About the work
Stephen Sondheim's musical „Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" was premiered on Broadway in 1979 with book by Hugh Wheeler. The work is regarded as Sondheim's masterpiece and as one of the most ambitious music-theatre pieces of the late twentieth century — a sung-through revenge drama at the boundary between musical and opera.
Plot
London in the 1840s. The barber Benjamin Barker returns from a fifteen-year exile in Australia under the name Sweeney Todd. He had been falsely sent into exile by the corrupt Judge Turpin to gain access to Barker's young wife Lucy. Lucy poisoned herself; Turpin took Barker's daughter Johanna as his ward. Todd reopens his old barber shop in Fleet Street, above the meat-pie shop of Mrs Lovett, who provides his old razors. Todd plans revenge. After the failure of his first attempt to kill the judge in the chair, he kills indiscriminately — and Mrs Lovett bakes the bodies into her pies, which sell brilliantly across London. Todd's apprentice Toby and Anthony, the sailor in love with Johanna, become entangled in the action. The judge finally falls under Todd's razor. Then Todd recognises in the homeless beggar woman he has just killed his lost wife Lucy. He hurls Mrs Lovett into her own oven and slits his own throat as Toby comes upstairs.
Cultural significance
Sweeney Todd is regarded as one of the great works of the American music-theatre canon. Sondheim's score (especially „A Little Priest", „Pretty Women", „The Ballad of Sweeney Todd") is a high point of the genre. Tim Burton's 2007 film with Johnny Depp brought the work to a worldwide audience. Productions by Hal Prince (premiere), John Doyle (Broadway 2005, with Patti LuPone) and Thomas Kail (Broadway 2023, with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford) shape the performance tradition.