Sweeney Todd: Private Ritual

Compulsion, repetition, and ceremony in Sweeney Todd

A few months ago, I argued for the inclusion of Judge Turpin’s “Johanna” in productions of Sweeney Todd. Cut the Judge’s “Johanna” and Turpin remains legible as villain, as predator, as wielder of public authority, but something in the quality of his corruption becomes harder to hear. His “Johanna” reveals compulsion. It reveals repetition. It reveals a man who does not merely experience desire but stages it, disciplines it, relives it, and turns it into a form of private ceremony.

This idea, of private ceremony or ritual, is something specific. It is no great surprise when, at the theatre, we share space with a character as they confess, as they mourn, as they hunger, or as they dream. But in Sweeney Todd, these states are rehearsed. We are immersed in a world of repeated language, repeated gesture, repeated space. Inner life arrives already shaped; objects are treated ceremonially. It’s a show as soaked through with ritual as it is with blood.

Turpin’s “Johanna,” which we explored in depth recently, is one of the clearest and ugliest expressions of that pattern. Couched in the language of penitential ritual, the inherited form becomes a chamber for desire. Turpin kneels, prays, scourges himself, looks again, names Johanna again, tries to master himself again. Nothing is resolved. The ritual gives his desire a structure in which to intensify. Even his solution, “I’ll wed you on the morrow,” has the feel of ritualized enclosure: a formal arrangement designed to convert inward disorder into sanctioned possession.

Yet once you notice this structure in Turpin, it becomes harder not to see it elsewhere. Sweeney Todd is full of characters who steady themselves through ceremony. They handle certain objects in certain ways. They return to the same phrases. They occupy the same psychic rooms. They submit themselves, over and over, to forms that promise relief and instead deepen the thing they are trying to contain.

Nathaniel Stampley in Sweeney Todd at Signature Theatre. 📸: Margot Schulman

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The opening Ballad establishes the ceremonial grammar of the show. This is already a ritual: the summoning of a demon, the recitation of his legend, the collective assumption of the role of teller. The Ballad performs Sweeney Todd — show and character — into existence. We hear that our title character is “quick and quiet and clean,” “smooth,” “subtle,” planning “like a perfect machine.” He is, we are told plainly, a figure of obsessive form. We glean from the outset that this will be a drama of repeated action, of exacting procedure, of life hardened into pattern. And Sondheim builds that recursiveness into the form: the show ends with the same summoning, the same instruction. We are told to attend. We will attend again.

“My Friends” is, among other things, a reunion scene, though a reunion of a peculiarly concentrated kind. Todd’s razors are tools, but they are also emblems of a lost professional self. And he receives them devotionally. “These are my friends. / See how they glisten.” “Speak to me, friend. / Whisper, I’ll listen.” “Well, I’ve come home / To find you waiting.” What matters here is the ceremony of address. He greets the razors, listens to them, holds them, warms them in his hand. The scene unfolds with the patience of private devotion.

The language is tender, even reverent. “Come, let me hold you.” “Rest now, my friends.” The razors, not yet instruments of action, are instead objects of contemplation, of intimacy. Todd’s arm is “complete again,” he says, once he holds them. Completion lies in contact, before it lies in vengeance. Revenge will come, certainly, but first it must be handled, must be admired. First it must take ceremonial form.

And then the image turns. “Till now your shine / Was merely silver.” Soon, he promises, “You shall drip rubies.” Blood enters the song as fulfilment, not eruption. The private rite has prepared for it. The tenderness of “My Friends” is inseparable from its homicidal imagination, because Todd shows us revenge in its most inward state: cherished, caressed, made beautiful to its possessor. If Turpin’s “Johanna” stages lust as a repeated private act, “My Friends” does something comparable with vengeance. Before Sweeney kills, he communes. Before Turpin acts, he kneels. The violence to come is already latent in the ceremony.

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Todd’s ceremony turns inward and backward, toward loss, the past, and the objects that predate his destruction. Turpin’s turns in a circle, ritualizing its own interruption so that desire can begin again. Johanna’s turns outward. “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” is a song addressed to living creatures, caged like her, who she watches with a question she cannot quite formulate about herself.

“How is it you sing?” she asks. “How can you jubilate / Sitting in cages, / Never taking wing?” The birds are her ritual objects, but she holds them at arm’s length, reads them, tries to extract from their captive song some answer to her own situation — some model, or some warning. Her ceremony is interpretive where the others’ are devotional. That is part of what makes her situation so moving in a show otherwise thick with predation and appetite. Johanna does not yet possess action in the way that others do. She cannot scourge herself, cannot sharpen silver, cannot remake the world by force. What she can do is return, again and again, to the imagined shape of another life. Her rituals are gentler than Turpin’s or Todd’s, but no less structured for that. They are built from recurrence too: from daily looking, daily waiting, daily address to creatures seemingly more free than she is.

Johanna’s window is the ceremonial space that makes all of this possible: the frame through which the outside world remains visible, the boundary her ritual approaches but cannot cross. It is also, not incidentally, precisely what Turpin fears. His “Johanna” is organized around the light at her window, the unbearable proximity of what he has locked away. The window that represents Johanna’s ritual of longing toward freedom is simultaneously the site of Turpin’s ritual of voyeuristic possession. Repetition can corrupt, but it can also sustain. And Johanna shows us what ritual looks like when it belongs to the captive rather than the captor.

Katie Mariko Murray in Sweeney Todd at Signature Theatre. 📸: Margot Schulman

Mrs. Lovett shows us ritual as adaptation. If Todd’s ceremonies are intimate and Turpin’s are penitential, Lovett’s are practical. She has made a life out of repeated management: of the shop, the pies, the talk, the habit of making do. She is a woman of routine, of accommodation, of comic resilience sharpened by necessity. What Lovett then does, more than anyone else in the show, is convert the intolerable into procedure. A body arrives. A problem presents itself. Very quickly, she has a plan of action. The horror is absorbed into sequence, labor, recipe, commerce. In Todd, private ceremony intensifies obsession; in Lovett, it domesticates catastrophe.

Lovett’s rituals are also prospective: rehearsals for a future she has designed in detail and intends to inhabit. “By the Sea” is the fullest expression of this, a fantasy so elaborately furnished — the pier, the bonnets, the deckchairs, the particular quality of the salt air — that it has evidently been visited many times before. It’s a ritual structure in which desire can live. Lovett, rather than communing with silver or kneeling before a keyhole, builds livable forms out of refuse, appetite, and hope.

This makes her, in some ways, the most unsettling ritualist in the show. Todd becomes grandly monomaniacal. Turpin remains trapped in the lurid cycle of lust and guilt. Lovett is more supple than either of them. She incorporates. She adjusts. She folds each new enormity into a rhythm that can continue. She is the character who best understands that survival in this city depends upon learning how to repeat oneself persuasively enough that repetition begins to feel like life.

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Private ritual is one of the governing mechanisms through which character is legible in Sweeney Todd. Those on stage submit feeling to form. They handle it, name it, rehearse it, consecrate it, tidy it, sing it back to themselves. The forms differ; the compulsion to form does not.

Ritual is often associated with consolation, order, continuity, or meaning. Here, additionally, it becomes the form through which obsession is preserved, desire is legitimized, violence is beautified, and horror is made workable.

And there is one further implication the show presses on us. We in the audience are summoned by the Ballad, asked to attend, walked through the legend, and then — at the show’s end — we are summoned again. The recursiveness is perhaps the show’s final argument: that we, too, have submitted to a form. That we have our own version of the ceremony. That we will, if given the chance, return. Sweeney Todd does not judge the ritual. It attends to it — and it notices that we do too.

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