By: Rebecca,
on 1/4/2008
In case you weren’t checking the internet during the holidays I thought I would repost the links to Robert Mack’s articles about Sweeney Todd, my favorite is the look at Charles Dickens and Sweeney Todd. Mack’s historical look at the story is a great way to learn more about the Demon Barber. Below is the trailer to the Sweeney Todd film, as A. O. Scott said, “It’s not Hairspray.” (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 12/20/2007
Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about Dickens’s Influence. Today Mack looks the many incarnations of the tale. This post first appeared on Powell’s.
It wasn’t long before dramatists saw the potential of the Sweeney Todd story. In the same month that the final episode of the serialized novel was published in The People’s Periodical in March 1847, the first theatrical version appeared on stage under the story’s original title, The String of Pearls. Written by George Dibdin Pitt, it was the first version to use the catchphrase now most associated with Todd – ‘I’ll polish him off’. This was soon followed by another stage version in around 1865, under the title Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: or, the String of Pearls by Frederick Hazleton. Meanwhile various other versions of the story were appearing in print, often either hugely swollen or greatly abridged, all using Sweeney Todd as the title. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 12/18/2007
Yesterday, Robert Mack, the editor of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, wrote about cannibalism. Today Mack questions who the author of Sweeney Todd was. This post first appeared on Powell’s.
If you ask that question today, the answer you’re most likely to receive is ‘Stephen Sondheim’. That’s not sot surprising, since Sondheim’s musical version of the story, first staged in 1979, and now about to hit movie theatres in a Tim Burton-directed film version, has done most to popularize the legend in modern times. In fact no one knows who wrote the original story on which the Sondheim ‘musical thriller’ – and every other stage and screen adaptation – is ultimately based. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 12/17/2007
Robert Mack is the editor The Oxford World’s Classics Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd is the tale of an infamous London barber who partners with a pie-maker to do devilish things with his customers. Below Mack mulls over cannibalism. This post first appeared on Powell’s.
Have you ever noticed just how many cannibals there seem to be about these days? I don’t mean the real thing (well … not just yet, at least, although be patient; we will come to them in time). No, for the moment I simply mean: have you ever noticed the extent to which the actual language we use on a day-to-day basis itself remains to an extraordinary degree permeated by the signs or the lingering rumours of what might also be described as ‘lustful cannibalism’ — a common rhetoric of erotic possession and physical consumption? (more…)
