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Prologue Prologue
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The Creation of the Fleet Street Villain, 1846 The Creation of the Fleet Street Villain, 1846
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The Fleet Street Villain and British Popular Stage, 1847–1969 The Fleet Street Villain and British Popular Stage, 1847–1969
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Todd’s Global Ambitions, 1973–1979 Todd’s Global Ambitions, 1973–1979
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Modern Psychology and Modernist Music Modern Psychology and Modernist Music
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The Social Geography of Sweeney Todd The Social Geography of Sweeney Todd
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The Journey of to the Present The Journey of to the Present
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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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chapter 24 From Fleet Street to Broadway and Back: Stages in the Career of Sweeney Todd
Get accessRobert Lawson-Peebles has worked at Oxford University, Princeton University, the University of Aberdeen, and finally Exeter University, where he is now an honorary senior research fellow. He has been a Leverhulme emeritus fellow and was awarded a number of other fellowships, for instance from the Salzburg Seminar and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has published three books on the cultural history of the American environment, two on earlier writing about America, and articles on subjects ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh to the relationship of ideology and the arts. His interest in transatlantic music led to Approaches to the American Musical (University of Exeter Press, 1996) and contributions to the Oxford Handbooks on Stephen Sondheim (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the British musical (Oxford University Press, 2016). ‘Paris and the Curse of Chicago’, on Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, appeared in the collection edited by Olaf Jubin titled Paris in the Musical: The City of Light on Stage and Screen (Routledge, 2021). He has also recently written essays about twentieth-century versions of The Beggar’s Opera and about the reception of jazz in Britain.
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Published:23 October 2023
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Abstract
This essay on Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) is organised into two parts. The first section discusses the criminal and unsanitary environment of Fleet Street that prompted the serial publication The String of Pearls (1846–1847), with its protagonists, the murderous barber Sweeney Todd and his pie-shop accomplice, Mrs Lovett. The metamorphosis of Todd from neighbourhood gangster to comic villain can be witnessed in a trio of melodramas, a British film, and a humorous monologue. The second part of the essay shows how Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler restored Todd’s status as a Fleet Street psychopath. They adapted Christopher Bond’s 1973 Brechtian version of Sweeney Todd by drawing on a variety of resources: modern psychology and modernist music (particularly the work of Bernard Herrmann), Weimar and Hollywood film, and the universal fairy tale and lullaby. The essay concludes with a survey of the productions, mainly in London, that established Todd as a demonic icon and the enterprise with Mrs Lovett as an urban myth.
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