A Conversation with Colden Lamb
On Sondheim and Weill, directing Sweeney Todd, and the gift of Sunday
It’s a pleasure to welcome director, actor, educator and writer Colden Lamb to The Sondheim Hub this week. We discussed the rich web of connections between Sondheim’s work and Kurt Weill’s Love Life, Silverlake, and The Threepenny Opera, directing Sweeney Todd, and the enduring gift of Sunday in the Park with George. Our conversation begins below:
Thank you for reading! Upgrade to a premium subscription for full access to The Sondheim Hub: a subscriber-only essay, extended interview, crossword & more each week — plus, our complete, paywall-free library of 250+ essays, features & interviews.
It’s so good to meet you. Let’s start with Sweeney Todd. Is this a show you’ve wanted to get your hands on directorially for a long time?
I’ve been working at St. Augustine High School in San Diego since 2022. When I arrived, it was primarily a football school — theatre was just a hobby. But I’ve been able to help build it up to the point where we can actually do Sweeney Todd, which is thrilling and exciting.
I’ve had such a love and affection for that show since the film version came out when I was in sixth grade, and each time I go to it, I’m one of those people who goes with a monocle — “That 16th note is wrong,” you know? And because I love it, I wanted to make sure that I did it right. There have been a lot of productions in which they put a hat on top of a hat. They overthink it, and they try to put a concept on it. Yes, concepts bring new ideas, new thoughts, new perspectives — but directors spend so much time on their concepts that the work is put to the side, and the audience doesn’t even know what the story is.
My problem with those productions is they forget the subtitle. The subtitle is A Musical Thriller. None of those productions focused on that subtitle, so I made sure for my production to focus on it. What is a musical thriller? A lot of people confuse Sweeney Todd with a haunted house. But in a haunted house, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. “Boo, I got you.” A musical thriller is more like a roller coaster, in which you know you’re going to go up a steep ramp, you know you’re going to be going through loops, and you do it anyway. Everyone walking into the theater knows what Todd and Lovett are going to do. What makes it fun for the evening is doing all the loops and turns — seeing the murders on stage, seeing Pirelli strangled, Lovett tossed in an oven. That’s what makes it a fun roller coaster, and that’s been my main directorial stance.
Are the young people you’re working with encountering Sweeney Todd for the first time? Did they have any context for Sweeney Todd is as a piece?
My students were not familiar with it, but it was my job to make sure they darn well were. Their homework during Christmas break was to watch the South Bank Show from 1980. That’s the closest thing we have to dramaturgy for this musical. So they watched that, and then I told them they needed to watch a version of Sweeney, whether that was the Tim Burton film, the Hal Prince production, the New York City Philharmonic, the San Francisco Philharmonic — just so that they know what’s to come, what is expected, and the love for the piece.
I asked my friends Will Blum and DeAndre Simmons, both of whom you’ve interviewed, to come and do masterclasses. Will talked about what each character is thinking at each moment, and it helped my kids a lot. He made some brilliant observations. Here’s an example: a lot of Sweeneys at the top of the show come in angry. But here’s the thing — he’s expecting to come home to a loving wife and child. He’s not on the murder boat yet. His madness for murdering people doesn’t really kick in until maybe Pirelli’s death and “Epiphany.” Even when he says “the time for the Beadle has come,” he was basically going to go to a magistrate and say, “Look what they did!” He’s a little bit like Jack: I’m gonna kill the giant! No one can stop me! That was a great observation, and it helped my actor not just come in angry from the start like a lot of other Sweeneys have.
DeAndre, who is a renowned opera singer, helped out with the singing and the acting through singing. Again, just wonderful insights, especially since he did Sweeney so recently. His voice teacher was Barbara Cook, and he worked with Sondheim. He had all these great, helpful hints.
I know our readers find it rewarding to place Sondheim’s work in its broader context. You’re a Kurt Weill aficionado, and you’ve spoken before about The Threepenny Opera in relation to Sweeney Todd. Could you speak a little about what excites you most about that lineage, and how you came to see these connections?
Of course. For the record, Sondheim went on to say that he’s not a Kurt Weill fan — he never liked any of his German music, and he only liked one passage from Street Scene. But in regards to Sweeney — in 1976, Lincoln Center did a revival of The Threepenny Opera. And I just find it very interesting that The Threepenny Opera starts off with a ballad about an English killer, describing who Mack the Knife is. A ballad that starts off an entire show about a killer in England? I don’t see any similarities at all, do you?! And even critics in 1979 seemed to notice: there’s one great video where a critic was like, “Everyone in the show looks like they were from The Threepenny Opera.”
