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hkblack · 1 year

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On Crowley and Sweeney Todd

I made a joke about writing a dissertation in a Discord Server, so here’s almost 3k words on why it's so significant that Neil specifically calls out the song Epiphany, and vaguely hints at the "original" Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett. As someone who has worked on Sweeney in different capacities from both high school nerd to a professional context--this gets real fascinating.

I really break down the plot of both the “original” Sweeney Todd story and the Sondheim musical, because I know not everyone was an obsessed theater nerd as a teenager, and I want to make sure you all get the important bits of this other story that may or may not have been destroyed by a certain movie that we will not discuss. I’d apologize for making a long post, but welcome to Tumblr, twitter folks, let’s DO THIS.

Let's start with context.

The String of Pearls [Featuring SWEENEY TODD THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET] was a Penny Dreadful story from the 1850s written by ?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (there's some guesses, but no one is 100% sure)

In it, Sweeney is a barber--what's important to note is that historically this is the time of the barber-surgeon. Victorian London was all about that one stop shop sort of life. Got a weird abscess you need checked out and also want a bit of a shave? Go to your local barber surgeon! He's got sharp things, makes sense to me! He and his neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, seem to run fully independent shops. She's got a thriving meat pie business; he's got a thriving barber business.

Cool.

The story itself is actually of a young sailor who has arrived at the city with a pearl necklace given to him by his mate who was all, "When next you go to London, give this to my lady love for me." Said mate is presumed dead at sea, because no one has heard from him for like a year. Johanna, the lady love, knows this sailor is coming--but he and the pearl necklace disappear before she sees him. She does some investigating, starts thinking there's something fishy going on with these Sweeney and Lovett characters and digs deeper. Surprise--human meat pies! Turns out her lover has been kept captive by Todd and Lovett in the crypts and tunnels that connect their shops and was forced to make pies. Bad guys get locked up (hung), good guys get married. And you, young Victorian Lad, are meeting with your mates after a day of work going "DID YOU CATCH LAST NIGHT’S GAME OF THRONES PENNY DREADFUL?"

This, you'll note, is vastly different from Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

In Sondheim, Benjamin Barker is married to Lucy, and they've just had a bouncing bundle of joy, Johanna. The powerful Judge Turpin wants Lucy, but she's not interested, and Barker keeps going "back off my wife, bro" So Turpin uses his power, and gets Barker shipped to mfing Australia, and then does exactly what you'd expect a man in power do to vulnerable Victorian woman. Distraught, Lucy takes lye. Here's a moment of goodness for Turpin. He takes in Johanna, recognizing his own culpability here. Lucy meanwhile is left to live on the streets, half mad from brain damage. Years pass. Barker comes back with the alias of Sweeney Todd, set on, finding his wife and daughter, and possibly getting revenge on one person, and one person only.

Let's jump to Lovett. In Sondheim you have to really pay attention to the subtext to get her story. She's a widow. She knew Todd before he was shipped off. She desired Todd no differently than Turpin desired Lucy.While Turpin gets Johanna, Lovett gets Todd's old house. Her husband is dead (who knows how), and she's making do with her pie shop. When Todd walks in her door she recognizes him almost immediately. She tells him, sort of, that his wife is dead (at least when Todd goes: she's dead? she never corrects him). She tells him Turpin has his daughter. He wonders what to do, and Lovett comes up with a plan. The plot is this: take over the upstairs and turn it back into a barbershop, get a following with this new Sweeney Todd name, become the best barber in town, lure the judge in, murder the judge. Prosper! It's rough around the edges, but the man has just found out his wife is dead and his daughter has been raised by a predator. Cut him some slack.

They go out and Todd gets into a competition with a "traveling barber" who also is a dentist (barber-surgeon, remember?). Todd wins and tells everyone where to find him. This includes the Judge's lackey, the Beadle. Clever marketing, man, it'll kill ya.

And it almost does! Said traveling barber also recognizes Todd and goes to confront him at the shop. Typical blackmail shit. Angry that his plan may not be able to work, and it'll be because of this one person, Todd lashes out. For a show with a high body count, the murder of Pierelli is probably in the top three in terms of brutality. It's just lash out and murder--because you're depressed, and your wife is dead. He hides the body quickly and is discussing with Lovett what to do when the Judge comes knocking.

Thrilled that his plan has just jumped a few steps, Todd gets him in the chair, does some schmoozing, and is really taking his time to just--savor the moment of revenge.

Now let's pause and rewind. On the ship into London at the beginning of the show, there's a bright eyed bushy tailed kid who Todd meets. This same kid sees our dear Johanna (now a teenager, who is being lusted after by her creepy Judge guardian) and falls in love. Kids these days. He and Johanna decide to run off together, but he needs help.

