Reviews

The Times

Let’s start at the end, just like Stephen Sondheims’ gorgeously grisly musical does. After almost three hours of being seduced and scared by thwarted love, warped morality and vengeful hairdressing, a Monday-night audience rose to its feet in delight. Quite right.

Jonathan Kent’s revival was a huge hit when it opened in Chichester last autumn with a cast of 30 led by Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton. It deserves a big audience here too. From the moment that an industrial whistle blows and the ensemble sings an operatic chorus from high up on Anthony Ward’s metal set, the mood is dark and entrancing. Kent has moved the story from the 1840s to the 1950s, yet the characters remain confined in a charcoal London illuminated by streaks of yellow light. By the time that Ball enters as Sweeney – the escaped convict who has come home to kill the judge who wrongly imprisoned him, raped his wife and adopted his daughter – we’re already halfway to Hell.

Yet this is a darkly funny evening in which a perfectly assembled story – adapted in 1979 by Sondheim (music and lyrics) and High Wheeler (book) from a play by Christopher Bond – is propelled by a score that turns the tropes of the Great American Musical to its own murky ends.

Kent handles the Grand Guignol with panache. But the real horror comes from the palpable progress towards damnation as our vengeful hero loses his moral bearings amid slit throats and human pies.

Ball is terrific. Unrecognisable with his bears and side-parted hair, he sings with the chilling purpose of a man desperate to turn himself into an angel of death. At the start he sings the word “naïve” with a sense of derision that suggests Sweeney will never again permit himself to be fallible. He sings it again at the end with the grim irony of a man who got it all wrong.

And Staunton? Startlingly good. She finds something surprising but true in every line as Mrs Lovett, the pie-shop owner, from the grimly amused fascination with which she greets Sweeney’s first corpse to the wilfully blinkered romanticism of By the Sea, in which she sings of domestic bliss for her and Sweeney. You won’t see a richer performance this year.

There is excellent support too, from John Bowe as Judge Turpin, Peter Polycarpou, Lucy May Barker as Sweeney’s daughter Johanna, Luke Brady as the sailor who loves her and James McConville as our antiheroes’ scrawny surrogate son, Tobias. But what really registers is how perfectly Kent controls the tone as we flip between the romantic and the discordant, the horrific and the comical, sometimes within a line. It’s an evening of glorious shades of grey; an absolute triumph.

The Guardian


One test of a true work of art is that it is open to multiple possibilities. Since its premiere in 1979, I have seen Stephen Sondheim's dark masterpiece staged everywhere from New York's barn-like Uris Theatre to Covent Garden and the Cottesloe. But Jonathan Kent's production, which has now transferred from Chichester, and which leaves me grasping for superlatives, has given the piece a fresh look without destroying its essential fabric.

Since Sondheim's musical derives, via a Christopher Bond adaptation, from 19th-century melodrama, it has long been played as a Victorian period piece about a vengeful barber. But Kent and his designer, Anthony Ward, who sets the action inside what looks like a dilapidated factory, have shifted the perspective.

We now watch as a 20th-century chorus of the working poor retell the legendary fable of the demon barber. This has the dual advantage of retaining the story's Victorian echoes while reminding us that inequality and injustice remain a permanent scar on city life.

But Kent's chief achievement is to heighten the violent shifts of tone in Sondheim's masterly music and lyrics and in Hugh Wheeler's book. You see this from the start, when the chilling prologue, with its screams, factory whistles and echoes of the Dies Irae gives way to the comic spectacle of Mrs Lovett making her disgusting pies, filled with the vermin that Sweeney sees as characteristic of London. And this ability to constantly unsettle us recurs throughout the evening. Sweeney's terrifying Epiphany, when his determination to avenge his wife's death turns into a rage against the universe, is quickly followed by A Little Priest which jauntily sets the idea of consuming human flesh to a waltz tune in three-four time.

The performances are as bold and striking as the concept. Michael Ball's anti-hero starts with the huge advantage of responding to Sondheim lyrics, which tell us: "Inconspicious Sweeney was, Quick and quiet and clean 'e was."

Ball presents us with a skilled barber nursing a private grievance, who only gradually turns into a demonic serial killer. Instead of playing the end from the beginning, Ball charts every stage of Sweeney's descent. And I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that he reminded me periodically of that other solitary outsider, Britten's Peter Grimes.

Imelda Staunton, with equal command, plays Mrs Lovett as a pinafored loner whose residual moral sense is quickly overcome by her love of profit and lust for Sweeney.

I shall never forget the way that her cries of horror, at detecting the first of his victims in a trunk, gradually turn into semi-orgasmic moans of pleasure. Staunton not only gives the evening its comic counterpoint, but confirms her great gift for discovering the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.

Luke Brady as a lyrical sailor, Lucy May Barker as Sweeney's imprisoned daughter, John Bowe as a self-flagellating judge, and Peter Polycarpou as his sadistic henchman are all first rate, and both Nicholas Skilbeck's musical direction and Paul Groothuis's sound design ensure every word is audible.

If one were mean, I suppose one could say, as Tynan did of Gypsy, that the show tapers off from perfection in the first act to mere brilliance in the second. But this is a superb achievement which proves that Sondheim's musical thriller has genuine social resonance.

Daily Mail

Where there’s yuck there’s brass. That may be the calculation behind Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

In this transfer from Chichester it is staged and sung and acted with verve. Professionalism at every turn. A top band.

For all this showmanship, the nastiness overwhelms. Vindictive barber Todd and his accomplice Mrs Lovett turn innocent (and some not so innocent) victims into meat pies.

A boy finds himself eating a dead man’s hair and fingernails. Blood spurts from throats. There are clever rhymes about the greasiness of dead  lawyers’ bodies.

I left the Adelphi impressed but sickened. Sweeney Todd is a  dark night.
Imelda Staunton deploys all her comic talent as Mrs Lovett to try to alleviate the tale’s grisliness. It does not matter that her voice pinks and rattles like an Italian moped engine.

Every time her sparrow frame steps on stage, the pace quickens. This is no bad thing, for musical director Nicholas Skilbeck  does not rush Sondheim’s  schematic score.

Michael Ball’s Todd wears a  whitened face in his first scene, along with a long lick of straight, black hair.

The psychotic Todd has returned to London from the penal colony  of Australia.