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Published on Sunday, Jan 20, 2008
SWEENEY TODD — MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
Various performers
Nonesuch
Vengeance and bloodshed aside, Tim Burton's take on Stephen Sondheim's musical sounds nothing like the brassy 1979 Broadway version starring Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury or 2005's cabaretish revival with Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone.
Sondheim's usual orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, did this film score's arrangements with a brooding atmosphere — grandly gothic and sweepingly dusky but not without light. This dramatic shading allows Burton's cast of mostly untrained voices to ease into Sondheim's complex opera with an ear toward softly intoning the sad truths of the lyrics without having to show off. That makes magic for Alan Rickman (the predatory Judge Turpin) and Helena Bonham Carter (the licentious Mrs. Lovett), but it's Johnny Depp's title character that's best rewarded.
When Depp stretches vowel sounds on a line like ''the cruelty of man is as wondrous as Peru'' during No Place Like London — a song whose spite-driven words are repeated growlingly in the glorious Epiphany — it's in a creaking baritone with phrasing reminiscent of David Bowie. Depp's casting brought hipster cachet, but his subtly mad mannerisms and uneasy croon drive Sweeney Todd to bloody brilliance.
— A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer
SWEENEY TODD — MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
Various performers
Nonesuch
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