"It can be fun to watch and it is juggling, but it's nowhere near as much pleasure for an audience as seeing all the balls - or in the case of the best lyricists, knives, lit torches and swords - being kept aloft with grace and precision." "Using near rhymes is like juggling clumsily," he wrote. He was generous about the latter, saying that generations of pop composers - one also thinks of the rap world - may have found them more fluid or liberating than true rhymes.īut they weren't for artists like Sondheim. For the layman, he explained the two main types: the true or perfect rhyme (love and glove, pain and gain) and the near or false rhyme (home and alone, dark and heart). In the two volumes of his collected lyrics - "Finishing the Hat" (2010) and "Look, I Made a Hat" (2011) - Sondheim dedicated a chapter to the importance of rhyme in his art.
Lovett can only end the exchange by coming up with an occupation with no rhyme, which she does. “Now let’s see here,” she proposes, “we’ve got Tinker…” As Lovett offers Todd pies, he rejects them – in rhyme. ("It's man devouring man, my dear," Todd sings, "and who are we to deny it in here?”) Yet Sondheim finds time to work in an extended reference to the process of songwriting itself. This so-called list song with a fairground, oom-pah-pah tune has plot to consolidate and theme to elucidate. In mid-song, Lovett appeals to Todd, who acts like a customer for the new line of human mincemeat pies: “Since Marine doesn’t appeal to you, how about Rear Admiral?” It’s a particularly funny piece of theater. “A Little Priest” is a reminder of the importance of comedy in the musical-comedy, America’s art form – the reason Sondheim, who died yesterday at the age of 91, abandoned an early attempt to adapt the humorless “Sunset Boulevard” to Broadway. The curtain fell and, in my life, I have never heard such amazed, lusty, unwilling-to-let-it-go cheering from an audience in a theater. “We'll not discriminate great from small.
The final lines of the song are sung as the couple link arms and brandish long knives in their free hands: They imagine how the tastes of the pies will differ depending on the victims’ occupations. Lovett, agree to pursue profit along with revenge by using the ground-up corpses of Todd’s victims to fill meat pies. Todd and his partner-in-crime, pie shop proprietor Mrs. Todd cries, ’'At last my arm is complete again!'" But at my performance, the audience found a different apex, "A Little Priest," Act One’s closer. According to Rich, the apex of the first act was the scene in which Todd is reunited in London with his razors, which he will use to avenge his wretched past - unjust transportation to Australia and the loss of his wife - by murdering people both innocent and guilty. In the New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that a smaller theater made the revival more emotionally engaging than the original production a decade earlier.
By Anthony Spaeth I saw the first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in 1989. Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century, has died yesterday at age 91. Stephen Sondheim arrives at the premiere of ″Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street″ in Los Angeles, on Dec.