Daniel Okrent

I'm very happy to be here.

Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of Sweeney Todd, I had listened to and been impressed by.

I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song.

It's all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective.

Right.

He steals his wife.

Well, he steals his wife.

And discards her.

And wounds her permanently.

Sure.

In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Meryl Seacrest, back in 1996, Sondheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of Sweeney Todd.

She was his closest friend, and she often would do this.

He would play them for her before anybody else.

So she came over.

He had told her before that that it was a horror show.

It was going to be a spined

And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs and she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror.

This is the story of your life.

And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is.

But I was able to determine through a couple of sources that