So of course, this kid, this optimistic fool that Todd had to deal with the entire way into London, bursts in right as Todd prepares himself to make the killing blow. The Judge hears the plot to "steal" his Johanna, thinks Todd is in on it and therefore awful, shouts and leaves.

Now Todd could, in this moment, murder the boy too, but he doesn't. He sends him out--and then we get Epiphany.

In good stagings of Sweeney Todd, Todd is depressed, morose, and kind of quiet up until Epiphany. He's unsure, he just--look there's a lot going on, okay? A lot of folks would say in the beginning you get to see bits of Barker still around and see the man struggling to be this identity he's created to hide himself and maybe, even, protect himself. He doesn't come up with his own ideas (and even after this, he lets Lovett drive a lot). He's the kind of "moving through the motions" you would expect of a man whose been sent to a labor camp in the harsh climes of Australia and has just found out his wife is dead. Epiphany is when Todd really wakes up. He snarls and rages against the world. Epiphany brings back a refrain from the very first song. Bright-eyed bushy tailed sings about there being no place like London in that "wow isn't London grand!" way and Todd responds by saying London is a black pit full of people full of shit, only the vermin of the world inhabit London. This comes back in Epiphany. Instead of being intent on revenge on one person who caused direct harm, this is where Todd snaps and decides to say "eff it everyone in this hellhole is now responsible for my suffering" Benjamin Barker stayed put in his place. He followed the rules. And Judge Turpin put his foot in Barker's face, that man essentially died, and Todd rose from his ashes. Todd says that everyone deserves to die. He starts with saying “they all deserve to die”, then says “no we all deserve”. He says, “the lives of the wicked should be made brief” and that death "for the rest of us will be a relief, we all deserve to die.”

He has this brief moment of grieving his daughter in the song before suddenly shouting "Finished!" Here he starts to really address the audience, inviting imaginary people to his barber shop to die at his hand. He says, "I will have vengeance, I will have salvation!" and starts referring to himself as "Sweeney." It's quite interesting when you listen to it or watch the incredible George Hearn perform it because he breaks again near the end to grieve his wife. There are some people who say that Todd and Barker are two different men, like split personalities or Jekyll and Hyde, as opposed to Todd being Barker’s alias and alias alone. And when you listen to the music--Sondheim isn't telling you no. This grand beautiful sweeping symphony swells under Barker's grieving moments, before getting cut by Todd shouting out. And finally at the end of Epiphany you get this absolutely transcendent and awfully dissonant moment of Barker's sweeping symphony and Todd's unhinged noise as he sings "I'm alive at last, and I'm full of joy!"

And it's awful and immediately followed by one of the funniest and most recognizable songs--Have a Little Priest. In which, again, Lovett comes up with an idea of how to deal with Pirelli's body, and any of the other bodies that Todd might want to make available.

Epiphany could just be a vent song. "I'm going to kill all those miserable assholes who did this to me," says Todd. And Lovett could, in theory, go "A'ight. So, look, this is how we get you back into good graces with the judge, we can work with this!" because she does do that part. Getting the judge to come back has nothing to do with the murder of other people. She does not have to encourage the murder for "practice."

There's a dead man in the trunk in the room. How much more practice do you need to slice a throat with a sharp object as a barber-surgeon? We're good boo.

But she does. And she starts with a little priest. And that temptation, if you must, only works because of Todd's own rage fueled venting.

So. Okay. -deep breath-

Let's go back to Crowley and why this could be his favorite moment.

We know Crowley hated the 14th century. We know Crowley took credit for many of humanity's worst hits. We know he drank after finding out about the inquisition. TV!Crowley shows us a Crowley who takes a carpenter from Galilee and shows him the world, who frowns at the execution of someone whose crime was to tell people to be nice to each other. We see him grumpily get a drink after having to deal with Caligula. We see him offended at the very thought of being aligned with Nazis.

Gaiman has said that for all that "sauntering vaguely downwards" Crowley is probably not nearly as bad as Heaven thinks, but not nearly as "good" as he'd like to say out loud. But one thing Crowley in every universe agrees on is that the phrase "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here," is pretty damn close to accurate because Hell could never be as awful and as terrible as humans are to each other. And in that, Crowley perhaps agrees with the idea of there being a hole in the world like a great black pit filled with people full of shit. So perhaps that's a reason he likes this song. The human race is pretty miserable. I’ll just gesture at the news recently and you all can find your own reasons to agree. Perhaps in Crowley’s lowest moments, when an angel refuses to fraternize with him, when he has to do a particularly nasty job, when he’s alone on earth and shouting into the void, he agrees with some of what Todd says here. Humans are awful, and the world might be a better place without them.

