The first show I ever did in college was Sweeney Todd. After perfoming in conventional musicals in high school — Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and The Music Man, this was quite a shock. How am I supposed to sing this crap? I thought. Are all college musicals like this?

The show was put on by a group called First Year Players, which does shows in which the entire cast consists of first-year students. (UVa calls its students first-years through fourth-years.) I was in the chorus. At the first rehearsal, the director decreed that none of the males could cut their hair or shave for the duration of the show — two months. I refused, because I was feeling like enough of an outsider at UVa and I didn’t want to make it worse by appearing to be a crazy mountain man. Finally the director relented and let me be clean-shaven.

Our production was what the director called “Brechtian.” I didn’t know anything about Brecht at the time. All I knew was that we framed our production as a show within a show. We were all homeless people putting on a production of Sweeney Todd. Instead of one stage, we had three mini-stages placed among the audience. When the audience came into the theater,
we were already wandering around the stages and the audience members, pretending to be homeless people.

It was strange. And it was the most difficult theater music I ever had to learn. But it was lots of fun and it’s the most prominent memory of my first semester of college.

So I’ve always felt a special connection to Sweeney Todd.

Matt and I saw the movie today. I felt that I was well-versed beforehand in the idiom of Tim Burton’s production, having watched a couple of “making of” specials and seen several clips online. I already knew that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (particularly the latter) were doing very different interpretations of their roles, that all iterations of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” were cut.

So what did I think of the movie? Well, on the one hand, I’m just thrilled that they made a movie of Sweeney and that millions of people will be exposed to Sondheim’s wonderful score and lyrics. And the movie has great production values — it deserves Oscar nominations for art direction, cinematography, costumes, and maybe makeup and directing. And it was nice to see an actual kid playing Toby. And Alan Rickman was absolutely fantastic as Judge Turpin.

And the movie was so bloody it was wonderfully comical — it made me think of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” Martin McDonagh’s blood-soaked Broadway play of last year.

And I enjoyed the cameo appearance by Anthony Stewart Head.

On the other hand, I thought Johnny Depp was rather one-dimensional as Sweeney. I actually liked Helena Bonham Carter’s nontraditional interpretation of Mrs. Lovett more than I liked Depp’s Sweeney. I didn’t hate Depp in the part — I actually liked him quite a bit, and it’s hard for me to hate him in anything — but I would have preferred someone more dynamic in the role.

I missed the choruses of “more hot pies” and “god that’s good” in the song “God That’s Good.” I know Burton cut all the chorus parts for timing reasons, but the movie included all the orchestrations for that song, with nothing sung over it, so given that no time was saved there, he might as well have included the chorus for at least that one song.

And the movie ended way too abruptly. No patty-cake, no policemen, no nothing.

Still, despite the flaws, it’s a top-notch movie, and probably the best film interpretation one could expect. And it will introduce millions of people to the show — for that, I’m thankful.

P.S. My favorite line from a “Sweeney” movie review so far: “Depp’s Sweeney comes across as one more mournful Burton wacko… and his ivory-pale face is crowned by a stiff black mane with a white blaze in it. If you had sat Susan Sontag down and broken the news that not everyone in New York reads Hegel, you would have got the same effect.”