The 2023 revival of Sweeney Todd, adapted from Christopher Bond's 1973 play about the legendary Fleet Street barber, won Tony Awards for Best Lighting Design and Best Sound Design.
This 2023 Broadway revival has closed — check touring dates or other regional stagings of Sondheim's score rather than planning around a current New York run.
Sweeney Todd began as a Victorian penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, in which the barber is simply a murderer. Christopher Bond's stage version gave him a motive — a wife taken, a sentence served on a false charge — and it was Bond's rewrite that Stephen Sondheim saw in London and decided to set. Hugh Wheeler wrote the book. The result is the closest Sondheim came to opera: near-continuous music, a chorus that comments on the action, and the Dies Irae plainchant threaded through the ballad that opens and closes the evening.
What makes the score hard to shake is that the comedy and the horror share a musical language. The pie-shop duet in which two characters cheerfully categorise the professions of London by flavour is written as a patter number, and it is genuinely funny; the same intervals return, slowed and darkened, when the plot arrives at its consequences. The original 1979 Broadway production, staged by Harold Prince inside an enormous industrial set, won eight Tony Awards.
The 2023 revival at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, directed by Thomas Kail, took the opposite approach and stripped the machinery away, but restored the thing productions usually cut first: a twenty-six-piece orchestra playing Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations, the largest the show had been given on Broadway since the premiere. Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford played the barber and Mrs Lovett. It won two Tony Awards in 2023, for lighting and sound design, and closed on 5 May 2024.
The casting of a pop-classical tenor in the title role drew an audience that does not usually turn up for a piece this bleak, and some of the commentary treated that as a compromise. The orchestra suggests otherwise. Sondheim's score has always been more demanding than its reputation as a horror entertainment implies, and hearing it played at full strength is the argument the revival was making.
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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a 1979 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler. It is based on the 1970 play Sweeney Todd by Christopher Bond. The character of Sweeney Todd first appeared in a Victorian penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls.
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