum, but not a characterization that alienated or intervened. Perhaps, this points to some unbridgeable gap in rendering Brecht in a Socratic form. When one takes Brecht out of history, one takes away Brecht.

Outrage. Itamar Moses. Set Design: Mimi Lien. Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, PA. June 7, 2005. Photo: Jim Roese

The characterization of Brecht was emblematic of the nostalgia that ran through the entire play. Although there are grand and pressing contemporary and historical questions encountered onstage, one never felt threatened or uncomfortable; one had been there before, and one knew what to expect. So, instead of critical intervention, constructed through historical perspectives, we were treated to a pleasurable work of postmodern nostalgia and mourning.

Sweeney Todd

Two days later, I picked up my theater kit again and ambled down from the new Avenue of the Arts to the Old City section where the Arden Theatre was presenting a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Arden co-founder Terrence J. Nolen had first directed Sweeney Todd a decade before in the original house of the Arden in St. Stephen’s Alley. Located in brand new digs since 1998, Nolen had the chance to re-imagine the material on the large and modern Haas Stage in the new house on 2nd Street. Nolen, a Sondheim enthusiast, claims Sweeney Todd is a “revolutionary work” which “paved the way for the American musical to tackle any subject.” Picking up my ears to the word “revolutionary” and with the dim echoes of past references to Sondheim – Brecht (thanks to Scott McMillin again) sounding in my ears, I gave Sondheim a shot.

Sweeney Todd is an old English folk tale, whose origins are shrouded in mystery and which has undergone several transmutations over the centuries. According to author Peter Haining, a historical Sweeney exists: born in 1748 and executed for his crimes in 1802, Sweeney grew up in early industrial London, a milieu which produced the characters in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) and which provided him the stage to be one of the great serial killers in history, with as many as 160 murders attributed to him. However, the more accepted story is that Sweeney Todd is a product of the mid-19th century pulp fiction market, where the material first appeared in one of the many “penny dreadfuls,” which peddled lurid and sensationalistic crime stories in serial form. Thomas Peckett Prest’s “String of Pearls” was one of the successful Sweeney stories of the era, and was quickly adapted by George Dibdin Pitt in 1847 as a melodrama, entitled The String of Pearls, or the Fiend of Fleet Street. Dibdin’s version remained a mainstay of popular English entertainment for the next century onstage and on film, until it was finally dramatized by Christopher Bond in 1973. Quickly and haphazardly, Bond injected what had been a melodramatic horror tale with a greater psychological and sociological depth, not to mention a more sophisticated and ironic sense of humor; and it was this version which Sondheim adapted for his musical in 1979. In the Bond / Sondheim version of the tale, the barber Benjamin Barker, happily married and with one child, is sent away to prison in Australia on trumped up charges by Judge Turpin. The Judge uses the absence of Barker to seduce and rape Barker’s wife and assume custody of their infant daughter Johanna, with the help of his henchman Beadle Bamford. Fifteen years later, Barker having escaped his confinement, returns to London under the name of Sweeney Todd in the company of a young idealistic companion, Anthony Hope. Thinking his wife is dead, he takes up his old trade with the design of revenging himself against his nemesis and getting his daughter back. He is aided in this endeavor by his neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, who soon figures out that Sweeney’s killing spree is just the right antidote for her struggling meat pie business. They strike a bargain, and thus one of the most famous stage machineries of American Theater is created: barber chair leads to subterranean shoot, which leads to the basement and the meat grinder and furnace. Sweeney kills a number of customers with his razor, Mrs. Lovett bakes up the remains in her pies, and both businesses blossom as the play moves to its climax. In the end, Sweeney gets his revenge against Judge Turpin and Beadle, but in the process kills his wife, who has been alive the whole time, and his partner Mrs. Lovett, before he himself has his throat sliced by his own razor.

Provocative (many of the first audiences left the theater appalled)  and critically acclaimed (winner of numerous Tony awards) the 1979 production under the direction of Hal Prince and starring Len Carriou and Angela Lansbury drew immediate comparisons with Brecht and especially the Threepenny Opera, although the Brecht scholar would certainly see connections with Mann ist Mann as well as Mahagonny. From the outset and ever since, Sondheim has emphatically denied any Brechtian connection. The Brechtian tag has ‘dogged” Sondheim for much of his career, especially after his breakthrough hit Company in 1970 and his 1991 production Assassins. Interestingly, before he worked on Company, Sondheim in 1968 had attempted to write the score for a musical version of The Measures Taken, under the commission of Jerome Robbins and his American Theatre Lab. Eventually referred to as A Pray by Blecht, the project was abandoned, and left Sondheim bemoaning Brecht’s didacticism and absence of humor; however, certain forms of epic theater seemed to appeal to Sondheim, and arguably he has applied epic theater practices throughout his career.

