The Roundabout Considers Bringing London's Sweeney Todd to B'way

Will the Demon Barber of Fleet Street sing again on the Great White Way? Broadway.com has learned that the Roundabout Theatre Company is in talks to bring the acclaimed London production of Sweeney Todd, currently running at the New Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, to New York.

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. The show first opened on Broadway in 1979 and ran for 557 performances. A 1989 revival ran 188 performances.

Directed and designed by John Doyle, this production of Sweeney Todd began performances at the New Ambassadors Theatre on October 13, after a national tour and a run at the Whitehall Theatre. Matt Wolf of Variety said of the production: "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."

The show, headlined by Paul Hegarty as Sweeney Todd and Karen Mann as Mrs. Lovett, ends its run at the New Ambassadors on February 5. There is no word on whether any of the production's current cast members would make the trip to Broadway.

The Roundabout has a strong relationship with Sondheim. Last season the company presented the composer's Assassins at Studio 54, and it is currently producing a Pacific Overtures revival at the same venue. On April 11, 2005, the Roundabout will present Sondheim with the Jason Robards Award for Excellence in Theatre at its annual Spring Gala.

A Roundabout spokesperson could not confirm the company's plans to bring Sweeney Todd to New York.