There’s myth and fairytale bundled up in this ferociously entertaining production: the legend of the demon barber of Fleet Street – turned so brilliantly into a musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, from Christopher Bond’s original theatre adaptation – and the glorious story of this particular staging’s transfer to the West End.
First off, with its blood-spattered roots in the juicily excessive Victorian ‘penny dreadful’ tales consumed as eagerly as Mrs Lovett’s man-filled pies, Sondheim and Wheeler’s tale of Sweeney Todd’s elaborate revenge on the covetous judge who stole his wife and sentenced him to hard labour in Australia is pitched perfectly. It’s a Swiftian satire in song, only winking lasciviously at us in pretence of a morality lesson, with the venal and corrupt society of London ending up quite literally devouring itself.
Sondheim’s music and lyrics are playfully dark. His songs dance around the story in an off-kilter, syncopated frenzy as a welter of sharply witty lines cut a host of twisted relationships into vivid shapes. The meaty revenge plot that brings the barber(ous) Todd and Mrs Lovett together in a mutually beneficial partnership of throat-slashing and pie-baking mayhem is seasoned with a big pinch of knowingness and a huge amount of relish. But there is also time between razor slashes for regret and heartbreak. The blade occasionally pauses.
Tooting Arts Club’s production brings you right up close to all of this, foregrounding the intimacy and turning the experience into an exhilaratingly close-shave. The show’s original run played out amid the tables, chairs and counters of the real-life Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop. And set designer Simon Kenny has brilliantly recreated that experience on Shaftesbury Avenue, building a Formica-clad, no-frills cafe from the ground up in a space owned and temporarily loaned by Cameron Mackintosh.
It’s a stunning achievement, transforming what used to be a club into an utterly believable, thoroughly lived-in setting for director Bill Buckhurst’s ingeniously staged, in-your-face production. A staircase to one side leads to the room (ominously out of sight) to which Todd’s unsuspecting clients go, never to return. We watch all of this unfold while seated at tables just metres away from the serving counter behind which Mrs Lovett (a superb, deliciously bawdy Siobhan McCarthy) rolls pastry in a cloud of flour.
The resulting performance blazes with the same fierceness as the furnace in which London’s various priests, tailors and lawyers end up being baked into pies. The fine-voiced ensemble cast chat companionably with us before suddenly launching themselves onto tables, rubbing ‘elixirs’ into balding heads or eyeballing us with either lascivious or malevolent intent. It’s fearlessly and thrillingly done. When I saw the show, Jeremy Secomb’s roar of ‘move!’ as an enraged, mad-eyed Todd caused an entire row of people to shrink back against each other and into the wall.
While all the cast is great, a curly-haired, rascally Joseph Taylor stands out for the mix of cheekiness and poignancy he brings to Tobias Ragg, the boy who makes the mistake of trusting the ruthlessly pragmatic Mrs Lovett. His softly plaintive rendition of ‘Not While I’m Around’, full of uncertainty and fumbling bravado, really makes you care about his fate. In general, though, this production hits its best notes when it’s at its loudest. Arguably, it’s not the most nuanced staging, but that’s not the point.
This is event theatre in the heart of London – not in the sense of the red-carpeted, ring-fenced, empty glitz of a big West End show. Sandwiched between the Gielgud and Queens theatres, this production feels unique: it’s all about the buzz of people rubbing shoulders around tables, chatting and getting excited about what’s coming. And if a certain Stephen Sondheim hadn’t popped into a pie-shop last year, loved what he saw and sung its praises to Cameron Mackintosh over lunch, it might have never ended up here. And isn’t that, right there, a cracking story in itself?
