"If I Cannot Fly, Let Me Sing"

My first semester at American University I was assigned a song I had never heard from a show I knew virtually nothing about. That song was "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" from Sweeney Todd. It was an attempt on the part of my new voice teacher to appease my desire to sing musical theater pieces while still learning the fine art of classical voice performance. The first time I heard the song all the way through I hated it and refused to even finish watching the video of Sweeney Todd I had purchased.

It's always been a fact, and a fairly well known one, that Sondheim musicals are not among my favorites. They're extremely difficult, long, and often hard to follow. At nineteen years old I couldn't appreciate the music, nor the technique required to perform it wall. It wasn't a pop oriented Frank Wildhorn piece, and my idol of the time, Linda Eder, would never have been able to sing it. I wanted to be a belter like her, not what I saw as the weak character written for the token soprano.

When I was offered a chance to play Johanna, who sings "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" in an upcoming local production of Sweeney Todd along with serving as the musical director of the show I was torn over what to do. Having studied just that one song there was no doubt in my mind as to the difficulty of the show, but at the same time I knew it would be the challenge I was search for recently.

So, a year later I am just over forty-eight hours from our opening. My cast and crew have worked so hard to bring this show to life. Our Sweeney is one of the best I've seen, bringing depth to a character who can often be very flat. My best friend who is playing Mrs. Lovett has turned her into more then just an over the top loony, and our Judge, who is one of my voice students, is shining in his first endeavor into musical theater. I have never been more proud or more confident in a cast.

Johanna has come alive for me, and I've discovered that I was very wrong to judge her based on the early scenes of the show. She is not just some Disney princess knockoff who sings to birds and falls madly in love with someone she doesn't even know. She is a young woman with a very complex past, and who is being pushed to the brink of what any human can take. Having been locked away since she was a year old she is desperate to escape, first from the Judge who now lusts after her now that she is no longer a child, and then from the mental institution where he locks her away. Once can quickly see how that might push her to agree to run away with Anthony Hope, the young sailor who is determined to rescue her, and later take matters into her own hands and shoot the head of the mental institution.

As I've learned the music and really looked at the content of the lyrics, I have learned so much about Johanna. I've also grown to truly love this show for all of it's complexity. When the lights go up on Thursday night I will take the stage as a true fan on Sondheim and Sweeney Todd, something I wasn't entirely sure I'd say when I started this process.