1. O.o at the 47 deviations since the last time i logged on

2. please keep in mind i'm sleepy. the only day i didn't work this week was Christmas. and it kinda went down the drain starting a bit on thursday not that it's been a horrible week...but it's left me exhausted...plus i'm being bad to myself and not going to bed early cause i want to see people that i don't get to see all the time while i'm home for break. i'll be lucky if i don't make myself sick. the only reason i'm staying up to write this is because i want to do write it when it's freshest in my mind.

3. i want to direct sweeney todd someday.

i saw the movie tonight it was highly anticipated, although i worried about the effect of johnny depp and helena(?) bonham carter's mediocrity at singing (sorry to fans of them, but really, they're not that great at it---they're great at straight-acting ).

so, here are my thoughts.

overall, i was okay with it. which i kinda expected. the people i was with absolutely adored it. one of them had been in a production of it and had seen it onstage once, i think? plus, she's also a theatre major. one had only heard what i made him listen to of the soundtrack, and the other two had just heard the hype about it, one of them hearing a lot of it from me

there were just things in it that i didn't feel were...how i would've done it.

johnny depp and helena bonham carter both looked the part. but alan rickman and timothy spall both totally filled their roles. quite well. there were a couple scenes where i felt that tim burton got everything he could and wanted to out of depp and carter, but there were some scenes where i just thought "you know, i know he's a higher caliber actor than this...he can fill this role so much better."

i also felt that the singing was quiet. quiet, and/or shy. this is a musical filled with passion. sweeney's crimes are driven by his passion. his passion drives him mad, because he feels so much grief for all he's lost. he's not concentrating on pitch. he's not afraid to feel convictions about how we all deserve to die. it doesn't have to sound pretty when you're talking about how in the world there's a great black pit filled with people who are filled with shit and how the vermin of the world inhabit it. there were some songs that i was okay with him singing in the way he did, simply because there were songs where they were supposed to be quiet and pretty. such as when he sings about "a barber and his wife. and she was beautiful..." that worked.

i felt that johnny did his best singing performance on "pretty women" tho. that was wonderful, i felt, especially right along with his actions and the harmonizing with alan rickman. awesome.

tim burton proved to be great at suspense. times when sweeney was shaving people (the judge the first time, in particular comes to mind), you just kept going "omg! he's going to---oh no, he didn't. ooh! ooh! he's going to---aw, damn it, wrong again!" you're on the edge of your seat just waiting for sweeney to slit their throats.

the costuming and the world were all awesome. no lie about that. a very real world was created.

although, i must admit that some of the stylized-ness kind of turned me off. particularly with the blood. i can understand tim burton's repetition of the blood and everything, but i didn't like it. credit this to karen kessler's love of pain and gore or not, but i felt that the fact that the blood looked like red acrylic paint kind of took away from the fact that sweeney had just killed someone. my friend kristin (the other theatre major in the group) pointed out that it did take away from it so that you weren't nearly as disgusted that he had just killed someone in the way he did. it made it easier to stomach.

i felt he should've worked more with the end. we don't know what happens to anthony and johanna. and we should, as audience members, at least have an idea as to what happened has opposed to johanna just cowering in the fancy chair

"by the sea" was a great sequence. i wanted helena bonham carter to let loose more so she wasn't trying to sound so dainty and pretty, but it was still well done. especially with sweeney's reluctance in wooing her. it was hilarious. hee.

my three favorite songs in the whole show are "epiphany," "a little priest," and the final "ballad of sweeney todd"

epiphany disappointed me. that was the main one where i felt they were concentrating too hard on the singing pretty. it didn't need to be pretty. it needed to be passionate.

a little priest was disappointing at some points, and quite interesting at others. i wanted carter and depp to have more fun with that song. that's the most fun song in the show. seriously. although, i did like how they looked out the windows at everybody and that's where they got all the professions they were singing about. i really need to read the libretto so i can figure out if that's what they're supposed to do or if that was just an awesome idea of tim burton's. they cut out an awesome part tho---the part where mrs. lovett is giving him all these different ones to try and he keeps refusing them in rhyme.

the ballad of sweeney todd didn't appear in the whole movie. neither did the factory whistle. both of which i thought were important parts of the script. if someone writes something like that in, it should be kept. plus, the final ballad of sweeney todd is what makes the whole musical so damn scary. because they talk about how you should heed the tale of sweeney todd and it makes it feel all the more real because of how we're all sweeney. just listening to it gives me chills. they used to have it on youtube when george hearn and patti lupone did the concert version, and it was so *drool* awesome. plus, it wraps the musical up in a nice little package. just in case someone went to it just for the gore and didn't expect a story to come from it.

i think i had a tiny bit more bitching than praising, but i felt pretty neutral about this particular production. i think it was decent. it helps get the musical to people who don't have the money to access a decent stage production, which is a good thing. but there was a lot wanting in my eyes, which is why i would want to direct it, because i feel i could add some of my distinctiveness to it. (there are some things i wouldn't direct EVER because i like a version i saw of it too much for me to change anything, such as mary poppins ) so yeah. me want to direct sweeney todd after seeing okay sweeney todd movie