Burton's "Sweeney": a delightfully fresh spin on my favorite Broadway musical

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2008)

I had to sit through two screenings of "Sweeney Todd" to erase my memories of the Broadway cast (I saw the New York stage company in 1979, with the magnificent Anglela Lansbury and Len Cariou in the leads.) But I came to appreciate the unique approach of Tim Burton's cinematic "Sweeney Todd" and to judge it on its own merits. It's a delight. Depp and Bonham Carter are superb actors, and their untrained, light singing voices somehow suit the intimacy of the silver screen. One thing I wish the film had is a greater sense of fun with the waltz number, "A Little Priest". The Broadway Todd and Lovett were clearly entertaining themselves with their macabre speculations in that song, laughing and smirking their way through Sondheim's fiendishly funny lyric. But in the film, that song lost much of its "black comedy", merely retaining its "blackness". As if to atone for draining "A Little Priest" of its lightheartedness, Burton has discovered new levels of comic relief and irony in the song "By the Sea". About Helena Bonham Carter  She won me over. Her Mrs. Lovett was a sexy corpse of a woman. Whereas Lansbury had provided a sort of burlesque comic-relief in the role, Bohnam Carter's Mrs. Lovett had much more pathos. Hers was a woman who obviously had been beaten-down into a state of malaise by years of hard-scrabble struggle to survive. And, although the superb young Ed Sanders out-sang Bonham Carter in the achingly beautiful duet "Not While I'm Around", the tears in Bonham Carter's anguished eyes, at the end of that song, haunted me as I left the cinema. Overall, the bombastic Broadway incarnation of "Sweeney" and the new, intimate screen version of "Sweeney" are vastly different animals, but each one roars like hell!