In Stephen Sondheim's musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, after Benjamin Barker is sent away to Australia, and Lucy raped and driven insane, Judge Turpin takes their daughter Johanna as his ward, raising her as his own. He keeps her in her chamber at his estate like a prisoner, with her only connection to the outside world being her window. Judge Turpin plans to make Johanna his wife; the idea repulses her, and she rejects him.
Anthony Hope falls in love with her at first sight and vows to rescue her from her containment. Judge Turpin discovers her plot to escape and sends her to Fogg's Asylum for the mentally deranged. She is rescued by Anthony, posing as a wig maker's apprentice. During the escape, she is forced to kill Fogg, the Asylum owner, when Anthony cannot bring himself to. Disguised as a sailor, she is taken to Sweeney Todd's barber shop, where he has been longing to see her. When an insane beggar woman (later revealed to be her mother) pursues her in the upper room, Johanna hides herself in a large trunk. From there she presumably witnesses Todd's murders of the Beggar Woman and the Judge. She is nearly murdered by her father when he discovers her, as he does not recognize her as his daughter (being as he had never met her since infancy and because she is disguised as a young man). She survives when Mrs. Lovett screams in the basement bakehouse, distracting Todd and allowing her to escape. In the final scene, Johanna, Anthony and two policemen encounter Toby in the bakehouse, mindlessly turning the meat grinder, surrounded by the corpses of Todd, Lucy, Mrs. Lovett, and Turpin. Presumably she elopes with Anthony after the events of the show.
Much of Johanna's dialogue and lyrics subtly reflect that she may be suffering from living under lock and key, confined by the surveillance of an oppressive and more powerful party. During the song Kiss Me, for example, she repeatedly interrupts Anthony's plans for elopement, believing that she has heard the Judge returning home, before calming and embracing him. This more confined portrayal of her character differs from the earlier The String Of Pearls version, in which she is offered more autonomy and a perhaps more assertive or adventurous control over her destiny by dressing as a boy.
In Tim Burton's 2007 film adaptation, much of Johanna's music is cut out including the Kiss Me sequence and her part in the second act Quartet. She has little dialogue, reducing her part to a nearly silent role. After being rescued by Anthony, she doesn't kill Fogg, who is instead savagely murdered by the female inmates with Anthony's consent. The ending is changed slightly: instead of her running out of the Barber Shop, Todd, hearing Mrs. Lovett scream, deliberately lets her go (still without recognizing her) asking her to forget his face. He leaves her sitting in the barber chair, after which she is not seen again, leaving it unclear if she reunites with Anthony, as the film also suggests that Johanna finds the idea of eloping with Anthony to be a naive solution to her traumatic upbringing.
In this version Johanna is sixteen years old. In "Poor Thing", Mrs Lovett describes Johanna as the "year-old kid", which, added to the fifteen years Sweeney has spent in Australia, makes her sixteen.
-
Source: Johanna (character) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
