BWW Preview: Fleet Street Penny Novels—Ensemble Does SWEENEY TODD

Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd,
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were seen again...

These foreboding lines in the early moments Sweeney Todd paint an ominous picture of the events to come in Stephen Sondheim's classic musical. Ensemble's 2015-2016 season-opening production, Sweeney Todd transports audiences to Fleet Street, a seedy avenue of Victorian-era London. In a flat above Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pie Emporium, Sweeney Todd (David Studwell), the mild-mannered barber-turned murderous psychopath, sharpens his razors. Todd, who has returned to London to exact revenge on the corrupt Judge who expelled him from England as a criminal, develops a grotesquely efficient, mutually beneficial business venture with unscrupulous baker, Mrs. Lovett (Heather Ayers): Todd slits the throats of his patrons and dumps the bodies in a basement meat-grinder; Mrs. Lovett bakes them into savory (and profitable) meat pies. A delicious example of the warped glee of Sondheim's dark humor, Sweeney Todd is a show with aspects sly, gripping, lovely, and tantalizing.

Originally an intermittent character in the urban-legend lore of Dickens-era penny novels, Sweeney Todd is, in the Sondheim-era, an eminent antihero of musical theatre. In this twisted tale of satisfyingly cruel comeuppance, Sweeney sings robust and dissonant of love warped by madness and revenge. The original Broadway Production of Sweeney Todd (1979) won eight Tony Awards, and the show's popularity has grown in the ensuing decades. Ensemble's upcoming production, directed by Jonathan Fox, is an appropriate horror-story musical for the Halloween Season.

Sweeney Todd features David Studwell, Heather Ayers, Norman Large, Karole Foreman, Chris Kauffman, Michaelia Leigh, Justin Charles Cowden, Craig McEldowney, and Michael Spaziani.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at The New Vic

Music & lyrics by: Stephen Sondheim
Book by: Hugh Wheeler
Directed by: Jonathan Fox

October 8 - 25, 2015
ensembletheatre.com