Musical: Sweeney Todd

Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Musical thriller. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Libretto by Hugh Wheeler inspired by the eponymous play by Christopher Bond. Orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick. First performed on New York’s Broadway at the Uris Theater on 1 March 1979, directed by Harold Prince and produced by Richard Barr, Charles Woodward, Robert Fryer, Mary Lea Johnson and Martin Richards in collaboration with Dean and Judy Manos. While vengeance is a dish usually best served cold, Benjamin Baker prefers it hot. Sentenced to forced labor by a corrupt judge who violated his wife and kept his daughter as his ward, the barber has spent fifteen years filling his heart with hate for the genteel London society that treated him so badly. Back in Fleet Street under the name of Sweeney Todd, he reclaims his razors and old premises above the shop where Mrs. Lovett scrapes a living selling meat pies. When men start to disappear, rumors start to fly. Might the sallow barber and the slatternly baker next door be in cahoots? Nineteenth-century Britain was obsessed with penny dreadfuls, tales of the macabre inspired by true events and serialized in print. One of the products of this craze was the character Sweeney Todd for whom much later, in 1970, the English playwright Christopher Bond invented a past and motives borrowed from episodes of “The Count of Monte-Cristo” and “The Barber of Seville”. Nine years later, the genius that was the late Stephen Sondheim immortalized the vengeance of the barber of Fleet Street in his epic and wildly imaginative score. Hot on the heels of the triumphant “West Side Story” in 2022, the colorful Barrie Kosky takes on Sondheim and the stage of the Opéra national du Rhin with this hilarious and rip-roaring musical thriller, starring Scott Hendricks and Natalie Dessay under the direction of Bassem Akiki. In English, overtitled in French and German. Duration : 2h50 with intervals. Age limit : from 12 years.