FAMILIAR HAUNTS

A sonically thrilling revival of “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

“There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit/And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it,” a stone-faced Sweeney Todd snarls, after the enthusiastic sailor Anthony burbles at him about coming home to London. Their conversation is the first in the much anticipated Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” at the Lunt-Fontanne—and, particularly with Times Square just outside, the most relatable. The great black pit’s nearby, but we’re all pie-eyed Anthonys. There’s no scowl dour enough, no blood spurt red enough, to quell a theatre full of people eager for this new production of Stephen Sondheim’s beloved horror operetta, starring the pop-classical superstar Josh Groban as Sweeney and the Tony Award winner Annaleigh Ashford as his landlady, Mrs. Lovett. A twenty-sixperson orchestra plays like mad under the stage, but the audience, on the verge of mob hysteria, provides its own dynamics, screaming before Sweeney’s razor ever catches the light.

We take our seats looking at the underside of a great bridge, a huge brick arch occupying most of the stage. The lighting designer, Natasha Katz, makes the night in this shadowy realm seem deeper with fog and moonlight—we’re down where the mud larks go, those who scavenge the Thames’s banks, looking for flotsam to sell. The director, Thomas Kail, and his choreographer, Steven Hoggett, start the show by making the ensemble seem to materialize from the blackness. “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” the company sings, hauling Sweeney himself up out of the ground and hurling him toward us. His white face and ratty beard make him look like something that the mud larks have fished out of the river.