So, what is a critic to do with Sondheim, Brecht, and Sweeney Todd? Should one honor Sondheim’s request not to be “maligned” by the Brecht tag? Sondheim’s aversion to Brecht is not unprecedented in American Theater; in fact, it seems to a fairly standard reflex action of many American theater practitioners and scholars. This is not surprising as Brechtian Theater in the broadest terms represents intellectual, didactic, non-naturalistic, ensemble theater; ideas which often stand in marked contrast to the traditions of American performance culture. But where American Theater views Brecht as a limitation to understanding performance, I see Brecht as an opening and expansion of coming to grips with American performance culture. This sensitivity, at times downright antipathy, to Brecht in American Theater indicates, in my mind, a very important nexus point between American and German performance cultures. One follows Shakespeare and Freud here, “Methinks, thou dost protest too much!” And with Sondheim it is not as if we are stretching things. Let’s face it, in form as well as content, Sweeney Todd, operates in a Brechtian orbit. How easy is to imagine that Brecht, if he had been aware of the material, might have treated it himself? Or, how easy is it for the Brecht scholar or practitioner to rethink Sweeney Todd as an epic theater piece? In short, Sondheim and Sweeney Todd seem to inhabit a Brechtian parallel universe, which only awaits a constructive dialogue.

First and foremost - the Arden production was quite professional and enjoyable. Not being an aficionado of this theatrical tradition, nor of musical theater in general, I nonetheless did not feel the urge to leave at intermission, as I have done with several “classic” theatrical productions, including Brecht productions. The theater house is a renovated 19th century warehouse, and when stripped to the bare brick, provided a wonderful organic setting, which David P. Gordon’s stage design capitalized on. Using the length and height of the warehouse to maximum effect, and incorporating a lot of metal scaffoldery and staircases as an industrialized aesthetic, Gordon constructed a multi-level stage, which was both functional and evocative. The lower stage contained Mrs. Lovett’s establishment, stage center, announced by a giant canvas sign “Meat Pies,” the chute, grinder, and furnace stage right, and a scrim area stage left where the rape and asylum scenes were performed. Behind this scrim area and partially hidden was the orchestra under the musical direction of Eric Ebbenga. The upper stage included Sweeney’s barbershop stage center right, announced by a giant canvas sign “Barber and Surgery,” Johanna’s room stage right on a catwalk, and a walkway stage left which was accessible by stage and from the audience. Of course, the barber chair – chute was the most compelling stage property and was wonderfully rendered throughout the production. The stage design along with the costumes designed by Marla Jurglanis effectively evoked 19th-century London, and at the same time provided ample space for choreographic interpretation. The choreography itself was professional, but not exceptional. Because the stage was so expansive and the actors were required to do a lot of work to navigate such a set, signifying moments of choreography were often dissipated or overlooked. Also, the set and choreography did not always serve the aural aspect of the production well. On the one hand, the orchestral music was excellent and filled the theater house quite well; additionally, the sound design, by the inimitable Jorge Cousineau, featuring the famous factory whistle shriek, was compelling. On the other hand, the libretto was, at times, obscured by the open house and wide-ranging movement of the actors.

Still, the set largely worked and allowed for a fine and consistent performance by the ensemble. The audience was treated to wonderful renderings of the “My Friends” scene in which Sweeney, in duet with Mrs. Lovett, sings a love song to his razors; and, of course, the “Epiphany” and “Little Priest” numbers right before intermission, in which Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett stumble across their horrible grand design. After intermission, Director Nolen artfully illuminated Sweeney’s “machine-like” killing ability with his razor and barberchair/chute during the “Johanna” number, by having the same actor play three separate victims. In terms of the acting, it is difficult to pinpoint any one performance, because the ensemble was so strong, and indeed the ensemble performance seemed to be consciously emphasized over individual performance. Naturally, the figure of Sweeney always stands out, but Thom Sesma played a very restrained and understated Sweeney. In this day and age, one would expect a Sweeney bordering between Jack Nicholson’s The Joker and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, and perhaps Sesma and Nolen had these cultural icons in mind as they crafted the interpretation of Sweeney. I respect the interpretation, but the only problem I had with it, was that it played somewhat “small” on the expansive theatrical stage, and didn’t always reach the cheap seats in the back. Mary Martello as Mrs. Lovett was solid, as were Ben Dibble and Elisa Matthews as the stock figures of Anthony and Johanna; Todd A. Horman and Bev Appleton as Beadle Bamford and Judge Turpin played the roles in efficiently evil ways. All in all, the acting and singing were impressively consistent, and one of the better presentations of ensemble work seen on the Philadelphia Stage.

