Back in the 1970s I used to subscribe to two audio magazines, High Fidelity and Hi-Fi/Stereo Review (later renamed to just Stereo Review). They each had reviews of pop, jazz, and classical records, feature articles on music and musicians, and reviews of the latest audio equipment, most of which I couldn’t afford.

I enjoyed both magazines and they each had their own distinct personalities with High Fidelity tending to longer articles of all kinds and Stereo Review tending to the short and pithy.

Then in August 1979 the editor of Stereo Review wrote an editorial that made me realize I had no need to continue my subscription to that rag any longer. I believe my subscription was about to expire anyway so I simply let it lapse.

Having discovered that so many other newspapers and magazines have archives online, I decided to check if the archives of those two audio magazines were available and to my delight they are. So I went right to the August 1979 issue of Stereo Review to see if my memory of what William Anderson wrote was correct.

He was writing about the Tony Awards that had been handed out that year:

Stephen Sondheim’s musical-theater piece Sweeney Todd won eight of them this year, so there is no dodging the fact that it is, for 1979, a kind of Official Art and that it ought therefore to be suspected of harboring some insight into the intellectual fashion of our time.

The melodramatic tale of Sweeney, the murderous barber who supplies the unspeakable raw material for the meat pies of Mrs.

Lovett, his equally unspeakable confederate, is an old one. Sondheim based his musical version on a recent London stage play, and it is a positive feast (!) for English majors.

There are traces of Jonathan Swift (his icily ironic Modest Proposal), of the Beggar’s Opera (the Brecht version, not the life-celebrat-ing Johr Gay original), of Charles Dickens’ pestilential nineteenth-century London, of Hogarth’s prints, France’s Grand Guignol theater of horror, and even I Remember Mama (the culinary secret of her meatballs).

The stage setting is an enormous cage of ma-chinery, a factory interior laced with iron girders, bridges, and ladders, filled with humming gears and pulleys, a steam whistle that screams at horrors no human throat could address itself to, and wheels, wheels every-where, even on the two-deck mechanical-marvel pie/barber shop. The relentless misanthropy (“The history of the world… is who gets eaten and who gets to eat”), the lewd-ness, the venality, and the scatalogical language of the play are relieved only by the blackest of comedy—a scene in which a preposterous Eve (Mrs. Lovett) tempts an improbable Adam (Sweeney) to a second Fall with an assortment of meat pies (“’Ave a little priest”) instead of an apple.

Wild horses couldn’t drag me to see this depressing spectacle again, and I mightily resisted listening to the original-cast album. All I can recall of the music is a rising three-note figure of yearning on the name Johanna (“I feel you, Johanna”) in young Anthony’s love song, and that probably because it echoes a similar phrase in West Side Story‘s Maria.

And significantly, no music from Sweeney was quoted in a current-Broadway-show medley in the extravaganza that marked the gala reopening of Radio City Music Hall on May 31.

But what is the message? Why, simply what Utopian pastoralists from William (“dark Satanic mills”) Blake to the latest anti-nuke Luddites have tried to tell us for years: the Industrial Revolution Was a Big Mistake, for it has brutalized all mankind. They may very well be right, but it is a considerable irony that this message is addressed to and (if understood) endorsed by (eight Tonys, remember) an urban audience that wouldn’t know the difference between a manure spreader and a butter churn and that would rather die or pay $5 a gallon (whichever comes first) than empty their three-car garages. There’s a Zeitgeist for you!

I’m perfectly willing to tolerate opinions that don’t correspond with mine from reviewers and critics, and over the years each of those magazines had published many reviews that I took issue with, but when the editor of a periodical lays down his opinion in such a stark manner, that’s something else entirely.

I could almost hear myself saying, “As for you, William Anderson, it is all too clear what company you keep. Service them well and hold their custom—for you’ll have none of mine.”

Presumably many other folks felt the same as I did for that magazine did not last much longer after that issue. I see from the archives that it stopped publishing after, let me see now—oh—about 20 more years.

It’s easy to forget that Sweeney Todd was quite controversial back in 1979. It was not unanimously acclaimed by all the critics. Walter Kerr, who still wrote pieces for the New York Times on Sundays, gave it an incredibly scathing pan, absolutely tearing it to shreds. Of course, Kerr believed that all musicals should be like Hello, Dolly!

And when I was making plans to broadcast it on my radio program that I did back then in Harrisburg on WMSP, word came to me that Walter Shepard, the general manager of WITF, the other classical music station in the area, refused to allow it to air on his station.