Sweeney Todd Confirmed for Fall Mounting on Broadway

As we previously mentioned, the London production of Sweeney Todd, which recently ran at the West End's New Ambassadors Theatre, is indeed coming to Broadway next fall. However, instead of being presented by the non-profit Roundabout Theatre Company, the musical will have a commercial production at a theater to be announced.

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 for 188 performances.

Directed and designed by John Doyle, this production of Sweeney Todd ran at the New Ambassadors Theatre from October 13, 2004 to February 5, 2005, 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 Roundabout Theatre Company had been casting for its presentation of the tuner, but, the organization never secured the rights to present it in New York. The Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd will instead be produced by Steven Baruch, Thomas Viertel, Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Ambassador Theatre Group, Adam Kenwright and Maidstone Productions.