What Does a ‘Sweeney Todd’ Revival Owe Us?

There was a blizzard the night my mother went with a friend to see Sweeney Todd in March of 1979, the month it opened. When she emerged from The Uris Theatre that evening, my mother had stars in her eyes. “It was as if the world had turned upside down,” she would later tell me. She and her friend walked to the subway in a silence broken only by the crunch of snow underfoot.

After its Broadway run, Sweeney Todd went on national tour, with George Hearn replacing Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury (thank goodness) staying on to play Mrs. Lovett. One performance of that tour—just one!—was recorded for a televised broadcast. Because there is a record of the show’s original look and feel, its Brechtian staging and the fine-tuned direction of its actors, its overpowering orchestration and eye-popping, soul-gutting performances, every subsequent generation of Sondheim lovers has been able to experience at least a percentage of that world-flipped-upside down shock and excitement that my mother described feeling when she left the Uris Theatre that night.

In Craig Zadan’s 1994 book Sondheim and Company, Lansbury says of the production:

The thinking theater people loved it. They realized what an extraordinary piece of work it was. And the New York audiences who had come to previews and didn’t particularly like