#will add toby tmrw

[magefelixir]

mannn sweeney todd is so sad

its at its core a love story; everybody’s story revolves around love.

benjamin barker was in love with the IDEA of his lucy. and maybe it had something to do with him being gone for 15 years. but when the people he loved; his lucy and johanna weren’t who he remembered them to be, would he even remember them? how did he act when his lucy wasn’t young, soft, and most of all beautiful? when johanna was disguised in sailors clothes he didn’t recognize her. (that’s not a shortcoming on his side though: he hasn’t seen her since she was 1)

in his search for love and finding his life before, he let his anger consume him and destroyed what he thought he wanted.

and ms lovett, well, she was in love with a man she knew she could never have. of course sweeney wouldn’t just forget about his wife. but she didn’t think of it that way; she was BETTER than his wife. why couldn’t he see that? and it manifests in her continuous dehumanization of lucy. in “poor thing” she seems very sympathetic to her, saying poor thing in a way where she sees lucy as something to be pitied. then throughout the musical we see her chasing her out, calling her dirty (paraphrased: i’ll not have people like you hanging around my fine establishment!) and the pièce de résistance being in the final sequence. and it’s revealed she knew who she was all along. “could that thing have cared for you like me?” that’s all that lucy is to her; a thing. she’s not a tragic tale of a woman who had her husband taken away from her, tricked into trusting a man who would later rape her and take away her child, driven to suicide that failed and left her insane, no, she’s just a thing trying to take away what is hers. in this case, todd.

with judge turpin, i think it’s kind of obvious. although it could be argued that it is more lust rather than love which i wouldn’t say i disagree with.

with johanna, it could be argued she didn’t truly love anthony but i would say i disagree. maybe that’s naivety or misplaced optimism. her love of anthony and his love back led them everywhere. it saved johanna from her room where she was trapped. anthony risked his life multiple times for her and she did back. she got locked in a mental asylum because she didn’t love judge turpin (who most likely saw her as a stand in for lucy) but anthony loved her more than he was afraid of anything. it’s unclear how much time passed but johanna says last august (“will we be married on sunday? thats what you promised— married on sunday. that was last august. kiss me!”) which implies a very sizeable amount of time passed. and yet, when anthony finds her he tells todd he finally found her. all this time he had been looking for johanna, his love. johanna killed for anthony. well yes, she did kill fogg in order to escape the asylum but she also did it to be reunited with anthony. and after all the time, when she was locked away, after a brief bit of turmoil they go back to talking like they did, as if no time had passed at all.

sweeney todd is a musical about murder and cannibalism and all that jazz, yes, but it’s most importantly a story about love and how we can do both terrible and great things for love.