Producer Cameron Mackintosh was so impressed by Bill Buckhurst’s atmospheric production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical masterpiece when he saw it in Tooting, that he has transferred it to the West End and recreated Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop on Shaftesbury Avenue on a site between the Gielgud and Queen’s Theatres.
An audience of only 70 sits at long tables onto which the cast regularly leaps. The production is so up-close that it is an extraordinary experience and quite unlike any other Sweeney Todd you may have seen.
The show, lyrical and dissonant, musically and verbally dexterous, is well sung and well acted. The story-line is razor sharp. Todd (Jeremy Secomb) is a bitter and self-obsessed barber, who was sentenced to deportation on a trumped-up charge by a malevolent Judge (Duncan Smith), who drove his wife to madness and then stole his daughter. He takes a demented revenge.
His partner-in-crime is the manic Mrs Lovett (Siobhan McCarthy), who bakes the worst pies in London until she gets hold of human flesh, provided by Todd’s murder victims. She then becomes the most popular chef in town. The story moves to a powerful close. The bodies pile up in a sensational Victorian melodramatic manner and the finale plays like something out of Verdi’s Rigoletto.