Indeed, the latter was a massive hit that won six Oscars, including Best Picture. When Sweeney Todd was released in 2007, the movie musical was just beginning to yawn back to life following the successes of Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002). The distinction Sondheim was alluding to is subtle, but it is striking. “This is not simply, as all the others are, a film of the stage musical.” “My reaction to the film is that unlike all musical movies, in fact I’d say all the movies made from stage musicals that I’ve seen, this is really a movie based on a musical,” Sondheim said in a 2007 interview. For here was a composer who celebrated the creative departures and artistic choices that drove his most ardent admirers into a frenzy. Which is why Sondheim’s musings about Sweeney Todd, and musical cinema in general, are still so fascinating. Often a sharp critic of how Hollywood previously transferred Broadway toe-tappers to cinema, Sondheim was always a thinker who could keep his own counsel, even about films as beloved as Robert Wise’s 1961 screen version of West Side Story.

Yet when it comes to Sweeney Todd, it might surprise many of his fans that he was never happier with a movie adaptation of a stage musical than while watching Tim Burton’s big and bloody reimagining of his music-and with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter’s limited vocal ranges, no less.

Before he turned 30, he wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy by the time he was 50, he’d imagined whole cloth the 3/4 time swoons of A Little Night Music and the melodic hellfires burning beneath Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As one of the greatest composers, lyricists, and purely creative forces in the history of American theater, Sondheim was a talent whose output in a handful of years could outstrip entire careers. It can be said Stephen Sondheim was a man who rarely kept his opinions to himself.

Sweeney todd sondheim