Stage and Screen

Beware: "Sweeney Todd" is coming. And "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" will be here sooner than you think.

The movie version of Stephen Sondheim's Tony-winning musical thriller -- about the demented title character's bloody reign in Victorian-era London -- arrives onscreen Dec. 21, with Johnny Depp in the title role.

Las Vegas audiences, however, have an even more imminent date with Sweeney -- in the flesh -- as the world premiere of "Sweeney Todd's" school edition continues this weekend and next at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing & Visual Arts.

"Sweeney" has been a stage landmark since it stunned Broadway audiences, and won eight Tony Awards, including best musical, during the 1979-80 season.

Yet there had never been a revision designed expressly for high school productions. Until now.

"They say timing is everything," notes John Prignano, senior operations officer of New York-based Music Theatre International, which licenses productions and provides scripts, musical materials and other resources for school, amateur and professional productions of hundreds of musicals, including "Sweeney Todd."

And the "Sweeney Todd" movie's imminent arrival "was the prompting for" a special school edition, according to LVA theater instructor Glenn Edwards, director of the initial school edition of "Sweeney." In that capacity, he's consulted with Sondheim on a regular basis.

"The changes are fast and furious," Prignano says of the rehearsal process, noting that Sondheim sent some changes to Edwards -- and that "a lot of changes are coming from Glenn's input," then passed along to Sondheim for consideration. "It's kind of a give-and-take."

And despite "Sweeney Todd's" success in its original incarnation (and two Tony-nominated Broadway revivals), Sondheim has been "very involved" in developing the school edition of what some consider his masterwork.

When MTI did a school version of Sondheim's sardonic fairy-tale musical "Into the Woods," for example, "he rewrote lyrics" and condensed the opening number, Prignano recalls. "He's very hands-on. He understands the importance of educational theater."

This "Sweeney Todd" isn't "hugely different" than its predecessors, explains Edwards, who estimates that about 15 minutes have been deleted. There's a verse cut here, some lines excised, he notes. "You'd have to know 'Sweeney Todd' really, really well to know what's cut."

One key difference: transposing some of the songs to different keys to make them easier for students to sing.

That still doesn't make the music any easier, Edwards says.

"It's a complicated show to do because the music is so sophisticated," he notes. The school edition of "Miss Saigon," which the Academy presented last year, "was a huge challenge technically, but the music wasn't as difficult," Edwards says. "This music is just hard -- hard to sing, hard to make it work."

And, ultimately, hard to forget, thanks to Sondheim's towering score, which sometimes approaches the level of opera in its range, complexity and power.

Sondheim's score and Hugh Wheeler's Tony-winning book recount the tale of a horribly wronged barber who returns to London after years in exile -- only to discover his wife gone forever and his daughter a virtual prisoner of the same lecherous judge who imprisoned him on a trumped-up charge.

Little wonder, then, that Sweeney (played by LVA senior Philip Cerza) vows vengeance -- by shaving "the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard from again," as Sondheim relates in "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd."

Of course, Sweeney couldn't have become the throat-slashing scourge of Fleet Street without a little help from his friend, Mrs. Nellie Lovett (played by LVA senior Rebecca Stewart, with senior Marissa Lessman as alternate). A downtrodden baker, Mrs. Lovett is (in)famous for making "The Worst Pies in London" -- until a secret ingredient supplied by Mr. Todd, transforms her meat pies into a taste sensation, prompting throngs of eager patrons to proclaim, "God, That's Good!"

Yes, folks, "Sweeney Todd" is a musical about serial killing and cannibalism. But it also deals with lost love, shattered families and innocent souls caught and crushed in the meat-grinder of urban life, topped off by bursts of delicious black comedy.

"The best word to describe it is thrilling," says this production's Sweeney Todd, Cerza. "It's so scary and creepy -- and really funny."

In the title role, "there's such a wide range of emotions you have to portray, Cerza reflects. "All the regret that he feels, plus the biting humor. It's difficult trying to capture that." But "with this show, the music does most of the work for you."

MTI officials approached their LVA counterparts last spring to gauge their interest in tackling "the very first trial production" of "Sweeney Todd's" school edition, Edwards recalls.

"We've done other work for them," he adds -- including the "Les Miserables" school edition, released in 2002, and last year's pilot production of "Miss Saigon," which Prignano described as "stunning."

LVA's "whole program is so wonderful," he says, noting that the students "have more training and more experience" -- and, as a result, "do understand music and can deal with getting new script pages, a new scene, a new song."

And while "Sweeney Todd's" merrily macabre essence remains intact, there's one hallmark of the original production that does not appear in the LVA production, Edwards says.

There will not be blood.

"Not one drop," he promises. "Our production is ritualistic. It's about the spread of madness."

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0272.