Aug 30, 2004 12:00 a.m. - Yahoo! News - Entertainment - Reviews
Variety - Is it possible to get too much of a good --- no, a great --- thing? That's a legitimate worry as concerns "Sweeney Todd," the 1979 Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical that has been appearing in Britain even more frequently than the hapless Victorian-era victims of Sweeney's savage razor. So the first thing to be said about director-designer John Doyle's simply thrilling new West End production --- the venture began earlier this year at the tiny Watermill Theater in Newbury, west of London --- is that it sounds, looks, indeed plays like no "Sweeney" you have ever seen before. It isn't just the scaled-down nature of the staging that's worthy of note: comparable "Teeny Todds" have been done before, on Broadway and elsewhere. But as socked across the footlights by a uniformly dazzling nine-person cast, all of whom pretty much play at least one instrument if not more, this "Sweeney" seems, to paraphrase the famous Sondheim lyric, "to hear music that nobody's heard," in the process turning a potentially overfamiliar piece --- at least in Britain --- into something entirely fresh.
Musicals.Net :: View Forum - Sweeney Todd Movie tales, Jennyanydots, 0, 25, Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:37 am Jennyanydots View latest Limewire, Acquisition, Sweeney Tod...
