The demon barber who slits his clients' throats is an urban myth celebrated in print first as a "penny dreadful," or serialized story of scandal and murder, in London in 1845. The razor and the strop continued to hold a fascination, at least until the technological advance of Mr. Gillette's safety razor put them at some remove. That wicked barber had figured in 13 earlier versions on radio stage and screen before this 1979 piece by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. They adapted British dramatist Christopher Bond's 1973 stage play, which had reimagined Todd as the wronged party, bent on revenge.
SummerStock Austin gives us their vivid imagining of Sweeney Todd's world. It's a London of grotesques and dog-eat-dog, corresponding to that which Thomas Hobbes imagined as pre-dating civil society: "a war of all against all " where lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The self-assured Judge Turpin and his agent the unctuous Beadle Banford represent the genteel classes who oppress the poor and regard them as little more than animals. Into this morass and degradation comes Sweeney Todd, unjustly condemned many years before and now escaped from a penal colony. Pie baker Mrs. Lovett tells him that his beautiful wife has died and that his infant daughter Johanna is a ward of the Judge. Mrs. Lovett restores to him his case of razors -- Todd's "little friends" -- and the elaborate revenge plot begins.
Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
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