Some Books

My brain doesn't seem to want to participate in year-end roundups this year, as every time I try to think about what books or films or music or legumes I've encountered, I mostly go blank. I seem to have lost the capacity to link such experiences to the experience of time in annual chunks. I wouldn't in any case be able to write a "best of the year" post because I've spent a lot of this year catching up with stuff from other years (well, no old legumes -- that would be gross...). Probably still a hangover effect from my years as series editor for Best American Fantasy.

However, some books, at least, do come to mind as things I haven't posted enough about here, and which I would like to recommend. So if you get some good giftcards or something during the holidays and feel impelled to buy something; or if you happen to want some stuff to look for in the library, here are a few titles (arranged alphabetically by author) I've thought rewarded the time I spent with them.

Of Sunday and Macbeth

My yearnings for theatre were sated last week when, through luck and happenstance, I got to accompany friends to two of the most talked-about shows in New York at the moment: Sunday in the Park with George at the Roundabout Theatre and Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As events and opportunities to spend time with friends, both were completely pleasurable. As aesthetic artifacts, both were disappointing.

The better of the shows in terms of script is the lesser of the shows in terms of production: Macbeth. The central problems are that the play is a hodgepodge of ideas and techniques and that Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth gives a one-note performance in the key of overwrought. (Patrick Stewart's performance is, like the whole show, occasionally extraordinary and generally competent, but lacking coherence.) The director, Rupert Goold, has chosen to put the play in quasi-Stalinist dress and on a single set: a white-tiled hospital ward-asylum-torture chamber, augmented with projected imagery when necessary. It's an effective choice, giving the play a sense of unity and menace, particularly in conjunction with the choice to make the witches into three nurses. The opening scene with the bloody soldier is hilarious at first, because the actor playing the soldier performs like an epileptic animatron, but the segue into the next scene, when the witches wonder when they'll meet again, is marvelously creepy.

Indeed, many of my favorite moments in the play were the scene transitions. Talking with other people who have seen the show, many of whom liked it far more than I, the banquet scene gets mentioned as a high point, and for me it was so, but not as much for the scene itself as for the movement from the scene of Banquo's murder (on a train, staged clumsily) to the banquet -- there is a puzzling shift to the entire cast singing something as if they've briefly been beamed in from Sweeney Todd, but just because it's puzzling doesn't mean it's not effective (I'm a sucker for sudden choral impulses), and then the chorus becomes the banquet. It's a lovely bit of choreography. Banquo gets to charge in, face and chest drenched in gore, and jump on the table, and then comes the intermission (or "interval" as the announcement at BAM said -- apparently they even imported the house manager from England). The scene is repeated when the second half of the play begins, this time sans Banquo and gore, so we get to see that Macbeth is -- shock of shocks -- delusional! It's one of the dubious choices that gives this production of Shakespeare's shortest play a running time closer to that of your average production of Hamlet.

Ultimately, my favorite performances were those of actors in smaller roles, particularly Christopher Patrick Nolan as the porter, portrayed with such diabolical menace that the character seems to have little to do with Shakespeare's original, but is nonetheless captivating to behold -- many of the other actors strain for similarly overblown effects, but produce characters that are less compelling, less nuanced, more like a reanimated bag of tics and tricks than a person.

Nonetheless, this is absolutely the best production of Macbeth I've ever seen. That is faint praise, though, because for some reason, though Macbeth is the Shakespeare play I have seen most often (yes, even more than A Midsummer Night's Dream, but that's probably because I've vowed never to see that one ever again lest it reach levels of fatal toxicity in my system), I have nonetheless had the bad luck to see nothing but truly atrocious productions of it, including an utterly lifeless version at the 1995 Stratford Festival in Ontario.

(I should note that Rick Bowes said the only reason I didn't like Kate Fleetwood's performance was that I couldn't adjust to the nontraditional casting of a woman in the role.)