Most impressive about the stage design was its environmental component. The amphitheater seating put the audience right within the action – even including a small seating area on the upper stage level in which several scenes were performed. The actors moved through the stairs and walkways of the spectator area, at times sitting on the steps waiting for cues, at times performing directly to an audience member. The environmental staging was not only a welcome shot of fresh air in the usually fourth-wall inspired Philadelphia Theater, but it also brought the unpleasantries from the stage to the audience, creating an added “squirm” level to the events unfolding onstage. It also set up the chorus of the final scene in which the cast members point to the audience and exclaim:

Sweeney wishes the world away,
Sweeney’s weeping for yesterday.
Hugging the blade, waiting the years,
Hearing the music that nobody hears.
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall,
Sweeney leans on the office wall.
No one can help, nothing can hide you –
Isn’t that Sweeney there beside you?

Included in this environmental component was the intermission, in which audience members could buy meat pie facsimiles to snack on as they ruminated upon the production. Though attractive to my avant-garde sensibilities, these environmental aspects were too restrained, and in the end, a bit too canned. I could not help but think of my experience at the LaMaMa Theater last summer in New York when the company revived its famous Greek Trilogy of the early 1970s. In the Trojan Women, the audience is actually onstage as the drama unwinds, and it is impossible to escape the ritualized experience and dramatized reality of war, when you are trying to avoid being trampled by actors playing angry Greek soldiers. Sweeney could be performed in a similar way, and it would go a long way toward involving the audience in the idea that we are all potential Sweeney Todds. Likewise, selling meat pies at intermission had potential, but could have been played even stronger. What better way to suggest the audience’s complicity in the business of capitalism, murder, and cannibalism, then by providing a critical moment of dialectical thinking, a moment of “eingreifendes Denken” to cite Brecht? Perhaps this intervention did occur with the great majority of the audience, but in my mind, it appeared as the opposite of critical thinking. It seemed to represent more the idea of contemporary global capitalism, in which “everything solid melts into air,” and everything is commodifiable and sellable. This, in turn, symbolized the huge corporate support underpinning such an expensive production – viewable in the production program and the overly long corporate and non-profit “thank yous” provided by two cast members before the show started. 

The interpretations specified above, for brevity’s sake let’s call them tragic (ritual) and epic approaches, are suggested by both the playscript and production, but other interpretative paths are also available. In a brief article in the program notes, penned by the Associate Director Amy Dugas Brown, the standard interpretative framework for understanding Sweeney Todd is presented. Like a story out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Sweeney Todd has a primordial effect on human consciousness; we are simultaneously repulsed and attracted, terrified and educated: “Nothing in literature, theatre, or film affects the nervous system quite the way horror can.” Brown also follows most previous reviews of Sweeney and equates it with an earlier tradition, that of Grand Guignol Theater, which presented violent, erotic, and comedic productions to Paris theatergoers from 1897 to 1962. As Brown makes clear, and as Sondheim himself as remarked upon, Sweeney Todd arose in the late 1970s, a cinematic era defined by terror spectacles, horror films, and psychological thrillers, symbolized by Jaws (1975) and Halloween (1979), and driven by powerful musical scores. In the Arden program, Sondheim is quoted as saying that Sweeney is a “background score for a horror film ... It had to be unsettling, scary, and romantic” and in an online interview citation with Larry A. Brown he draws a contrast between a horror movie and Brechtian epic theater: “The idea of Sweeney is the idea of a horror movie ... That’s not Brecht.”