BUT another reason Crowley might like this song could also be it's a perfect demonstration of humans being the key to their own fallibility in temptation. "I'm going to murder everyone" could just be a thing Sweeney says and does not do, if not for Lovett coming up with a way to one up her neighbor (who, it is implied earlier, is using stray cats to fill her meat pies). And even then—Todd could say “yeah, okay, calm down crazy. We’re not…eating people. I want revenge on this man who ruined my family, cannibalism is a whole other level. Where did you even get that idea? Who are you hanging out with? Why did you get my house? Wtf?” But he doesn’t. He goes with it. He easily falls into this temptation because he is blinded by rage and the need for revenge.

I like both of those reasons. They’re pretty good reasons. I could write fanfics for days with those two reasons.

But my favorite reason that Crowley likes Epiphany is that he probably finds some kind of ironic humor in Todd saying he'll have salvation by murdering people, because that's not how salvation works, buddy--and Crowley would know.

But what is salvation then? Living in miserable suffering, for a crime you didn't commit so that maybe, just maybe, if you bear it well enough, you'll get some kind of eternal reward, singing celestial harmonies? How do celestial harmonies solve the grief of a dead wife, a daughter he'll never be able to hold, the knowledge that a man ruined his entire life and got away with it?

Because here’s the thing, for Todd at least. What if, instead of relying on some omnipresent being who never answers Her telephone to give you salvation, you make your own salvation?

In Epiphany, Todd takes the concept of salvation in his hands and says, "I recognize that Heavenly Salvation is not achieved by murder, but given that celestial harmonies are stupid, I have elected to redefine salvation with my own terms."

Now, admittedly in the end, this goes south for Todd. HOWEVER, you can argue that part of the reason it does is because he is being actively lied to. He accidentally murders his Lucy, thinking her some obnoxious beggar woman. Some of this is because she is an obnoxious beggar woman. Lovett is constantly shoo'ing her off, seeming to be nervous any time the woman is around. When Lovett goes down below their building and finds Lucy's body and realizes what Todd has done, she panics, "Quickly now, into the oven with you" she says, dragging the body to the giant oven, dispensing with the usual process of meat grinding. Todd comes down and catches her, tells her to knock it off, still not realizing who Lucy is, Lovett tries to distract him, Todd goes to move Lucy's body, and then recognizes her. He loses it. Barker comes back, you might say, sobbing. Then we get the most brutal murder--Todd pretends to forgive Lovett who is insisting she loves him, always has, even before, and she'd make a better wife than Lucy ever was. He agrees, spinning her around and dancing before throwing her into the oven. Todd then dies by the hand of a young boy, Toby--formerly Pirelli's assistant, taken in by Lovett--who figured out the secret and went (rightfully) insane at the knowledge that he'd been helping turn humans into pies (and also had been eating those pies). Young Toby slits Todd's throat as the man grieves his wife. Many productions have Todd recognize Toby's presence and intentionally let it happen.

Because how can there ever be salvation for a man who ruined the very thing he proclaimed to love? By killing Lucy, he has become as wicked as Turpin.

SO.

When Neil makes references to the original Sweeney Todd, we're talking about a story that was made for shock value. How awful that those people ate pies made of human, how fantastically delightful that we have the ability to consume mass media for one of the first times, how good that the young couple lives happily ever after. What creative little bastards humans are for coming up with this story. Crowley’s got a lot to be excited about. Something entertaining for one. But also, mass media! Mass media talking about cannibalism. Some rich dude somewhere is going to wonder what human flesh tastes like thanks to this. Not Crowley’s scene, but if it gets a soul in on the books with his name attached, hey, gotta pay rent somehow, amirite? And that's all well and good.

But when Neil says Crowley likes Sondheim's Sweeney, and specifically Epiphany, we're talking about a moment where we see the ease at which humans fall into temptation, the horrors humans think of on their own, and the taking of Heavenly concepts and turning them entirely human.

And the beauty of redefining salvation in human terms (after you take out the murder) is that it gives Crowley permission to redefine salvation in his own terms too. Why can’t a demon have salvation, when the demon is the one who gets to define what salvation is? Crowley doesn’t need Her to make him an angel again, he doesn’t want Heaven, it’s boring and full of celestial harmonies. He’s been there.

But if Crowley gets to decide that salvation is the freedom to blast Queen while going 90mph in the middle of London with his favorite book hoarding angel by his side…

He doesn’t need someone else to give that to him.

And I think that that’s rather lovely.

#long post #good omens #sondheim #sweeney todd #good omens meta #oh crowley baby you have so many feelings #its gonna be okay

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