Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street returns a wrongly transported barber to the city that ruined him, carrying a razor, a false name and a single intention. Downstairs, his landlady is struggling to sell pies made of almost nothing. Between them they arrive at a solution.

Benjamin Barker comes home as Sweeney Todd to find his wife gone and his daughter kept as the ward of the judge who destroyed his family. His plan for revenge is patient and precise until it is neither, and Mrs Lovett — practical, besotted and entirely without scruple — turns his violence into a business. Around them a young sailor falls in love, a beggar woman keeps appearing, and the pies begin to sell extremely well.

Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics and Hugh Wheeler the book, working from a nineteenth-century melodrama by way of Christopher Bond's 1973 play. It first opened in 1979, took the Tony Award for Best Musical, and has since been staged at every possible scale, from full orchestra to a handful of actors playing their own instruments.

The score is among the most demanding in the repertoire: choral, contrapuntal and closer to opera than to musical comedy, with jokes of real cruelty running through it. The show is funnier far more often than its reputation suggests, and the comedy is exactly what makes the horror land.

It suits audiences who want a musical with teeth and are not looking for reassurance. It works best live, where the sound of a full company singing the ballad at close range is the reason the piece has survived.