In his new role as artistic director of Birmingham Rep, Joe Murphy has got off to a flier, said Alison Brinkworth on WhatsOnStage. Having given us a “sparkling” “Midsummer Night’s Dream” for his main stage debut, we now have this production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, and it is “dazzling” – superbly designed, thrillingly cast and “sure to bring goosebumps of excitement”.
Murphy has deployed a fairly small company, accompanied by a superb seven-piece live orchestra, but as every performance is a head-turner, the evening feels “epic”.
Sondheim’s 1979 musical – about the late 18th-century London barber whose quest for vengeance on the corrupt judge who raped his wife, had him banished and stole his infant daughter leads him into multiple gruesome murders – is given a “grandly monumental staging” that suits the story’s “operatic sweep”, while releasing the musical from any “Victoriana clutter”, said Holly Williams in The Stage.
Fittingly for a tale about how violence corrupts, a vast angel of justice hangs between two staircases, while soot spreads up pale walls and white costumes like a “creeping moral stain”.
Ramin Karimloo brings a “fabulously demonic darkness to his portrayal of Sweeney”, a man who clutches his “personal pain like a knife”, said Rachel Halliburton in The Times. And his performance is more than matched by that of the cabaret star Meow Meow, who makes for a “rip-roaringly Hogarthian” Mrs Lovett, the yellow-clad accomplice who bakes the demon barber’s victims into pies (here, revenge is a dish served hot). But in this production there isn’t a single weak link, “vocally or dramatically”.
In a staging notable for its clarity, visually and otherwise, the singers’ diction is as sharp as a scalpel cutting through ice – “not one sliver of Sondheim’s spikily subtle wit goes missing”; and Leo Munby’s musical direction “brilliantly captures the tale’s jagged emotions”. All told, it’s a deliciously blood-curdling production that “goes for the jugular but ultimately captures your heart”.
Showing at The House, Birmingham Rep. Until 15 August.