Nonesuch
2006
Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street
About This Album
Composer Stephen Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler's 1979 musical Sweeney Todd, based on Christopher Bond's modern version of the bloody revenge play originally written by George Dibdin-Pitt in 1847, has had two kinds of revivals since the initial Broadway production, ones like that staged in repertoire by the New York City Opera since 1984, which perform it on a large scale and treat it virtually as an accepted classical work, and ones like that staged by the Off-Off-Broadway York Theatre Company (with a transfer to Broadway in 1989), which take a minimalist approach and emphasize the drama (an approach dismissed by some critics as "Teeny Todd"). Director John Doyle hewed more to the latter when he first staged the show at a small theater in northern England, even to the point of requiring a reduced cast of actors to do double duty as musicians. At the same time, he only added to the work's disturbing nature by making the characters genuinely disturbed in a show-within-a-show structure that had it being put on by the inmates of an insane asylum. ("Marat/Todd!" crowed those same critics, recalling the 1965 play Marat/Sade that took a similar approach.) The result gained enough attention to transfer to London's West End and inspire the second Broadway revival in 2005.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,3,4,5,7,9,10,14 and 15)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,6 and 7)

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