Sweeney Todd

Synopsis

The demon barber of Fleet Street who used to kill customers and dispose of them in meat pies! Set in Victorian London. Sweeney is bent on revenge for the death of his wife and has started to murder indiscriminately - and suddenly meat for the pie shop next door is no longer in short supply!

Our Review:

28 July 2004

In an interview with Whatsonstage.com, Guardian drama critic Michael Billington explained why Stephen Sondheim’s Victorian thriller about the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, is his favourite musical. Sondheim, said Billington, “demonstrates a great understanding of the form”, which means that Sweeney Todd is capable of working “at every kind of level - performed as a chamber piece, a vast musical or an operatic epic”.

In this Watermill Theatre production, director John Doyle has opted for the more modest – and self-consciously so - end of the spectrum, which is entirely fitting for the intimacy of the West End’s most exciting new venue, the Trafalgar Studios, where it’s now transferred.

All of teeming late 18th-century London is rendered by a cast of just nine, who not only play the characters but also the ab...

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Latest User Review

195.93.34.12) - 25 January 2005:

I was very much looking forward to seeing this, as I had read such wonderful things about the production and the talented cast. While I don't contest that the cast are indeed multi-talented, I did feel that we lost out of hearing great vocal performances given the casting restraints of a show with actor/musicians. I was also not overly impressed with the standard of acting, although Karen Mann was superb. I love Sweeney but this production did not excite me at all. We missed so many wonderfully funny lines and also a moment near the end of the show that normally hits the audience right between the ribs, just did not have any effect at all. Dissapointed......

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