The similarities go further than just the ballads, too. The Act One finale of Threepenny bears a real resemblance to “Epiphany.” In the Ralph Manheim and John Willett translation from the 1976 production: “Let’s say your brother’s close to you / But there’s not food enough for two / He’ll kick you smartly in the face / And so will all the whole human race.” That is a very close cousin to “Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. / There’s the one staying put in his proper place / And the one with his foot in the other one’s face.”
And the Act Two finale of Threepenny shares the same ideology as “A Little Priest” and Sweeney in general. In the Marc Blitzstein translation: “What keeps mankind alive? / He lives on others / He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can / Forget that they’re supposed to be his brothers / That he himself was ever called a man / Remember if you wish to stay alive / For once do something bad and you’ll survive.”
Now, I don’t think Threepenny was Sondheim’s catalyst for the show. Personally, I think it’s Porgy and Bess, because you know how much he loved Porgy and Bess, and how Gershwin sort of broke the mold of: is this an opera, or is this a musical? I think, more than anything, Sweeney is a love letter to Porgy and Bess and to Gershwin. But also, Threepenny and Sweeney are both about the class system, about fighting against it, about having all walks of life have an equal opportunity. That was what Brecht was writing about — a very Marxist idea. The point of Threepenny is that we’re all the characters. We’re all killers, we’re all taking advantage of the system, we’re all fighting against the establishment — just like in Sweeney Todd: “Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall.” We’re all Sweeney. We’re all victims of this horrible English class society. That’s what I think about in connection to Threepenny and Sweeney.
The closest thing we have to a very direct connection with Weill is Weill’s 1948 musical Love Life, which Hal and Steve both saw. Love Life is considered, along with Allegro, one of the first concept musicals. We all know that Steve worked on Allegro as assistant to Hammerstein, but there’s a lot more connection there. A lot of people say, oh, Allegro was his catalyst for Company, and Cameron Mackintosh has said that he spent his entire life trying to fix the second act of Allegro. For me, Allegro’s not a concept musical. It’s more of a Greek play. If you look at it, it’s a Greek chorus telling, throughout, the story of a man growing up. There’s nothing too concept-musical about it compared to Love Life.
Love Life is the story of Sam and Susan Cooper, starting in 1789 and ending in 1948. Sam and Susan and their kids never age. We watch their marriage across all of American history, and while we watch their story — their marriage and later their divorce — it is interrupted with vaudeville numbers. Because as soon as I say it’s interrupted with vaudeville numbers, people go, oh my god, that’s Chicago, that’s Cabaret. And at the end, Sam and Susan are faced with the head of a minstrel show, and they have to make a decision whether to live in this illusory minstrel show or face reality. That’s Pippin, you know?
With Love Life, let’s start with just the idea of a concept musical about marriage — that’s both Love Life and Company. Love Life was one of the first musicals to talk about marriage in a very serious way. In the second act of Love Life, there is a divorce ballet. The technical term for it is “Punch and Judy Get a Divorce.” And people always wonder why we don’t know about Love Life — it’s because we never got a cast recording.
Love Life is the story of America throughout a period of time in which time doesn’t really exist. Weill and Lerner were obviously inspired by Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Elia Kazan, who directed The Skin of Our Teeth, directed Love Life. With The Skin of Our Teeth, the Antrobuses go through time, but time is not a thing — they’re the same age when they go to Atlantic City as they were during World War I. Well, in Assassins, all the assassins are crossing times — Guiteau is having a conversation with Sara Jane Moore, Booth is having a conversation with Oswald. I think Love Life was definitely an inspiration for that idea of crossing time, of time not mattering.
Perhaps the biggest single reference to Love Life in all of Sondheim’s work is the Act Two finale, “The Illusion Minstrel Show.” Sam and Susan are pulled out of their narrative and into the framework of the show itself; several musical numbers are performed that comment on the themes of love, and it ends horrifically, with Sam and Susan fleeing to face the reality of their marriage. This, of course, would later be used in Follies, in which the four leading characters enter Loveland — several musical numbers are performed that comment on themes of love, and it ends horrifically, with Ben breaking down as he faces the reality of his situation in life. And Love Life, Company, and Follies all shared the same set designer: Boris Aronson.
That’s really fascinating. Tell me about Silverlake and Sweeney Todd, too.