Sunday in the Park is an altogether better production, one with strong and thoughtful performances throughout, and a coherent style and vision. My primary complaint was with the orchestra -- well, band, really. The production began at a tiny British theatre (yes, this is another import, a fact Michael Feingold has complained about) and despite moving to very modern and expansive digs here in the U.S., the band has not been expanded, and the lack is painful to anyone who knows the original soundtrack -- excruciatingly painful at a couple of key moments, in fact. Plenty of musicals can survive just with a piano -- I once saw a perfectly good Sweeney Todd performed that way -- but the orchestrations of Sunday in the Park provide a level of meaning to the show that is simply not available without at least a few more instruments (preferably some brass) than the new production has. The final moments of Act I, with the song "Sunday", are breathtaking with an orchestra, and while they were still affecting at the Roundabout -- it's one of the best moments in all of Stephen Sondheim's work -- the emotional power was greatly reduced from what it could be.

Sunday in the Park provides a few gnarly problems to any production. First, there's the technical challenge: how do you assemble one of the most famous post-Impressionist paintings during the course of the first act, for instance? This production solves the technical challenges cleverly -- with projected animations. Even in these days of massive Broadway spectacles, the animations in Sunday in the Park are impressive because they make the stage itself into a blank piece of canvas, allowing quick and occasionally stunning transformations. Sometimes the animations are distracting, but more often they are magical, as props and set pieces that previously seemed solid evaporate into thin air.

The other problem with Sunday in the Park is the second act. Critics have, ever since the original production of 1983/84, complained about the second act, and its shallow satire of the 1980s art world has not aged well. This is, though, primarily a problem with one song, albeit a long one: "Putting It Together" (rewritten to somewhat better effect for the revue of that title, where it became about putting a show together) -- the rest of the act is, though a bit ethereal and certainly less impressive than the first act, not particularly painful. The new production does its best with "Putting It Together", but Daniel Evans makes George so unsympathetic, so much the stereotype of the bristling and bitter and whiny artist, that the emotional possibilities of the second act's conclusion are lost, and what remains feels forced and sour.

It is, though, a generally enjoyable production, though seldom transcendent in the way the material can be.

Sweeney Todd

I know Terry Teachout reveres the stage version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at least as much as I do, but I can't entirely agree with him that Tim Burton's film version "is -- without exception, and by a considerable margin -- the best film ever to have been made from a Broadway musical." However, this is only because I think Bob Fosse's Cabaret is a more profound and innovative film. Fosse turned an awkward and mediocre musical into something newly rich and strange, and the camera work and editing in Cabaret remain breathtaking even after thirty-five years and oodles of CGI movies. Tim Burton simply had the task of not obscuring the brilliance of his source material. That he did more than that is something to be celebrated.

Burton has created what is certainly his best film in many years, and perhaps his best film yet, although opinions on that will depend on how much you prefer Burton's darker side to his goofier side. This Sweeney Todd is dark indeed -- dark in color palette, dark in tone. By cutting out the "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" segments from the play, Burton has removed the device that allowed the audience to keep a bit of distance from the gore and mayhem, and his ending is more that of a Jacobean tragedy than a Victorian melodrama, for the untainted purity and goodness of Anthony and Johanna is left more unresolved in the movie than in the play. (Did I miss the "Ballad" sections? Sure, because they contain some of my favorite lyrics, and I love the moment when Sweeney rises in the final one. But they're theatrical and would either have made the movie campy or Brechtian, and Burton wisely chose to go in other directions.)

This is very much a Tim Burton movie, and that's just fine, because Burton has tremendous respect for the original play, and his style is not one that is at odds with the source, although it certainly offers a different experience. He is a filmmaker with as distinctive a visual vocabulary as any director I can think of -- there is a continuity of imagery between many of his films, and at times Sweeney reminded me of Beetle Juice and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Batman Returns and Corpse Bride and, at the very least because of the razor blades, Edward Scissorhands. Indeed, Sweeney is the nasty Struwwelpeter underside of the sentimental sweetness at the core of Edward Scissorhands (which, I rush to say, is a movie dear to my heart). Sweeney's line upon getting his razors back -- "At last, my arm is complete again!" -- could be the cry of Edward after having grown up and lost his way for a while. We don't need to refer to Isaiah Berlin to know that some artists have many different styles and visions and others are masters of digging away at particular stylistic obsessions -- Burton, it seems to me, is the latter, with each new film a work unto itself, certainly, but also a work that offers variations on its predecessors' images.

