BEN MINGAY & ANTOINETTE HALLORAN, WA OPERA (PHOTO: JAMES ROGERS) Dear Opera Lover You play an important part in driving this large arts employment goal. Your attendance, your donations, You are so much more than a lover of opera! Please your advocacy and your willingness to share in our know how treasured you are because of your appetite success has a multiplying efect. Thank you. As we for music, your passion for drama, and your support begin our Annual Appeal for 2021 I hope you will of our artists, musicians, and indeed our Company as consider deepening the value of your attendance here a whole. Opera is a broad church, both in content and at Sweeney Todd with a donation to State Opera. I the unique personalities it attracts, and I hope you hope it is plainly evident that we funnel as much of will feel utterly complimented when I tell you that you our income as we can directly into productions and are in the very best company here this evening. performances; that is where your financial support will make every bit of diference. Donating is easy: I wish you had a chance to peek backstage and into stateopera.com.au/donate the rehearsal rooms over these last few busy months. I know Stuart will agree with me when I say it has been My special thanks to those who have already food for the soul to see such a hive of activity taking donated, sponsored and contributed in so many place, and I personally have been deeply gratified and ways. Thanks also to our partners, Board of relieved that we have been able to return to delivering Directors, and the ever hard-working and talented on our vision – more opera for more people (okay, we’ve team at State Opera both behind the scenes and on begun the year with a couple of meaty musicals stage. So many talented people have contributed to instead… but watch this space)! A key part of the the production you see before you now, and I have no ‘more people’ in this vision includes more artists. doubt you will join me in relishing the dark brilliance Stuart and I want to see as many Australian singers as of Sweeney Todd. possible working with State Opera over the coming years, and while last year put a dent in our bold Yarmila Alfonzetti aspirations we have thankfully started to once again EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR leap towards this goal. State Opera South Australia ANTOINETTE HALLORAN, WA OPERA (PHOTO: JAMES ROGERS) In 1978 as a young stage manager and recently moral. The cast are stock standard: the sweet converted Sondheim ‘tragic’ (a friend had given me heroine, a black-hearted villain, the buf hero and, of the double LP Side by Side by Sondheim – addicted), I course, goodness triumphs in the end. had devoured the then extraordinary output of this giant of music theatre, from West Side Story to Pacific Stephen Sondheim and his librettist Hugh Wheeler Overtures. Sweeney Todd was my first opportunity to used as their starting point a 1973 reworking of the discover a new Sondheim. Knowing not a word of it, melodrama by Christopher Bond. Here Sweeney with no performance history to guide me, no Todd has a cause: just revenge. This Sweeney YouTube, no videos, no libretto – just vinyl and murders for reasons other than monetary gain, a man photos on the sleeve – I listened, and listened loud. at the mercy of a brutal society and forced to seek Nothing prepared me for the visceral feeling of terror I out an existence in the underbelly of human sufering experienced: the Gothic organ voluntary, the piercing that was Victorian London. Only afer his just factory whistle, the power of the chorus interjections, pursuit for vengeance is foiled, and he realises his the painful and horrific storytelling, the tunes, the impotence against the Victorian social system, does black humour. My response has not diminished in the he crack and transform into a charismatic homicidal 30-odd years since that ‘road to Damascus’ maniac, aided and abetted by a totally charming experience. The terror still thrills. accomplice who is prompted by two of those great deadly sins: lust and greed. From the first words – ‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd’ – we know this is a period piece, an allegory, a Although ofcially subtitled a ‘Musical Thriller’, ‘tale’ that has of been told across the generations, an Sweeney Todd has been categorised as an opera, a urban myth, a cautionary tale... And it’s deliciously musical, a musical play, an operetta and almost every scary; dark, sinister... and thrilling. other musical or dramatic form. Sondheim himself describes his Sweeney as ‘a musical horror’. Does it The grizzly story of a homicidal barber appears as matter? Perhaps not. The piece is without doubt one early as 1825 in a pamphlet entitled The Tell Tale, of the most powerful, dramatic and theatrical horror based on an earlier account in Joseph Fouché’s tales ever set to