‘Sweeney Todd’ Stage Review: Bloody Good Fun

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, the 1979 Stephen Sondhiem and Hugh Wheeler classic, is made fresh again with a new site-specific production imported from London. The original, which was performed in the oldest pie shop in London by the Tooting Arts Club, created a sensation across the pond. Now, New York City audiences can get in on the fun with a new production which opened Wednesday night at the Barrow Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village.

Crammed into a theater space remade to feel like a pie shop, the actors dance on the tables and engage the audience with vigor. Jeremy Secomb does an admirable job in the title role, bringing wit and humor to his blood-thirsty part. His accomplice Mrs. Lovett (Siobhan McCarthy) enlists the serial killer Sweeney to provide (human) meat for her pie shop while on carrying out his vendetta against the judge who sent him off to a penal colony in Australia — and now plans to wed his daughter to boot. Sweeney has always been about good macabre fun, and the Tooting Arts Club’s production kicks the meta level up several notches. Theater buffs will surely not want to miss their chance at another close shave.

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