I found this line of interpretation interesting, but not persuasive, especially in regard to the Arden production. If it is indeed a horror film, then how does the horror of Sweeney Todd work on us, and to what end? If we consider the folk tale idea that Sweeney works on the level of some primal fear or ritualized terror, the production did not seem to evoke a real psychological depth or tragic double bind. If we consider the idea of Grand Guignol Theater, then why was the production not more lurid and repulsive? It has been twenty-five years since Sweeney premiered, and our database for terror has expanded, especially the terror of the Grand Guignol variety. Why, for instance, was the rape scene indicated briefly behind a scrim? Sondheim’s original text calls for a wild carnival affair of masks, culminated by the judge exposing himself and then violating Sweeney’s wife. Why the decorum? Give us the sado-pornography! Or, why not include the “Mea Culpa” scene, which was deleted from the original production, and later re-inserted? In this scene, the Judge, dressed in his judicial robes and carrying a Bible struggles with his lust for his stepdaughter. Peering though a keyhole at her, he strips his upper body and scourges himself into a masturbatory orgasm. Instead, the audience was provided a pretty tame version of Grand Guignol. In fairness, I must state that other Philadelphia critics seemed to think that the production still packed its repulsive punch. J. Cooper Robb referred to a “frighteningly brutal intensity,” and Tim Dunleavy stated that Sweeney still had the “power to shock,” and as evidence of this claimed that “several elderly patrons walked out after Todd’s first murder, clearly shaken by the raw brutality of Sesma’s performance.” Note that it was elderly people who left; I doubt it moved the younger generation much.

Some critics over the years have opted for a combination of Grand Guignol and Epic Theater; that is a horror show which still imparts a lesson. Such a description owes a lot to Hal Prince’s original 1979 production in which the production showed a Sweeney produced by the dawning era of industrial capitalism, which in turn constructed humans as objects, and thus made it easy to eliminate them as objects.  The New York Times critic, Richard Eder, referred to the original 1979 production as: “Grand Guignol opera with social undertones,” and the current New York Times critic, Ben Brantley, in his review of 2002 Sondheim revival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. stated that Sweeney is “an exercise in Grand Guignol, an angry social indictment.” Again, I find this line of interpretation unpersuasive, and little more than tacking one superficial blurb onto another. No one who makes this interpretation ever elucidates what it means. How do we learn if the horror element of the production operates as an escapist narcotic?

In the end, we are left with the idea of Sweeney Todd as a “fractured love story” (Ben Brantley), which operates on a powerful, universal level of emotion and passion. When Sondheim reflected on Prince’s 1979 production he drew this exact conclusion: “Hal’s metaphor is that the factory turns out Sweeney Todds. It turns out soulless, defeated, hopeless people. That’s what the play’s about to him; Sweeney Todd is a product of that age. I think it’s not. Sweeney Todd is a man bent on personal revenge, the way we all are in one way or another, and it has nothing to do whatsoever to do with the time he lived in, as far as I’m concerned.” Director Nolen emphasizes a similar point: “I am drawn so powerfully to the sheer emotionality of the piece. This musical is filled with so much life – and people by characters consumed by passion.... Sweeney allows for the great contradictions of the living world – a world that can be unbearably cruel and yet so full of possibility.” Of course, Brecht would have a field day with such visions of Wagnerian romanticism: “emotional extortion racket,” anybody? The myopic emphasis on the individual, de-historicized and universalized, and the appeal to an eternal and mystical emotionality is antithetical to Brechtian theory and praxis.

Yet, Nolen does point to the dialectical moment which obsessed Brecht, “the great contradictions of living in the world.” Nolen’s statement is representative of much of American performance culture in that the contradictions inherent in human existence are neither ignored or repressed, but rather approached and illuminated. The difference lies in what to do with the contradictions. Brecht saw the contradictions as a dialogical puzzle in which one was constantly engaged in unraveling. He never accepted making a religion out of the mystical contradictions, nor did he fully believe in the deliverance from these contradictions. For Brecht it was the process of engaging the contradictions, the never-ending dialectic, which does contain a distrust of the human condition (especially in stasis). For the Greeks, it was the courage to fully look at the contradictions and horrors of human existence and then to engage these horrors with a cognitive and emotional tragic vision. For Nolen, Sondheim, and American performance culture we engage the contradictions in a deep primordial form but we refuse the depth of this engagement. We are not enamored by the abyss or the puzzle, but rather the fragility of the contradictions. Hence, we prefer a lightness, which is often hard to distinguish from superficiality.

In the end, it would be easy to dismiss Sondheim’s piece and the Arden production in Brechtian terms, except for the fact, that the Sondheim/Nolen collaboration in the context of Brechtian criticism, has generated the ruminations contained in this review.

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)