A Conversation with Rick Pender
Author of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Behind the Bloody Musical Masterpiece and The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia
It’s a pleasure to welcome Rick Pender, author of the recently released Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Behind the Bloody Musical Masterpiece, to The Sondheim Hub. For decades, Rick has been a significant chronicler of Sondheim’s work, writing for and editing The Sondheim Review, and authoring The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia. We discussed all this and more. Our conversation begins below:
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You’ve written about Sondheim’s work in so many formats over the years — essays, reviews, the Encyclopedia. What led you to take on a full-length book focused entirely on Sweeney Todd?
Let me tell you, it was quite pragmatic. I authored The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia, and that has sold pretty well. The publisher came to me and said, “Would you like to do another Sondheim book, maybe something about one of his shows?” And I said, “That’s a great idea.” They said, “Well, which one would you pick?”
I am always loath to answer when people say, “What’s your favorite Sondheim show?” I always say it’s the one I just paid some attention to for the last day or so. But I felt that Sweeney Todd had perhaps the most interesting long-term history behind it. And it is such a wonderful show, musically, character-wise, all of those kinds of things. And it’s been produced in so many different ways. I thought this would be the perfect show for a lengthy, in-depth study.
When you were writing, did you imagine an ideal reader — a curious newcomer who’s seen the show once, or a long-time devotee who knows it intimately?
I really tried to address both of those audiences, I guess. I wanted the book to be as comprehensive as possible. I have an acquaintance here in Cincinnati at the university who’s going to be staging Sweeney Todd next spring, and he’s interested in getting copies of the book to give to all the cast members so that they can become more acquainted, because most of them were born long after Sweeney Todd was first on Broadway. But then I also had in mind that this would be something for people who wanted to see all the dimensions of Sweeney Todd brought together in one volume, and that’s very much what I tried to do.
I’ve tried to cover lots of productions—not just the major ones that everybody knows who follows Sondheim, but an astonishing array of productions in other languages and in other countries, and then all the differing ways that it has been staged. For anybody who has a more serious interest in musical theatre, I think there’s a lot of appeal for that also.
The other thing that I will say to you is that I originally thought I was going to be a college professor. I have a PhD in English literature. In Middle English, in fact. Nothing to do with any of this. But it was so fascinating for me to learn more about the penny dreadful stories that the Sweeney Todd story emerged out of. I have a whole chapter on that, and that really took me back into my literary scholar stage in my life, when I was doing things like that, to dig in and learn more about that.
The penny dreadfuls were a publishing phenomenon in the 1830s and ‘40s. The way things were published and serialized, if they sold well, then they kept adding more to those stories. Sweeney Todd was a sort of minor character in a different story, but his presence in it was so sensational that eventually he took over the myth. The String of Pearls story went by the wayside, and it became much more about him. It was quite fascinating to follow that thread through time and literature as to how Sweeney Todd came about.
In the process of piecing together all this history, was there anything that especially surprised you — either in the material you uncovered or in the show itself?
What I really did not know very fully was the extent of Christopher Bond’s contribution. I got a copy of Bond’s script and read it, and he really did some amazing work on it. He was part of an acting company, and they had done some other melodrama that had sold tickets. So they decided to do another one, and he said, “Oh, I’ll pick one out, and I can adapt that.” Well, he picked out the one by George Dibdin Pitt. And about two weeks before they were to start rehearsal, he looked at it more carefully and said, “This is really dreadful, and there’s no psychological motivation.” I mean, Sweeney’s motivation throughout the 19th century was that he was just a scoundrel who murdered people to steal things. There was no vengeance or revenge plot or anything like that. And Christopher Bond added all of that to the story.
Now, it evolved further when Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler took it on, but without Christopher Bond laying the foundation for what they then developed, I’m not sure that it would be the work that we have. If you ever go see a production of Sweeney Todd, there’s always a credit to Christopher Bond on the title page, but I thought it could have been just some piece of hack work that Sondheim saw, and thought, “Oh, we could really make this into something.” Well, it really was something already.
I’d love to know a little about your own personal history with the show.
I am sorry to say that I never saw the original production. I’ve lived in Ohio most of my life, and going to New York was not something that I could afford with time or funds to do in many cases. I knew that this guy named Stephen Sondheim had written lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy, but the first show that I knew anything about in more depth was Company, which I had seen a summer theater production of in the Cleveland area. And then I saw a production of A Little Night Music, and I was just blown away by that. So that’s when I began to hone in on Sondheim as being the guy who’s created all of this stuff.
But then, when I heard that he was doing this musical about a serial killer and making meat pies of his victims, I remember thinking, “Man, this is some weird shit.” I wondered how people would respond. There’s even an interview with Len Cariou that I quote in the book where he talks about Sondheim playing some of the songs for him, when they were courting him to take on the role. And he thought, “Man, these guys—have they lost all sense of what an audience is going to accept?”
I came to understand the greatness of Sweeney Todd by having opportunities to see it. Over the course of my career of writing and reviewing and editing and all of that, I have probably seen it staged eight or ten times. I saw the recent production with Josh Groban, and I saw the John Doyle actor-musician production. And as I did the Encyclopedia, and as I edited The Sondheim Review, I saw that putting together the shows that Sondheim and Hal Prince did during the ‘70s was just such an amazing output creatively. Each one was so different from the next. That’s a fact that really caught my attention.
Here’s the other thing. I had to have surgery in 1989 or ‘90, and I was laid up for a while. I knew that I was going to be, and so I went to the public library and got some CDs that I could listen to. I picked up the three-disc set called The Collector’s Sondheim, and I listened to that obsessively. It covered all those shows from the ‘70s, and I just thought, This guy’s amazing.
The lyrics are really what has drawn me constantly into his work. I mean, I appreciate the music. I am not a musical person, however. I don’t read music, and so I’m at a slight disadvantage when it comes to that aspect. However, I had the extreme good fortune, when I started editing the magazine, to have contact with Mark Eden Horowitz. He wrote a series of pieces called “Biography of a Song” that were just astonishing, and gave me so much more insight into the complexity of the music, the lyrics, all of that sort of thing.
Which was harder to write—The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia or the new Sweeney Todd book?
They presented different challenges. For the Encyclopedia, having edited The Sondheim Review for more than a decade, I felt that I had a pretty comprehensive sense of the length and breadth of Sondheim’s career. In a lot of cases, it was just a matter of gathering material, and all the back issues of the magazine were tremendous resources for me. I will tell you, my contract with Rowman & Littlefield for the Encyclopedia was for 300,000 words. That was my contract. And so I had a kind of version of those fundraising thermometers, keeping track of my word count. It took me a little more than a year to write the book, and I actually finished it almost two years before it came out.
Doing the Sweeney Todd book really required that I dig much more deeply and try to synthesize things in ways that would be meaningful to people. You asked the question before about who was I writing it for, and I was really trying to do a variety of things that would serve various types of readers. A high school theatre director, a musical theatre student, a fan… I’ve tried to write something that would be serviceable to anybody.
Find out more about Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: Behind the Bloody Musical Masterpiece by clicking here.
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