Attending the tale of Sweeney Todd was my introduction to musical theatre. I was in my early 20s and a friend of mine had invited me to the summer show at Guildford School of Acting and Dance. Reluctantly, I went along, fearing jazz hands, happy talk and an overdose of The Kids From Fame. I was much too cool for that - or so I pretended.
I could hardly believe what I saw. So much of The Macabre that I had grown up with was there being sung by characters unrepentant in their violence and mendacity. My mother was a very enthusiastic reader of fairytales as bedtime stories and, not much later, strongly encouraged us to watch Hitchcock movies on TV, so I knew what I liked and I liked what I saw.
Here was that seductive world of dark delights, heroes and anti-heroes with their transgressive complications up on stage - and they were singing. I cannot say the bug bit instantly - I saw Sunday in the Park with George in the West End a few years later expecting more of the same and I was disappointed - but I had experienced my gateway drug and it wasn’t going away.
Crucially, and nobody does this better than Stephen Sondheim, I felt before I understood how the music deepened the drama, revealed the psychology of these picaresque villains and heightened the spectacle as it crashed into eyes and ears. Two decades later, I was to catch that same revelation again on seeing opera live - no surprise as Sweeney sits more than most shows in the intersection of the Musical Theatre/Opera Venn diagram.
So Sweeney Todd, especially after witnessing the famous Pie Shop Sweeney in an actual pie shop just ten minutes walk from home back in 2014, holds a special place in my imagination. Expectations were high - too high, I feared - as I marvelled at just how hostile Birmingham city centre is to visitors (but not so The Rep!)
The cast stand in a straight line as if facing a firing squad and step forward to sing that unforgettable introduction to time and place and, of course, to the demon barber of Fleet Street himself. Having read the director, Joe Murphy’s, notes in the programme that he had stripped everything back, I wanted to contest it immediately. After Harrington's Eel and Pie shop, this felt huge!
That sense of epic scale (and this an 800+ capacity house, so it’s not easily tricked up) comes from the second claim Murphy makes. He intends to position the storytelling, performances and score front and centre - no video, no hand-held mics and no meta. Seldom can a director have substantiated those oft-stated aims with such success.
In that triumph, he is helped by Elin Steele’s monochrome set that sits somewhere between the squalor of the rookeries of Victorian Clerkenwell that so inspired Charles Dickens and the dark shadows of Carol Reed’s Vienna in The Third Man. Overseeing the whole space is an ironic Lady Justice, no longer shining in the sun above the Old Bailey, but looking right at us with a wan eye behind the blindfold in Brum.
Murphy has assembled a superb cast that would (and I hope will) grace the West End. David Bedella swaps Sweeney’s razors for Judge Turpin’s gavel, the passage of a decade or so since I saw him squirt blood over my kids in Twickenham as the murderous barber, ripening his remarkable voice.
I wasn’t sure about him downplaying the hideous flagellation scene in which the judge lusts after his ward (Jo Stephenson, who gives Johanna some agency) but the age difference between them is enough these days to make Sondheim’s point. We don’t want walkouts.
Rahim Karimloo and Meow Meow (pictured above with the cast) anchor the narrative as Sweeney and Mrs Lovett, she of the mysteriously sourced best pies in London. Karimloo has to play straight man to his lover’s comic cuts, but he’s funny when he needs to be and, crucially, finds the righteous anger and poignancy as Todd spirals into a death cult of his own making. Meow Meow is never opts for an easy winning personality in her portrayal of Mrs Lovett, but she is consistently charismatic before a well-timed jolt or two reminds us that Lovett’s a psychopath too, if a lonely one.
There’s time for a lovely selection of cameos, the best a puppyishly bright-eyed Shem Omari James who plays Johanna’s paramour, Anthony Hope, in the clearest of tenors. That said, the singing is uniformly excellent, obeying Sondheim's demand for clear diction, with John Rigby’s reduction of the score for Leo Munby’s seven piece orchestra both effective and sensitive.
That I had to check if there really was a demon barber in Fleet Street (spoiler alert - there wasn’t) shows just how far the tale has penetrated popular culture, fueled by the rhyming slang of course. But, as this production demonstrates again, his presence looms largest in musical theatre, voices in harmony, music soaring above the shadows, creating an extraordinary character given full value in this superb production.
On the way home, I reflected that I might miss my next shave at my favourite barbers up in North Wales. Can’t be too careful now.
