The Stage

Sweeney Todd

Published Monday 13 June 2011 at 12:19 by Andrew Liddle

Stephen Sondheim’s version of the old melodrama dates from 1979 and belongs to a time when musicals were being written as much to shock as to entertain. This brilliant revival by Elizabeth Newman certainly does both in equal measure.

Ruth Alexander Rubin (Mrs Lovett) and Tobias Beer ( Sweeney Todd) in Sweeney Todd at the Octagon, Bolton Photo: Ian Tilton

The early crushing of the songbird by the detestable beadle (Lloyd Gorman) perhaps warns us that there will be no pretty tunes around. Indeed, Sondheim’s score has a good deal that seems atonal and, for him, unusually unmelodic - in keeping with the dark content, no doubt.

Tobias Beer’s rich voice, in the title role, might surprise many who know him chiefly from his recent roles here, in The Hired Man and David Copperfield. What he gains in vocal expression, however, he deliberately sacrifices in emotional range, having to restrain himself to play, quite superbly, the cold, ruthless killer who takes well-merited revenge to epic proportions.

It is, predictably, the hugely talented actress-musician, Ruth Alexander Rubin, who steals the show in the play’s richest role as Mrs Lovett, Sweeney’s moll and accomplice. She receives wonderful support from, among others, Adam Barlow - one of the great emergent talents at the moment - as the ragamuffin Tobias Ragg, and the community company of local amateurs who excel themselves in a glorious pie brindisi.

John Addison does splendid work as Anthony Hope, in love with Sweeney’s daughter Johanna (Sarah Vezmar), but his efforts at heroism are as much defeated by the tragic tendency of the plot as by Mark Heenehan’s gloriously loathsome self-flagellating villain, Judge Turpin.