Community theater adult themes production: Sweeney Todd – What to know before you go

Beginning Friday at 7 p.m., “Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” runs this weekend at the Historic Savannah Theater on Court Square.

The local community theater production opens Friday at 7 p.m. with repeat performances Saturday at 7 p.m. and a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m.

Tickets will be available at the theater box office, beginning one hour prior to each show.

This amazing show leaves a lasting impression on audiences, which numbers in the many millions of attendees for productions around the world and over 240,000 for productions solely on Broadway.

But in a cautionary note, there are things you should know before buying a ticket.

This is not a show for kids – it has non-graphic violence, mild profanity, sexual innuendo and content (such as implied rape), and deals with very adult themes.

A movie based on the musical, starring Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd, is rated R for those reasons and more – in the movie, the violence was made extremely graphic and bloody by Director Tim Burton.

This weekend’s stage production tones the violence down quite a bit, with no fake or even implied blood, but the depictions of violence and murders are central to the story and thus remain.

Parents should decide for themselves whether their children under 17 or even older are mature enough to handle the content.

Sweeney Todd is dark, complex and intricate, and is considered one the hardest to perform musicals ever written, and this weekend’s production is being tackled by Dreamweavers, Savannah’s best known and longest running active community theater troupe.

It’s big. It’s grand. It’s intense. It’s complex. It’s scary. It’s gory. It’s hilarious. It’s obnoxious. It’s darkly romantic. It’s manic. It’s disgusting.

It is also a gloriously complicated musical piece, often spoken of as not just a musical but a true American opera – and the actors sing in English, not Italian or German.

So let’s examine the many reasons that make this a must-see show, as well as why some may decide it’s not for them.

First, the considerations that should definitely entice you:

Sweeney Todd, written by Stephen Sondheim in 1979, swept the major theater awards that year, winning Best Musical from several critics’ organizations and 13 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Lyrics and Outstanding Music.

At the very highest level, Sweeney Todd won nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score, and is one of only four musicals ever to have won what is called the “Big Six,” what are widely considered the six most important Tony Awards.

As a composer, Sondheim has won more Tony Awards for music than any other person.

Performed live, the music requires exacting timing and skill, with different sets of lyrics sung by singers in different ranges, often at the same time or quickly interspersed mimicking high-speed call and response, with time signatures and meters changing many times throughout most songs.

The result is an interwoven symphony of sound, voices and instruments coming together to create an unforgettable experience.

As for the story itself, some audience members write main character Sweeney Todd off as a psychopathic serial murderer, killing simply to quench his lust to kill.

That would be a mistake, because Sweeney Todd is much, much deeper than that.

Sondheim himself said “What the show is really about is obsession,” in this case an obsession with revenge, and how destructive that obsession can become when a person is pushed by injustice beyond all human capacity to deal with it.

Which leads to what actually happens in this story, and things members of a local audience may find off-putting (and likely, almost certainly, will find off-putting – but they absolutely serve a purpose).

Boiled down to bare basics, the show is about a man named Benjamin Barker, who later adopts the fake name Sweeney Todd, whose life and family are ruined when he is falsely convicted by a thoroughly corrupt judge.

The Judge, named Turpin, falsely convicts Barker on purpose, in order to get rid of him so the Judge can rape Barker’s wife.

After 15 years, Barker escapes his prison (exile to Australia) and returns to London under the name Sweeney Todd, with only two goals in mind – finding his wife and daughter, if possible, and getting some gruesome revenge on Judge Turpin and his assistant, the Beadle.

As the show goes on, Sweeney Todd comes to find out his wife committed suicide and his daughter is long gone, who knows where. There is a huge plot twist later in the show on that score.

But Judge Turpin and Beadle are still there, so it’s time for Sweeney’s revenge.

He meets a kooky shop owner who sells meat pies, and she’s hungry for love, attention and affection – as well as money.

Sweeney and the shop owner, Mrs. Lovett, team up – so he can get his revenge and she can get a man – but they aren’t immediately successful, so Sweeney’s obsession turns to straight-out murdering anybody and everybody, as he sinks deeper into desolation.

The turn of events works out well for Lovett, however, because she uses the bodies of those Sweeney murders to increase sales at near-zero cost – a businesswoman’s dream.

They feed each other’s growing lunacy, if you’ll pardon the pun.

If that’s not bad enough, the audience learns that Judge Turpin has, after raising her from infancy, developed lustful feelings for Sweeney’s young daughter, who would now be about 17.

We get a better look into the depths of depravity of Judge Turpin during a song in which he professes his pedophilic love for the young Johanna.

The song, deemed creepiest of the show by many, was cut from the Sweeney Todd movie by Tim Burton himself – a man widely considered the King of Creepy in films – reportedly because even he thought it too creepy.

Yet Sondheim included it as being vital to the story, to show just how dark Judge Turpin is, further exposing just how much injustice Sweeney Todd experienced and possibly mitigating how we see the murderous protagonist.

By the end of the show, Sweeney Todd gets his revenge, but it destroys him and many of those around him in the process.

Do we care? That’s hard to say – in this story, nearly everyone is a despicable person, which in life can also be true at times.

Beyond the unbelievable music, compelling psychological drama-turns-tragedy, story of obsession and devotion and love for family, dark romance, murder, cannibalism, rape, and pedophilia, there are also frequent comedic scenes that are hilarious, so there is also that.

In the end, it’s up to each audience member to decide for themselves, and that decision may take awhile, maybe even days, after seeing the show.

If you attend with friends or family, it will likely spark some lively debate – but now you know the reasons for and against seeing this weekend’s show.