I sang Sweeney Todd once before, in the Stone Center at Jacksonville State, on a Tuesday night, in front of an audience that included my mother and the woman I was about to ask to marry me. That was 2008. I was twenty-two. The woman was Heather. I married her.
I don't remember being nervous. I remember the razor was a stage prop with the edge filed flat, and it still felt heavy in my hand, and I kept turning it over between scenes because I didn't know what else to do with my fingers. Judy Shealy played Mrs. Lovett. She was a foot shorter than me and twice as sure of herself, and when we sang together it felt like being carried. The production was steampunk — gears and brass and Victorian machine-age everything — and I sweated through the costume every single night.
The audition was in front of Eric Traynor, the director, and Teresa Stricklin. They had me sing "My Friends" with Judy — the duet where Sweeney finds the razors again for the first time. We stood six feet apart in a rehearsal room and made something neither of us had planned on. When we finished, Traynor said that was amazing. Not to the room. To me. I filed it away and carried it into every rehearsal after that.
I was a bass-baritone. Classically trained, which at twenty-two mostly means you can make the sound but you have not yet earned the right to it.
I hit the notes. I understood none of them.
Sweeney Todd is a man who had a life, and it was taken from him, and he came back years later to find that the people who took it had gone on living just fine without him. The show is about what happens to a person when the thing that was stolen becomes the only thing he can see. Every conversation routes back to it. Every stranger's face is the wrong face. At twenty-two I sang that as a series of very difficult intervals. I thought the show was about a barber.
Then I did the other things. I stood in front of people and asked them to trust me with something important for a long stretch of years, until I couldn't anymore. Heather and I grew flowers on nine acres out near the Chief Ladiga Trail, rows of them, the kids barefoot in the dirt between the beds, and we sold what we cut at the market on Saturdays. That's gone now. Not by choice. Somewhere in there a doctor gave me a word for what had been happening in my head, and I spent a while learning to hold the word without dropping it. The pulpit went quiet. The farm went quiet. And the singing, which had been the first thing, the thing before all the other things, just stopped. I didn't decide to stop. I looked up one day and it had been years since I'd made the sound on purpose.
The singing, which had been the first thing, the thing before all the other things, just stopped.
This week I found it on my hard drive. Not a recording but a video — I'd captured the whole show on a camcorder on the last night of tech week. Hell week is the conventional name for it in theater circles, the final push before opening night when everything goes wrong all at once until it doesn't. I sat at my kitchen table and put the first scene on.
Stone Center for the Arts — Jacksonville State University, 2009
It's a strange thing to hear yourself at twenty-two. The voice is mine and it isn't. It's clearer than I expected, and lighter, and it has no idea what's coming. That's the part that got me. The kid singing had a farm ahead of him and didn't know it, and a diagnosis ahead of him and didn't know it, and this whole quiet stretch ahead of him, and he's up there hitting the notes clean and easy like the sound would always be there for the taking. I wanted to tell him to pay attention. I wanted to tell him the songs are true.
Skylar Wheat is directing Sweeney Todd at Theatre of Gadsden. I read that and something in me sat up that hadn't sat up in a while.
Monday I walked into a Sweeney Todd audition and sang Man of La Mancha. "The Impossible Dream." Sixteen bars of it. In a room where everybody else was reaching for something dark and jagged, I stood there and sang the most hopeful thing I know, no irony in it anywhere, the exact opposite of the show I was auditioning for. I don't fully know why. Maybe I chose it on purpose. Maybe my body chose it for me before my head caught up. Either way it was the truest thing I could have done. A man who's been living inside Sweeney's music for years, without a stage, without meaning to, walking into that room and proving to himself he can still find the other key. That he still remembers where the hope is kept.
The callback was for Epiphany. That's the one where Sweeney finally breaks. Twenty years of patience and loss and waiting collapse into something he can't carry another minute, and he stops wanting one man dead and starts wanting the whole world to pay. We all deserve to die. At twenty-two I sang it as theater. I stood in the auditorium and made the terrible sound and it was a costume, same as the frock coat. I know what it costs now. I've stood on the edge of that kind of losing and looked down into it. I was not going to have to act.
I know what it costs now. I've stood on the edge of that kind of losing and looked down into it.
I went. They offered me Judge Turpin. I said no.
What I keep coming back to is Monday. The room, the sound, the most hopeful song I know sung with no irony in front of people reaching for something dark. I proved something in there — not to anyone else, just to myself. That the door opens when I knock.
I understand the songs now. That's enough.
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