There are a few moments of Sweeney that feel a bit long, a bit theatrical, a bit off (mostly with Anthony's song "Johanna", which generally comes off as silly in the movie because Anthony's passion is a shallow and ridiculous passion of love-at-first-sight, the sort of thing theatrical melodrama can absorb, but which is unintentionally funny on screen). For the most part, though, Burton's version works quite well as a film, making for a fine meld of gory gothic horror and movie musical.

I had heard enough clips of the singing online that I knew what to expect, but I wasn't sure how it would all fit together -- would it seem as thin as it does alone, or would the intimacy of the camera and the lushness of the production design compensate? Overall, I was perfectly comfortable with the singing, and I say that as someone who knows nearly every note of the score by heart. It's simplified in the movie, certainly, and has more the quality of a pop album than an operetta, but the only singer who really disappoints is Helena Bonham Carter, because the quality of her voice is so thin that, for instance, in her first song ("The Worst Pies in London") many of her words are lost beneath the orchestra. But she's a fine actor, and that matters -- I've seen productions of Sweeney Todd with excellent singers who are not particularly good actors, and it is a far more painful experience than productions with adequate singers who are excellent actors. (And her voice is just right, I think, for her later song "By the Sea", which is one of my favorite sequences in the movie.) Burton gets his actors to create vivid, over-the-top characterizations that are often mesmerizing. Johnny Depp is just about the best in the business at such characterizations, and many of the people who can give him competition for that title are in the movie, too: Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall. Each sings, and each is at least competent -- the key is that they do what the best actors do, and throw themselves so deeply into their roles that how they sing becomes a vital part of the character. Timothy Spall's version of "Ladies in Their Sensitivities" is much less pretty than it usually is, but his characterization of Beadle Bamford is also far less pretty than the usual -- he is no self-important fop, but rather a rat-like creature, a lurking pustule of corruption. Johnny Depp's Sweeney lacks the bombast and rugged masculinity of most stage Sweeneys, and so his gentler, less forceful singing makes good sense for his character -- there is a creepiness to him that I've never encountered in Sweeney before, because usually he is presented as rugged, strong, forceful -- whereas Depp finds something else within him: not a vulnerability so much as the ghost of vulnerability, the shell of a man who was once too sensitive, who was nearly destroyed because of it, and who now maintains an obsession because nothing else will keep him from shattering into a thousand tiny bits of self. It lacks the complexity some of the best stage actors have found in the role, but it provides a unity the film needed.

In 1994, my father and I saw the glorious London production of Sweeney Todd at the National Theatre (with Julia McKenzie as a strong and multifaceted Mrs. Lovett and Adrian Lester adding more depth and the role of Anthony than anyone probably ever imagined could be there). My father didn't know the show at all, but likes horror movies, so I thought he'd enjoy it, and he did, saying, afterward, "That had more blood in it than any play I've ever seen!" I don't remember it being particularly bloody, myself, but it's one of those plays that, regardless of how much blood actually gets poured onto the stage, feels like a bath of gore. The movie, though, is full of blood right from the opening credits, but the notable thing about the blood is how stylized it all is -- Burton doesn't try to make the blood look realistic, but rather makes it very, very red, and the effect is both unsettling and beautiful. Perhaps unsettling because it is beautiful. The only truly painful moment of gore is one of the slightest and involves Pirelli's technique with a razor, strop, and Tobias's fingertips.

An interesting change Burton makes from the play involves Tobias, who is generally played as a dim-witted young man. Tobias in the movie is played by Ed Sanders, a young boy. It's a notable performance because it is so understated and sincere, the one character who lacks almost any trace of caricature in the movie. (It's interesting that this year two of the best American movies are musicals -- I'm Not There and Sweeney Todd, and both include startling performances by kids: Sanders here, and Marcus Carl Franklin in I'm Not There.)