So, we talked about how Sondheim was influenced by Weill. Well, there was a case at New York City Opera in 1980 where Sondheim influenced a production of Weill. The project that Hal Prince, Hugh Wheeler, Larry Fuller (the choreographer of Sweeney), and Ken Billington (the lighting designer of Sweeney) worked on right after Sweeney was an adaptation of Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee.
Der Silbersee is a 1930s Kurt Weill piece that basically put him on Hitler’s list. It got Weill in so much trouble, because it was such an anti-Nazi opera, that he had to flee to France, and then eventually came to America and wrote his musicals. In 1980, they were going to do the American premiere of it at New York City Opera. But because it’s a play with music, and it’s four hours long, Wheeler and Prince decided to adapt the work rather than present it. And it became what is known as Silverlake. Unfortunately, it was met with such a disastrous response that the Kurt Weill Foundation has disowned it, Hal Prince has disowned it, and it’s only lived on through a cast recording. Not a lot of people know about it, but it starred Joel Grey. It was the first project that Grey and Prince had worked on together since Cabaret.
Now, in regards to how Sondheim affected the work: because Der Silbersee was a play with music, and the only time music was introduced was for Weill’s numbers, there were a lot of scenes without music. Prince took a page out of the Sweeney book, which was to fill the scenes with melodrama music, to make it feel more cinematic. He said he thought Weill’s music was too terse, and he wanted to fill the evening with music to help the momentum of the scenes. Well, that’s right out of Sweeney — just look at Pirelli’s death. You could do that scene with Pirelli in the trunk without music, but Steve specifically made music like a movie, because it was his love letter to Bernard Herrmann. There’s music all throughout Sweeney, and I think Hal definitely took a page out of that book.
There are also a lot of similarities between the Sweeney script and the Silverlake script, unintentionally. Wheeler even delivered one of the first drafts of Silverlake four days before Sweeney opened in New York. There are a lot of connections: the high class and the low class, the need for revenge, the people in power who take advantage of the poor. What’s interesting is that Wheeler — and I’m not sure even what his political stance was with Sweeney — decided to defang a lot of the political bite from Der Silbersee. A lot of that probably comes from the fact that he wasn’t a very political person. Sweeney’s not really that political. Some people put a political stamp on it, and to that I say, just go do Threepenny if you really need that.
When I interviewed Larry Fuller for my Silverlake article, he stated that in the beginning of Der Silbersee, there are two gravediggers who are digging to bury an effigy of Hunger. Well, they decided for Silverlake to change it to burning the effigy — a pyre. And the reason for that is that they had already done gravediggers in Sweeney Todd. There was originally a song in Der Silbersee in which they sing a funeral hymn to this effigy of Hunger. Again, they cut that because it was too similar to “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.”
If you like Sweeney Todd, go listen to Silverlake. It’s basically Sweeney Lite. It’s Diet Sweeney!
You recently contributed to our 96th birthday feature, and in your tribute you reflected on a production of Sunday in the Park with George. What you hone in on as Sondheim’s gift in your life is the friendships born of that production. I’d love to hear a little more about that.
Of course. There were almost 2,000 actors who called for that show. And luckily, the director was able to detect not only who was good enough for the job, but who actually cared about the project. Sunday is a show you have to care about, because even though it won the Pulitzer, people still have a problem with that second act. And if you don’t have actors who believe in the second act, that show is not going to soar and fly.
We had a table full of books about Sondheim and Seurat. We all read them, we all talked about them, and every lunch we went out to, we talked about Sondheim, and the show, and how much we loved it. Will [Blum] and I really connected. During lunch, we would play Follies, we would play “Buddy’s Blues,” and I would tap dance. Here’s another gift Sondheim gave me: when I was in high school, I was obsessed with the 2011 production of Follies, and “Who’s That Woman?” I took tap classes because of “Who’s That Woman?” — and I know how to do the entire number.
On that production of Sunday in the Park with George, we felt like we were in the Cool Kids Club. Oh, to be in the Cool Kids Club, as someone who has never been in the Cool Kids Club — it was so much fun. And every night, it felt like we were doing a church service in which we were honoring God. That show, every night.
✍️ Support The Sondheim Hub by upgrading to a premium subscription:
The Sondheim Hub exists solely thanks to the generous support of our readers. Please consider supporting our work for a few dollars each month. A premium subscription gives you full access to The Sondheim Hub: an exclusive essay, crossword, extended interview & more each week, plus our complete, paywall-free library of 250+ essays, features & interviews. 📚