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:

18 December 2003

Covent Garden's Royal Opera House has finally staged its first musical. Not just any musical either. It's Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's masterwork of obsession and revenge, first seen on Broadway in 1979 and in London a few hundred yards from the Opera House a year later, in an all-too-short-lived production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Though London didn't initially embrace a show actually set here, it has had any number of reclamations since, from the fringe to the National and even a British opera company (the Leeds-based Opera North).

So Covent Garden is wrestling with a lot of ghosts and expectations in adding Sweeney to the repertoire. For its house debut, the ROH has marshalled some of its greatest operatic guns, including Sir Thomas Allen in the title role, Felicity Palmer as Mrs Lovett, Rosalind Plowright as the Beggar Woman, Bonaventura Bottone as Pirelli and Robert Tear as the Beadle.

This means...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (62.6.139.13) - 6 January 2004:

I was SO disappointed with this. The production at Sadlers Wells last year knocked it into a cocked hat. Desperately short on scenic invention (obviously a cut price production), the stage of the ROH seemed far too big and soulless for a show which gains shock value from intimacy. And why have surtitles when its sung in English? All this acheived was to spoil the jokes before they were out of the performers' mouths. The oven, which should be dark, sooty and terrifying, looked like a 18th century chinoiserie wardrobe. And those bloody irritating curtains!!!!!! If it hadnt been for Flic Palmer's portrayal of Mrs. Lovett, a role she was born to play, then I think I probably wouldnt have bothered returning after the interval. ...

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