Sweeney Todd Musical Quotes

In the original production, after the first factory whistle, almost the entire cast appeared onstage to sing the opening song, the first words of which are, “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” (F 333).44 These words immediately establish that what we are to see over the next two and a half hours is not the story of Sweeney Todd but the narration of the story of Sweeney Todd, presumably by the actors assembled on the stage.45 That we are watching a narration, a performance, is reinforced by the periodic reprises of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” that assist the transitions between scenes and comment on the action. This emphasis of the storytelling aspect of the play, its narrativity, gains importance if we recall some of the connections between narrative and time discussed in the section on Company. Narratives, because of their connection to time’s arrow, move toward death. The desire for completed narrative-epistemological structures implies specifically a desire for death and, more generally, a desire for the transcendent, the ideal, absolutes that exist outside the completed structures and, implicitly, outside of time.

The dramatic strategy of the show provides a simple and effective means to blend melodrama with farce (which Sondheim claims as his “two favorite forms of theatre because … they are obverse sides of the same coin”).37 Starkly put, the show develops a pattern of first scaring the hell out of its audience and then rescuing the situation through humor, each time by introducing Mrs. Lovett into a situation saturated with Sweeney Todd’s wrenching angst. This scare-rescue pattern happens twice to great effect, at the beginning and end of Act I, but its real payoff is the devastating conclusion, where there is no comic rescue. The denial of this previous pattern greatly intensifies the darkness of the supremely bleak ending, making the show’s musical profile seem operatic to Broadway audiences even though, ironically in this respect, the denouement unfolds with only intermittent singing.38 But the musical dimension of the show is also deliberately operatic, as it interweaves, Wagner-like, a host of recurring motives, mostly related to each other through a common origin in the Dies Irae, from the Catholic requiem mass. The Dies Irae (literally, “Day of Wrath”; see example 7.1) was taken up as a symbol of death and retribution in music throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth (the most important early such use was by Berlioz in his 1830 Symphonie fantastique). Most scene changes bring back “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” which includes both fast and slow versions of the Dies Irae (example 7.1) and builds up to a frenetic, obsessive chorus of “Sweeney, Sweeney.