FSU Alum Returns to Present “Sweeney Todd…and Zombies?”

The School of Theatre at Florida State is proud to welcome back alumnus Dr. Aaron C. Thomas as he shares his rich research on musical theatre in a lecture drawn from his new book, Sondheim & Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd. This lecture is presented by the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies and will take place on Friday, February 23rd from 3:30pm – 5:00pm in Room 249 of the Fine Arts Building. Reading from his new book on Sweeney Todd, Dr. Thomas describes the pleasures of eating and sex in Sondheim and Wheeler’s murderous 1979 musical. Sweeney Todd is about a serial murderer and an unhinged accomplice who bakes his victims into meat pies, but theatre artists have long used cannibalism for dramatic effect. In this talk, Dr. Thomas traces a line – from antiquity through Shakespeare and Brecht to Broadway – of cannibalism and pleasure in the history of theatre. Speaking of “Sweeney Todd…and Zombies?”, Dr. Thomas will trace a journey through Titus Andronicus and Brecht, capitalism and cannibalism into the strange erotics of the musical and the undead.

Click here to register for this event!
Registration will close Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 5:00 PM.

Dr. Thomas is a theatre scholar and practitioner teaching at the University of Central Florida.  His essays on musical theatre include “Engaging an Icon: Caroline or Change and the Politics of Representation” for Studies in Musical Theatre and “Dancing toward Masculinity: Newsies, Gender and Desire” in G. Rodosthenous (ed.), and The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen. As in these essays, his current book project, The Violate Man, raises questions of race, gender, and representation while exploring cultural expressions of violent masculinity in fiction and on stage and screen.