The Postered Walls
3 Sondheim posters and the language of rupture
A crack through a showgirl’s face. Blood on a barber’s blade. Bodies torn in half, a century ripped open.
The original posters for Follies, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George share a visual language: rupture. Each establishes a relationship to damage, danger, and attention before the curtain rises. Let’s look closely at how each poster makes its promise.
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Follies: The Face as Ruin
Stand at a distance, and David Edward Byrd’s Follies poster reads like a billboard for glamour. Enormous saturated colour fields: that blazing red, red-orange (George would approve), those purple-and-blue Art Nouveau flourishes framing the image like peacock feathers. The title spelled out in massive letters crowned with stars, sitting atop the showgirl’s head like an architectural headdress. A frontal, symmetrical face with Dietrich cheekbones and cascading waves of hair. It’s declarative, confident, built for the street.
Then you step closer…
The crack runs straight through the face, starting just above the left eyebrow, cutting down across the nose, bisecting the mouth, with finer stress fractures webbing out near the chin. This is structural damage. Her face is stone, and the stone is breaking.
Look at her eyes: they’re oddly level, almost bored. There’s no warmth, no invitation, in the showgirl’s gaze. She stares past us, focused on something in the distance. Perhaps on a time long past… What she’s not doing is performing for us.
That title-as-headdress does something subtle and brilliant, too. In a traditional showgirl image, the feathered fan or jeweled crown is ornamental: lightness, sparkle, the thrill of being on display. Here, the word “FOLLIES” has weight. It seems irremovable, load-bearing, more architectural than decorative.
Byrd’s first sketch for this poster, submitted on spec, unpaid, showed a woman standing in the rubble of the demolished Roxy Theatre, inspired by this famous Life magazine photo of Gloria Swanson amid the ruins:
The producers liked the concept but wanted changes: make her blonder, bustier, more “flamboyant and feminine.” They suggested Dolly Parton as a model. Byrd dutifully created that version, a glamazon in a plunging red dress, and hated it.
So he made a second poster, unasked. He turned to his new photo book Four Fabulous Faces—Garbo, Swanson, Crawford, Dietrich—and found a frontal shot of Dietrich from Shanghai Express. He gave the face a massive title-headdress, added the crack to signal “the end of an era,” and sent both versions via messenger to the production. “I never heard about the Dolly Parton thing again,” Byrd later recalled.
That crack was the argument that won. It allowed the poster to promise spectacle—stars, color, Art Nouveau flourish—but, crucially, to refuse warmth. The claim it makes is precise: the past, in Follies, is not a place that might be visited wistfully, nostalgically. It is a crack, a scar, the wound of a broken present.
Byrd’s Follies poster is iconic (and here, that wildly overused word does feel earned). That showgirl’s face, so glamorous yet so haunted, so scarred, is a monument and a warning all at once.
Sweeney Todd: The Penny-Dreadful as Broadway Poster
The bravest choice Frank “Fraver” Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd poster makes is caricature. Not realism, not atmospheric moodiness, but grotesque exaggeration rendered in a woodcut style. Two figures, wielding their razor and rolling pin, with gaping mouths, wild hair, faces distorted into masks of terror and glee. Heavy blacks, rough hatch marks, the texture of Victorian broadside printing. And over it all, in hand-daubed red letters that look scrawled rather than typeset: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”
The illustration is explicitly archival in its reference points. Fraver has said his artwork was based on an old woodcut, to which he added Mrs. Lovett in the same style. It’s an aesthetic of reproduction and repetition, of Punch cartoons and penny dreadfuls, one that brings to mind the crude force of engraving, the high contrast of black ink on cheap paper.
And it’s the right visual equivalent for a story that functions somewhat like folklore: the same cautionary tale, retold with relish. It’s also a way of making the show’s horror feel communal and performative, rather than purely psychological. It invites us to lean toward public spectacle and away from gothic interiority. Victorian sensationalism is foregrounded as the show’s visual syntax.
