How do you describe what it feels like to end a show?
What does it feel like to say goodbye to a complicated character that you spent over half your life dreaming of playing on stage?
How does this all end?
One of my favorite documentaries of the last decade is Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018). The film tells the true-life tale of one of my childhood heroes, Fred Rogers. For 30 years, Rogers hosted the PBS children’s series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Near the end of the documentary, Rogers’s wife describes Fred Rogers’s feelings when he retired: “When he did stop making the programs, I felt that he was depressed. I mentioned it to him, and he said, ‘Well, I miss my playmates.'”
That is the feeling.
It is going to take some time for me to process all of the emotions of the last few months–the unbridled joy of performing, the fear of not being up to the task, the exhilarating rush that comes when the crowd applauds after Epiphany or laughs at the punch lines of A Little Priest. What I mostly feel at this moment is a deep gratefulness for the men and women who contributed their part in telling the tale of Sweeney Todd. There is no rehearsal this evening. Yes, I miss my playmates.
I am a professor of Christian ethics, and this summer I played the role of a serial killer. The jokes write themselves. Occasionally someone will ask me about what I, a Christian ethicist, think about the “meaning” of the story. My take: it’s hard to turn Sweeney Todd into a morality tale. The closest thing that one gets to a moral message in the show is in Sweeney’s final solo line in the closing ballad: “To seek revenge may lead to hell.” That’s not a very uplifting sermon. I am a Christian, but I am also dissatisfied with the Christian tendency to turn every artistic production into a sermon. Sweeney Todd is not a story that invites us to be a light to the world. It is not a story that holds out a glimmer of hope about good overcoming utter evil. We should resist such sentimental moralism. Tobias may well live the rest of his life traumatized by the horror of what he has seen. Anthony may well become the jaded soul whose youthful optimism gives way to the dark truth of Sweeney’s words: “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit, and the vermin of the world inhabit it…” Sweeney Todd is dark, dramatic, and musically rich. It is a devastating story of obsession, with characters who spend much of their time on stage utterly blind to one another. It is a dark story, offering little optimism in the end for an audience looking for some hopeful kernel to take from the tale. That’s my take. This story resists any effort to repackage it as hopeful or uplifting.
Reflecting on Sweeney Todd, my moral attention over the last few months really has centered on the way that participating in live theatre cultivates space in our lives for our own moral formation. Theatre folks are an odd sort. The cast of Sweeney come from very different places. We are college students, professors, military personnel, business professionals, and laborers. Our cast had actors who have performed in professional opera, actors aspiring to become professional, and a fair number of amateurs like me. Amid our differences, all of us shared a love for theatre. In his seminal book After Virtue, Alasdaire MacIntyre speaks eloquently of how the mundane practices that attend complex activities–performing in theatre, for example–create space for us to cultivate virtue in our lives. For me, this is what has made this production so morally significant. The last two months have provided us all with the opportunity to do the mundane things necessary to perform this show well. In that sometimes unrewarding, unnoticed, and difficult labor we become a different sort of people. I love the members of this cast. They make me want to be a better person–kinder, less anxious, more humble.
Now that the show is over, I am eager for more. I don’t know what the future will hold. To return to the stage once again would be a glorious thing. Sweeney Todd was on my bucket list. There is one other show on that list (Robert Preston, I’m looking at you), though right now I’d be happy simply knowing that there is another stage waiting, another role to perform in any show. To my fellow Sweeney Todd cast members, Sweeney’s final words to his razors seem fitting for us all:
Sleep now my friends,
Sleep now forever,
Sleep now the untroubled
sleep of the angels…
I will miss you, my friends…
