Sweeney Todd is one of Stephen Sondheim’s best musicals. The Broadway show of the mad barber that slays his customers and his equally mad partner who turns them into meat pies starred the lovely and talented Angela Lansbury. If you only know Angela Lansbury as that sweet old lady on Murder She Wrote, it is a real wonder to hear her sing about The Worst Pies In London. Sweeney Todd is an amazing musical filled with great songs and one of most intriguing stories to find its way into the usually sickly sweet waters of Broadway.
As a general rule they don’t make movies for me anymore, not since I moved out of the 18-34 age range anyway. But I do still like the occasional film. Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd:The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the first movie trailer I have seen in a while that made me sit up and take notice. While Johnny Dep was absolutely the worst possible choice to play Willy Wonka, I believe that Sweeney Todd may be the role of a lifetime for Johnny Dep. I also love Helena Bonham Carter in most everything I have seen her in. I even watched the somewhat disapointing Corpse Bride, which was also a musical. So I am causciously optimistic about Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. It is nice to see Alan Rickman playing a villian other than Professor Snape as well.
Having said that Sweeney Todd:The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is one of the best musicals of the last thirty years, I have to wonder if Johnny Dep or Helena Bonham Carter are up to the challenge of singing a mini-opera. Of course, there is no reason that anyone starring in the film need to sing themselves, the technology is a lot better than it was in the days of My Fair Lady where they dubbed the lovely Audrey Hepburn’s singing out of the film. One of the many reasons I hated the film version of Chicago was the horrid singing of the all-star cast, most of which can’t carry a tune in a bucket. So anything Tim Burton can do to make Sweeney Todd the movie it should be will be alright with me.
Sweeney Todd has a MySpace page, which is not all that surprising, where Sweeney Todd has about 44,000 friends. Mrs Lovett and a handful of other characters from the film have Myspace pages as well. The Myspace pages are filled with all kinds of cool widgets and whatnots, and each character’s page seems to have a different trailer or video.
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