[In the following review, Weales presents a comparison of the original 1979 production and the 1989 revival of Sweeney Todd, praising Sondheim's score.]

The new Sweeney Todd at the Circle in the Square inevitably lacks the shock and surprise of the original 1979 production of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical. Although it is a restaging of last year's revival at the tiny York Theater it does not have the intimacy of the television version (now available on VCR) in which George Hearn is an electrifying Sweeney, even more appealingly frightening than was the admirable Len Cariou. The ghosts of two heavyweight Sweeneys hover over this production, but Bob Gunton holds his own in their company—a forceful, scary, sometimes touching, even playful Sweeney. Beth Fowler, as Mrs. Lovett, stakes her own claim to a character, some small corner of which is forever Angela Lansbury. The two principals are surrounded by a small but strong company (particularly Jim Walton as the sailor), but the real star of the show is Stephen Sondheim. His score gets more impressive with every hearing.

Although London, as a place and as an image of injustice and greed, is at the center of this tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the original production turned the city into a high tech phenomenon, presumably a metaphor for the ugly side of industrialization. The current production retains the shrill factory whistle to punctuate the narrative at particular grisly moments (sound as exclamation point), but it has neither the space nor the funds for so elegant a set. Instead, the director (Susan H. Schulman) and her designer (James Morgan) have chosen to wrap the audience in a tatty suggestion of the city. Playgoers, who sit as usual on three sides of the Circle playing area, enter beneath hangings that look like a cross between tattered banners and wet wash. Neither these nor the long blue streamers through which the company weaves during the “City on Fire” number seems to have anything to do with Todd's “great black pit” of a London. The audience is enveloped in the city because it is enveloped in the story and the music and the characters. Banners aside, Schulman and Morgan have found the means in the awkward space at the Circle to let the musical happen as it should. There is a permanent set at one end of the playing area, but at the other is a movable, detachable, multilevel set that gives the production the flexibility to present the intermeshing stories and the restlessness of the urban setting.

When the show first appeared, it was labeled—in the program, on the record cover, in the published version—“A Musical Thriller.” Musical it is and thrilling, but that is a reductive label that hardly does justice to a work concerned with both social and personal evil. Sweeney, a victim of class privilege, was transported on a false charge to clear the way for the judge's rape of his wife and theft of his daughter. He returns to take revenge on those who wronged him, but he ends by killing at random because “We all deserve to die!” This kind of vigilante justice might be taken as a special case of a Sweeney driven mad had not a recent Philadelphia Inquirer carried a story about four white men who beat two black men, waiting on separate corners for buses, because three blacks with no connection to the victims had earlier mugged the girlfriend of one of the baseball bat wielders. Mrs. Lovett, like a looter in St. Croix, has a more practical response to societal inequities. She bakes Todd's victims into meat pies because it “Seems an awful waste. … With the price of meat what it is.” The figures were almost totemic in the original, grand grotesques by virtue of their make-up and the performance of Cariou and Lansbury. They are more human as Gunton and Fowler play them, easier to sympathize with, even identify with, which is one of the points of the musical, to elicit our complicity because we find such murderous people so attractive.

I am not quite sure what is intended by a scene, not in the original, in which the judge flagellates himself while he sings of Johanna, his ward, Todd's daughter, whom he is planning to marry against her will. More human? A masochistic hypocrite? A creative mistake? I vote the last of these; Sondheim should not have restored or added it to the musical.