Latest news with #Mrs.Lovett
Winnipeg Free Press
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
The back story of the meat-pie baker
When it comes to his novels, horror author David Demchuk's output is a bit of a zig-zag. His first book, The Bone Mother (2017) took us on a tour through a menagerie of monsters tied into the Slavic mythology of Ukraine and Romania. It was nominated for the Giller Prize and a Shirley Jackson Award. The monster in his followup, Red X (2021), though supernatural, was untethered from established myth, inspired by a real-life serial killer who stalked Toronto's gay village. Interspersed with the horror was a good deal of autobiographical content, describing, among other things, the Winnipeg-born Demchuk's migration to Toronto in the mid-'80s. Dreamworks pictures Johnny Depp in the titular role and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett in the 2007 film Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Demchuk's new book, The Butcher's Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett (Hell's Hundred, 432 pages), written in collaboration with Canadian author Corinne Leigh Clark, returns to the realm of legend. It's an ambitious telling of the story of Mrs. Lovett, the fabled Victorian-era murderess who aided London serial killer Sweeney Todd in the disposal of his victims' bodies by baking their remains into pies. While Mrs. Lovett and Todd were almost certainly fictions, the product of 19th-century penny dreadfuls — cheap, sensational serial publications — the book adds a dimension of reality that is more sympathetic to the Lovett character, at least more than the character in playwright Stephen Sondheim's 1979 Broadway musical interpretation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (Patti LuPone, who played the role in a 2000 production, said she felt Mrs. Lovett was the true villain of the story.) In fact, Demchuk — also a notable playwright — got the ball rolling on the book in December 2021, a month after Sondheim died. 'I first mentioned the project to my agent, Barbara Berson, and indicated to her that I would need another writer with greater knowledge of the time and place to partner with me to complete the book on a reasonable timeline,' Demchuk says in an email interview from his home in St. John's, N.L, where he lives with his husband. 'Corinne was another client of Barbara's who was remarkably well suited for the project. By Christmas we had agreed to work together and began in earnest in January 2022.' Supplied Sketches of Mrs. Lovett for the 2018 Sweeney Todd musical at Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre The book hardly seems like the product of two authors. One can detect no demarcation anywhere in the book's narrative, which largely takes the form of letters from one 'Margaret C. Evans' to investigative newspaper reporter Emily Gibson. Demchuk, who turns 63 next month, says the collaboration was a happy conjunction of expertises. 'I was familiar with some of the stage melodramas, sensation novels and penny dreadfuls of the era, so I began to develop the plot and the structure with those as the inspiration,' he says. 'Corinne was less experienced than I was at plot and structure and form, but had studied in London and worked in theatre there for a while, primarily on sets and costumes, which meant that she had literal hands-on experience with the look and feel of Victorian England. She also has a great love of all things Gothic, and had considerable historical knowledge and access to research materials.' To start, Demchuk gave Clark some preliminary research and writing assignments, such as developing some of the secondary characters. With that groundwork, the two were able to adapt and meld their writing styles to create a unified voice. Supplied David Demchuk 'I think we were both amazed at how quickly it came together from there. It was very much a 50/50 partnership — I think by the end there wasn't a word left that we hadn't both touched in one way or another,' Demchuk says. The book offers a more fleshed-out interpretation of Mrs. Lovett, the result of careful consideration between the authors. 'Our key question going into the project was: even considering how grim the Victorian era was for working-class people in general and women in particular, what happened to this particular woman that led her to assist her murderous associate by grinding and baking his victims into pies?' Demchuk will be signing copies of The Butcher's Daughter on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Raven's End Books in St. James. 'Twelve-year-old me would never have believed that Winnipeg would have a bookstore focused on horror, and that I would one day be signing my novel there,' he says. 'And yet I think Winnipeg has always been a strong supporter of horror, in film and in print and on other platforms. I think the genre is more popular than ever, thanks to our worldwide anxieties over just about everything.' Randall KingReporter In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
You've Attended the Tale of Sweeney Todd. Now Hear Mrs. Lovett's Story.
For half a century — much longer, if you go back to the original 1840s penny dreadfuls — people have thrilled to the story of Sweeney Todd, the murderous London barber who cut short the lives of priests, fops, sailors and one especially loathsome judge before he met his own gruesome end. Sweeney's tragic losses and appetite for vengeance have been well documented, most notably by the musical genius of Stephen Sondheim. But what of his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, who popped his poor victims into her pies? Does her tale not need attending, too? David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark's epistolary novel 'The Butcher's Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett' gives the woman beside the man her own turn in the spotlight. Part Victorian historical fiction, part grisly horror, the book follows a mysterious woman, Margaret C. Evans, a.k.a. Margery, as she recounts her life story to a never-seen (and, we learn at the opening of the book, missing) journalist, who is investigating the disappearance of Mrs. Lovett 50 years before. Though she does not disclose her true identity outright until fairly deep in the novel, it is clear within the first few pages that Margery is Mrs. Lovett, who — in a departure from the source material, where she is killed by Sweeney — is very much alive and confined to a nunnery. Margery's harrowing tale reframes Mrs. Lovett not as a villain but as a maligned girl fighting to survive. She's a seductively evocative narrator, making it easy to forget that her every word should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. It will surprise nobody familiar with the musical that this is a gory book. The violence starts early, at Margery's father's butcher shop, where she is awakened each morning by the sounds and smells of sheep being slaughtered, and where it is a shame bordering on sin to let anything go to waste. At 16, Margery catches the eye of a wealthy surgeon when a toddler is hit by a carriage in front of her shop and, in an attempt to save the child's life, she amputates his leg. When Margery's father dies soon thereafter, her mother sends her to work for the doctor. The horrors only increase from there: In the surgeon's home, Margery faces medical experiments, botched abortions, Freemason conspiracies. By the time she lands in the pie shop on Fleet Street, she has been drugged and forcibly inseminated, fallen in love with a deaf prostitute, had her baby stolen and murdered the shop's owner — oh, and discovered there's a serial killer upstairs who keeps dropping corpses in her back room. Demchuk and Clark have clearly done their research, crafting a ghoulish version of 1830s Britain that sets the stage for Margery's misadventures. The book seems to be aiming for the sort of feminist reclaiming of familiar stories that have proliferated in recent years, from the lushly literary ('Circe') to the fantastically irreverent ('My Lady Jane'). But in making Mrs. Lovett a vulnerable yet determined teenager, and in focusing on the brutal realities facing women — especially single, working-class ones — in the early 19th century, the authors lose some of the madcap genius that makes her so fun onstage. That Lovett is enterprising — an innovator, if a macabre one; this Lovett struggles to stay afloat. That Lovett is disturbingly zany; this one is, by unfortunate necessity, a realist. This is a wild, high-octane, blood-soaked tale, but by the end, everything crimps together just a little too neatly (with one final, groan-worthy twist). Life, like baking or butchery, is a messy business. I wish the authors had left a bit more room for untidy possibilities.
