London's Sweeney Todd Moves to Bigger Venue
Sweeney Todd, which features music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, tells the tale of the "demon barber of Fleet Street," fresh out of jail for a crime he did not commit, who cooks up a macabre revenge scheme with his dazzlingly demented accomplice, Mrs. Lovett.
Directed and designed by John Doyle, this production of Sweeney Todd opened at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in February and then embarked on a national tour. The show began a 12-week engagement at the Whitehall on July 22.
Matt Wolf of Variety said of the production: "Is it possible to get too much of a good--no, a great--thing? That's a legitimate worry as concerns Sweeney Todd, the 1979 Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical that has been appearing in Britain even more frequently than the hapless Victorian-era victims of Sweeney's savage razor. So the first thing to be said about director-designer John Doyle's simply thrilling new West End production--the venture began earlier this year at the tiny Watermill Theater in Newbury, west of London--is that it sounds, looks, indeed plays like no Sweeney you have ever seen before. It isn't just the scaled-down nature of the staging that's worthy of note: comparable Teeny Todds have been done before, on Broadway and elsewhere. But as socked across the footlights by a uniformly dazzling nine-person cast, all of whom pretty much play at least one instrument if not more, this Sweeney seems, to paraphrase the famous Sondheim lyric, 'to hear music that nobody's heard,' in the process turning a potentially over-familiar piece--at least in Britain--into something entirely fresh."
Headlined by Paul Hegarty as Sweeney Todd and Karen Mann as Mrs. Lovett, the cast also includes Michael Howcroft as Beadle, Rebecca Jackson as the Beggar Woman, Stephanie Jacob as Pirelli, Rebecca Jenkins as Johanna, Sam Kenyon as Tobias, David Ricardo-Pearce as Anthony and Colin Wakefield as The Judge.