I had hoped the film of Sweeney Todd would at least not cause me to cringe while hearing some of my favorite theatre songs sung on screen. I crossed my fingers that it might do more than that, and might even provide occasional moments of joy. It exceeded even those hopes. It was entertaining, entrancing, surprising, delightful, and emotionally affecting in ways different from, but not inferior to, the stage version. It is very much a work of art of its own, separate and different from the other iterations of the story and music -- which was my highest hope, the one I didn't dare dream of, because the chances of disappointment were so high. There was, though, no disappointment at all.

Epiphany

Thanks to this post, this site has become the top hit on Google for such phrases as "I will have vengeance!" and "I will have vengeance, I will have salvation!" And lots of hits a day are coming through because of it.

I don't know if people are looking for ways to get vengeance and salvation, or if they're looking for the song the phrase came from in Sweeney Todd.

If it's the latter, that's easy: The song is "Epiphany" and the lyrics, wiht a fwe typoz, are available here. You can see it on YouTube in various productions: Len Cariou (the original Sweeney) and Angela Lansbury (the original soundtrack album is a masterpiece, like a bloody and brilliant radio show); George Hearn and Angela Lansbury; George Hearn and Patti LuPone; a little bit of Johnny Depp.

For actual vengeance and salvation, let me introduce you to my friend Nick Mamatas, who will be happy to help, I'm sure...

"I will have vengeance! I will have salvation!"

The website for Sweeney Todd has just been updated, and it contains a number of audio selections. I'm hardly alone in being simultaneously excited by Tim Burton directing my favorite musical and skeptical of a cast made up largely of people who are not known for their singing.

The clips on the site, though, are heartening. Most are of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Neither will ever be mistaken for powerful singers, but they're not atrocious. (Alas, no Sacha Baron Cohen yet.) These versions of the songs are a bit thin on their own, and sometimes the actors get overwhelmed by the lush orchestrations, but I can imagine the songs working pretty well on film, which, thanks to the way the camera modulates the audience's proximity to the actors, can be much more effective as an intimate aural environment than live theatre (or maybe it's just me -- I hate plays where the actors are heavily miked, and I have more than once walked out of shows because of the sound design). Here's a fun YouTube comparison (audio) of four versions of Sweeney (Len Cariou, George Hearn, Michael Cerveris, and Johnny Depp).

The songs promise to be streamlined in the film, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, since most of the worst movie musicals are the ones that stick too faithfully to the stage version. I love "A Little Priest" in live performance, but if the whole thing were in the movie, the pacing would be quite a challenge, given how static and word-based the song is.

In any case, some of my fears about the movie being embarrassing or unintentionally cringe-inducing are allayed, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing Burton's visual interpretation of it all.

"Freely Flows the Blood of Those Who Moralize"

Too much blood?! What planet do Warner Bros. execs come from? (Planet of the Apes, clearly.) The New York Post reports:

Tim Burton has been told to tone down the gore in the screen version of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," starring Johnny Depp. The suits at Warner Bros. "became a tad squeamish when they viewed grisly footage of blood splashing across the set as Depp slits the throats of his customers," London's Daily Mail reports. In another scene that has the studio on edge, a 10-year-old boy feeds human body parts into a meat grinder to make meat pies. The movie, co-starring Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, opens in December.

Sweeney Todd is all about the blood -- it's grand guignol operetta! Blood and music, baby!

I'm certainly not the only person curious to see how the various actors handle the singing, particularly Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli. In terms of acting, a lot of the casting seems perfect and brilliant, but ... I've seen badly-sung productions of Sweeney Todd and they're exquisitely painful in all the wrong ways. I adore Sondheim, and Sweeney Todd in particular, but it's tough stuff, and the show is almost entirely sung.

But I shall reserve judgment, because Tim Burton has often surprised me in good ways, and Sondheim has given it all his blessing (so far), making this the upcoming movie I most look forward to seeing.