Sweeney Todd in Concert

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Hugh Wheeler

Anthony Gabriele, conductor

Séimí Campbell, director
Sarah Travis, music supervisor

‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd… the demon barber of Fleet Street’ 

The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), by arrangement with Music Theatre International, proudly partners with Irish Youth Musical Theatre (IYMT) and the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) to present a concert performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler.

The roles of Sweeney Todd, the titular barber, and his equally demented accomplice, pie shop-owner, Mrs Lovett, will be played by professional actors, details of whom will be announced in due course. All other roles will be cast on the basis of open auditions for young actors in training and recently graduated actors. Such roles include Johanna Barker, Anthony Hope, Tobias Ragg, Judge Turpin, The Beadle, Beggar Woman, Adolfo Pirelli, Jonas Fogg, as well as a Featured Ensemble and Chorus.

About Sweeney Todd

First staged on Broadway in 1979, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has claimed its place in theatres, concert halls, opera houses, and, in Tim Burton’s star-studded 2007 Hollywood adaptation, on film.

Part musical thriller, part Victorian melodrama, part macabre cartoon, it is one of the truly great modern musicals, lauded with prestigious awards on both sides of the Atlantic.

A thrill-a-minute experience of grim horror and gruesome fun, at its heart are two of musical theatre’s most unforgettable characters: Sweeney Todd, the titular barber, and his equally demented accomplice, pie shop-owner, Mrs Lovett, who develop a lucrative but murderous sideline in manufacturing ‘the best pies in London’.

Sweeney Todd first appeared in a Victorian ‘penny dreadful’ in 1846 – since when he has come to rival Jack the Ripper for notoriety – although it was Christopher Bond’s 1970 play offering an explanation for his murderous ways that caught Sondheim’s eye and imagination.

Boasting one of Sondheim’s most accomplished and accessible scores, it has two stand-out songs: the yearning hymnal to Todd’s daughter, ‘Johanna’, and the lilting, loving ‘Not While I’m Around’.

Elsewhere the recurring menace of ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ alternates with the black humour of ‘The Worst Pies in London’, the tongue-in-cheek Grand Guignol of ‘A Little Priest’, and the pretty Victorian pastiche of ‘Green Finch and Linnet Bird’ and ‘By the Sea’. 

Sondheim himself described Sweeney Todd as a ‘dark operetta’, but added: ‘what [it] really is a movie for the stage’.

Presented by the National Symphony Orchestra in partnership with Irish Youth Musical Theatre and the Royal Irish Academy of Music