"Johanna (Quartet)" is a song from Sondheim's 1979 classic SWEENEY TODD, with book by Hugh Wheeler.
The Set Up: (This'll take a minute.) SWEENEY TODD tells the story of a London barber named Benjamin Barker transported to Australia on trumped up charges by local Judge Turpin, who is obsessed with Barker's wife Lucy. As the show opens fifteen years have passed. Barker returns to learn Lucy committed suicide after having been raped at a party by the Judge, and the Judge is now caring for/creeping on their daughter Johanna.
Barker, now taking the name Sweeney Todd, set ups to kill the Judge, while a sailor on the boat that brought him back plots a way to free Johanna from the Judge's clutches.
At the end of Act One Anthony has messed up Todd's initial plan to kill the Judge, making a reunion with his daughter seem impossible, and Todd has decided to go in with his landlord Mrs. Lovett on murdering clients and turning them into meat pies while he waits for another shot at the Judge.
After the Act II opening spectacle of the two of them doing just that, "Johanna" has us catching up with Anthony, Johanna, Todd and an unnamed beggar lady, who seems to represent the threat of being discovered, but in fact is actually none other than Lucy, Barker's wife.
The Performance: For me, there is the original production with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, and then there is everything else. But I found this concert version online starring opera singer Bryn Terfel as Sweeney and Audra McDonald as the Beggar Woman, and it is exceptional.
Terfel has me literally crying at the end. (I have no idea what that says about me.)
The Storytelling:
1) Audiences Appreciate a Vacuum
Much like "Ladies Who Lunch", part of what makes this song so great is the choice to write away from the emotions of the moment rather than into them. Sweeney has lost everything, including it would seem his damn mind, and yet what he's singing is this very beautiful, in some ways happy song of goodbye to his daughter.
The distance between what's he singing and the multiple murders we see him committing makes the song very funny. (In most staged productions when he cuts a customer's throat blood spurts and a hole opens in the
floor through which the body slides down into the basement to Mrs. Lovett. It is AMAZING.)
It also lends it unexpected pathos. It's like that old director's tip to actors to never cry. Every tear that you withhold is a tear that the audience will shed. The more Sweeney stays away from the grief and horror of the moment, the more we feel it.
2) Taking a Beat to Breathe Can Draw Us In Deeper
Even though there are things happening in this song--Anthony is trying to figure out how to get to Johanna; Beggar Lady is trying to call attention to what's going on at the pie shop; and Sweeney is murdering people--really this is a Catch Your Breath song, a moment the plot pauses and we get to just catch up with our characters, see where they're at in light of everything that's happened and where they're planning to go.
In film and TV we don't often take many moments like this. Especially on television we have so little time to work with. Every moment is super precious.
But watching "Johanna" what I note is how taking that time also gives us a chance to catch up with ourselves and how we're feeling about what's going on. And as we do so we're paradoxically drawn in deeper. Prior to that song Todd is a dangerous and hilarious nutcase and Anthony a naive prat. After it we care about them more deeply, and the others too.
(It's interesting that Mrs. Lovett is given no part in this song. It makes sense--through her lies and manipulation of Todd she is another villain in the story. Sondheim doesn't want us to invest in her further.)
Again, it can seem harder to pull these kinds of moments off in film and television. But I find if I step back and consider what are some of my all time favorite TV/film moments, or just the beats that I liked most in the last thing I watched, a lot of the time they end up being moments like this, where the writers lead us away from the plot to someplace quiet or unexpected.
As I'm writing this my mind immediately goes to this incredible moment at the end of the first episode of the last season of FRINGE where Walter, overwhelmed by the distopia he finds himself in, can't sleep. And then this happens:
It's a moment that is completely unnecessary to the story. It almost feels tacked on. But my God is it powerful. (The ep is written by J.H. Wyman.)
3) Parallel Stories Add Layers
"Johanna" isn't quite Shakespeare, but it does have that quality of parallel stories which bring one another out that is such a classic Shakespeare move. We've got Anthony and Sweeney with their radically different takes on Johanna; at the end as Sweeney sings "Goodbye" Anthony overlaps with "I'll free you".
Meanwhile the Beggar Woman (aka Lucy) cries out about the horrors happening at the bakehouse, which seems like a whole other topic entirely, except that in the end Sweeney will almost kill Johanna there, and does kill Lucy. Each of their stories is really commenting on the others, and expands the ways that we think about each of them. And the fact that we won't fully appreciate all of that until the very end when the Beggar Woman's identity is revealed gives this moment a whole other layer entirely.
(For those who love J.J. Abrams mystery boxes, I point to the Beggar Woman as an example of how much more is possible when you choose not to front load the mystery.)
