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Long before Jack the Ripper, there was the legend of 'the demon barber of Fleet Street', the murdering barber who dispatched his customers with a flick of the razor and then had his lover serve up the remains in a tasty meat pie. Many people encountering the tale take it for just that – a legend. To get to the musical as we now have it, Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics, and playwright Hugh Wheeler, adapted an earlier work by Bond, who had sourced an even earlier melodrama by George Dibdin-Pitt. This had its foundation in a contemporary account of Todd's arrest, trial and execution.
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Before hearing this performance there were only two songs I really knew; Mrs Lovett's 'The worst pies in London' and 'Not while I'm around' and Daniel Evans's rendition of the latter as the gormless Tobias was a highlight of the evening. Philip Quast as Judge Turpin seems to have suffered the most from the scissors and was (as a result?) rather two-dimensional. Emma Williams trilled away prettily as Johanna and Adrian Thompson lent his considerable tenor top notes and comic gifts to Pirelli. Rosemary Ashe overdid the cockney a bit as the Beggar Woman, but Steve Elias was a well-realized Beadle. As the lovelorn Anthony, Daniel Boys came fresh from exposure in the BBC's Any Dream Will Do and sang limpidly yet winningly so was not out of place amongst many more experienced colleagues.
© Musicweb