music. And all the more thrilling in Archives de la Police. In these early versions the details that for all its melodrama, blood and gore, it tells a of the crimes are the same: a Parisian barber cuts the very universal human story – revenge, obsession and throats of his clientele, steals their worldly goods, and lust, yes, but also pain, yearning, even love. In a then has a pastry chef mince their bodies into pies. In society where the weak get weaker and the powerful 1846 he turns up as Sweeney Todd in a serialised more powerful, how easy is it for a man to revert to novel The String of Pearls, A Romance, capturing the his base instincts? Violence and brutality are ofen popular Victorian imagination. Even Charles Dickens the result. Not all turn into homicidal maniacs of mentions the tale in Pickwick Papers, warning his course, but we still ‘get’ this tale. The language is readers to only buy pies from cooks they know. archaic, the musical is operatic in scale, the setting is Victorian England but in this most thrilling of The theatrical ancestor to our Sweeney was a 1847 musical treatments we can make the leap – this is a melodrama by George Dibdin-Pitt titled The String of tale for our times. Pearls, or the Fiend of Fleet Street. For today’s audiences the term ‘melodrama’ has judgmental Stuart Maunder AM connotations and is associated with mawkish ARTISTIC DIRECTOR sentiment, delicious villainy and a high-minded State Opera South Australia DESIREE FRAHN & NICHOLAS CANNON (PHOTO: SODA STREET PRODUCTIONS) STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S THEATRICAL WORLD is not easy The operatic scale of Show Boat was a first on the to define – dedicated opera lovers can be a bit mifed Broadway stage, as was its inclusion of such when he invades the sacred portals of the opera theatres, ‘uncommercial’ themes as miscegenation. The close and audiences for music theatre in Australia can find his integration of words and music in Hammerstein’s shows work more confronting than they expect from something with Rodgers also took the concept of a musical show called a musical. further than ‘a nice evening’s entertainment’. The stories Sondheim has set his shows in many diferent locations may not always have been complicated but the characters and at many diferent times – feudal Japan (Pacific were more flesh-and-blood, less cardboard, than was Overtures), fin-de-siècle Sweden (ALittleNightMusic), usually the case, and the songs bore a closer relationship the Paris of the impressionists to the story than Broadway » (Sunday in the Park with audiences would have George)andacrossmorethana experienced in many other century of US history shows of the day. (Assassins)–buttheyall It is against the background examine behaviour and of Hammerstein’s aesthetic neuroses with which con- that Sondheim’s was born. temporary audiences may You could say that his musical identify. Even when his language and verbal imagery musical language is not always evolved from the music purely operatic, the results are theatre language in which he more complex and poetic than became immersed as an the term ‘Broadway show’ adolescent. In the words of usually evokes. The New York Times music His mentor, a man who critic Anthony Tommasini: Sondheim has confessed was ‘No matter how musically very much a father figure to complex and linguistically THE STRING OF PEARLS OR THE BARBER OF FLEET STREET him, was lyricist and librettist ingenious his lyrics, no matter « Oscar Hammerstein II, whose how psychologically rich his Broadway pedigree included storytelling, all his scores are Show Boat, with composer based in the words-and-music Jerome Kern, and among his heritage of the musical. On shows featuring music by Richard Rodgers, Oklahoma!, some level, every Sondheim score pays homage to older Carousel and South Pacific.Hislyricalimagerymaynot genres and styles of musical theatre.’ One obvious have been as witty or as bitter-sweet as that of Cole example is his refinement of the monologue, which Porter or Lorenz Hart, but in his librettos he worked to Rodgers and Hammerstein had used to such powerful, stretch the form of the theatrical musical to make it and, at the time, original efect in Carousel’s ‘Soliloquy’. accommodate a broad range of emotional possibilities. ILLUSTRATION FROM THE 1850 EDITION OF Let’s look at how this refinement plays out in the ethics of Imperialism. Based on the economic invasion of musicals Sondheim composed in the years leading up to Japan by the USA in the 1850s, it is a Kabuki piece, with Sweeney Todd. Follies (1971), for example, is a show all the characters, Eastern and Western, played by an all- overtly about the idealism of young love and young male (originally all-Japanese) cast, and sets Sondheim’s ambition, and its destruction in uncertainty, compromise existing achievements in motion in a way that might not and selfishness.