SWEENEY TODD — ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK - VARIOUS ARTISTS
At first slice, the musical tale of a murderous barber doesn’t seem like appropriate Hollywood fodder. But if you think of it as Tim Burton’s answer to the stage-to-film adaptation craze that gave us John Travolta in drag, it makes some kind of sense. Helena Bonham Carter as the meat-pie-making Mrs. Lovett sings more like Little Bo Peep than the cockney wench Angela Lansbury originated in 1979. But Alan Rickman is memorably creepy as the pedophilic judge, and as the title character, Johnny Depp is pretty much perfect, selling the vocally strident “Epiphany” (”They all deserve to die”) and savoring Stephen Sondheim’s tricky wordplay. Oft-covered Sondheim classics like “Pretty Women” and “Nothing’s Gonna Harm You” are here too, but once heard in the context of the gory plot, you’ll never be able to listen to Barbra Streisand sing them again.
