Sweeney Todd Coming This Winter!

With all of this Harry Potter hype, it’s difficult not to mention a movie in the making with three of the saga’s renowned actors. Bellatrix Lestrange, played by Helena Bonham Carter, Wormtail aka Peter Pettigrew, played by Timothy Spall, and Professor Severus Snape, played by Alan Rickman, will be portraying Mrs. Lovett, Beadle Bamford, and Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, respectively. The story of the musical adaptation, by Stephen Sondheim (there are many versions of the story), is about Benjamin Barker, a barber in London, who is sent off to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit; his wife comes to an untimely end and his daughter is adopted by the judge who decided his unjust fate. Barker returns to London (as Todd) and gets revenge by setting up his barber shop again, but this time, no one who goes in comes out again. Mrs. Lovett, his partner in business and romance, helps to get rid of the evidence by baking it into her famous meat pies.
The film adaptation is being taken up by the notorious acting-directing duo, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton. Depp will be playing the demon barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd. Tim Burton will reprise his fondness of darkness and death. He is known for having singing in his films (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride), but will this live up to the ‘opera’ that is Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd? Is Depp capable of singing more than backup in a rock band? Cry-Baby is no indicator of this, by the way, his singing was dubbed in that project. A better example would be the theme song to 21 Jump Street.
In my opinion, I could not imagine a better director to take on the subject matter. If you have any objections, pop in Sleepy Hollow or even Beetlejuice and you’ll get my point. Burton’s worst temptation, I think, would be to make it too campy…perhaps by dressing everyone in stripes. The movie comes out in limited distribution December 21, 2007.

http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/sweeney-todd-coming-this-winter/