Sondheim’s final note to Fraver on the design was simple: “Add more blood.” And so that vivid red punctures the monochrome. The title. The blade held aloft. Mrs. Lovett’s apron is stained scarlet, and Todd is captured literally red-handed.
The story of this poster reveals how design so often operates as negotiation between concept, production, and star. Fraver met with Hal Prince, who showed him costume sketches in which Mrs. Lovett appeared “very fat.” Prince was considering asking Angela Lansbury to wear padding. Fraver was then asked to visit Lansbury’s apartment to show her the artwork for approval. He (smartly) brought a range of Mrs. Lovetts, from obese to svelte.
Lansbury, as Fraver recalls, “was taken aback by the girth of some of my renderings.” When he mentioned the possibility of a fat suit, she replied: “I’ll just play it fat. Let’s go with the thinnest drawing.”
What emerged, then, was a Mrs. Lovett rendered in caricature. It’s exaggerated, yes, but the focus stayed on the face, the open mouth, the sense of Grand Guignol excess presented as entertainment.
If Byrd’s Follies poster advertizes fracture, beauty already splitting, Fraver’s Sweeney Todd advertizes that cruder and more exhilarating notion of complicity. It beckons like a street ballad. It grins at us. It practically dares us to come in, to attend.
Sunday in the Park with George: The Tear as Time-Jump
After we’ve considered the Sweeney Todd poster, with its red-smeared dare, gaping mouths, and crude black hatch marks, Sunday in the Park with George greets us with a different kind of confidence. It’s not lurid, nor is it loud. It’s… formal, somehow. The typography at the top is crisp, centred, museum-clean: SUNDAY in the PARK with GEORGE. It’s a poster that feels at a glance open, composed, notably polite.
But then, with a jolt, we take what’s actually happening in the central image: bodies are ripped in two, and recombined.
We see the upper halves of two people in Seurat-painting world, including (most prominently, with her parasol) the figure that serves as Sondheim and Lapine’s Dot. But Fraver has torn the picture open. Below the rip line, we see a pair of modern legs, mid-stride, in blue jeans and brogues. To their right, a second set of legs: stockings, heels, poised with no less elegance than would befit the painting. It’s a kind of duet, perhaps: one figure pulling toward motion, the other toward poise; two presences yoked to the same image whether they belong there or not.
The nineteenth century doesn’t transition politely into the twentieth here. And the poster isn’t just saying “this show leaps forward 100 years.” It seems to say something more intimate: that the leap is made between people, in tension and in tandem.
Fraver’s account of creating this poster is one of the great stories of design-as-dramaturgy. When he was handed the script, it contained only Act One. He asked the producers what happened in Act Two. Their response: “It’s not written yet, but it takes place 100 years later.” So, Fraver had to design the poster for a show whose second act didn’t yet exist. His image had to be an imaginative leap. And the solution he arrived at—the torn figures, half in period costume and half in contemporary dress—became the show’s defining visual metaphor.
“Since it was a musical, I decided to give the legs in the lower half of the graphic some movement,” Fraver explained. “It was suggested by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine that I think of the word ‘gavotte.’” Isn’t that a beautifully precise note to give a designer? Not “make it dynamic” or “show motion,” but “think of the word gavotte.” Those legs, as well as being modern, are choreographic.
A gavotte is courtly; it’s precise; it’s a dance that looks effortless because it’s controlled. To let “gavotte” guide the image is to insist that even this century-jump, this rip through time, will be executed with craft. The show’s subject is art, but its method is choreography.
Fraver’s poster for Sunday makes its structure legible without a plot summary. It tells us, in one glance: there will be Seurat, yes; and there will be something else, later, that refuses to stay politely in the frame. It promises wit: the legs are a visual joke, a playful rupture of decorum. But it also promises rigour. That tear is an argument about time, about how the past and present perhaps can’t be reconciled, only collaged.
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I reckon you could also do a series on how certain shows' posters have evolved through different productions. Can't wait to hear what you find on the creation of the Night Music poster, it's my favorite! I actually have that one and Follies tattooed on my arms...
3 down, I've forgotten how many to go. GIve us more to see/read!