“Is That Just Disgusting?”: Mapping the Social Geographies of Filth and Madness in Sweeney Todd

This essay reconsiders Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street as centrally concerned with and largely constituted by metaphorical and material filth. Positing filth as a historically specific phenomenon, the author contextualizes the 1979 original production within the urban ecology of New York City’s theatre district. He argues that the convergence of socially produced madness and filth in Sweeney Todd is not an isolated cultural event, but one that is deeply rooted in the overlapping material histories of mental distress and sanitation in the United States. Reading the production and reception history of Sweeney Todd in dialogue with filth studies, sociology, the history of US mental health care, and Kleinian psychoanalysis, the essay shows how the musical’s distribution of filth and madness across the urban environment relates, materially and figuratively, to the analogous geographies of New York’s theatre district during the time of the first Broadway production. This reappraisal of the musical introduces new historical and theoretical perspectives into Sondheim and musical theatre studies and demonstrates the utility of “filth-thinking” for theatre historiography in general.