Looking for a gateway into the musical as a genuine art form? Walk through the Victorian gates of London and make your way towards Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's macabre masterpiece first staged on Broadway in 1979, is now prowling the stage at Dubai Opera.
With a name like Sondheim's attached, it's tempting to lump all the credit his way. He is one of the great masters of the form after all – writing music, lyrics or both for Into the Woods, West Side Story, Sunday in the Park with George, Company, Follies and more. And in some ways, this could be called his most personal effort, with the titular serial killer a crazed stand-in for Sondheim himself, according to his friends.
But in reality, this towering show was a masterwork more than 100 years in the making. It began in 1846 with the publication of the serialised penny dreadful The String of Pearls, which introduced Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street as a serial killer who kills his customers by pulling a lever next to his barber chair and dropping them through a trap door, with his accomplice Mrs Lovett turning them into meat pies to dispose of the evidence.
It was a fantastically lurid tale, but it wasn't particularly layered on a human level until 1970, when the British playwright Christopher Bond adapted it into a play and imbued the horror story with the tragic heft of Victor Hugo, blending Sweeney Todd with the Count of Monte Cristo.
In his version, Sweeney had fallen victim to an evil judge who coveted his wife, banished to prison only to return 15 years later as a broken man ready to claim vengeance by any means necessary. And while still morbid, it's a deeply moral tale, in which the still-sympathetic antihero is shown in heartbreaking fashion just how much he still has to lose, even when he thinks everything has already been taken from him.
Sondheim saw Bond's story as the stuff of great opera, and, in turning it into a musical, came as close to reaching the heights of Verdi or Wagner as anyone before or since, a richly layered piece of work full of nuance, wit and sheer beauty. It was also such a reinvention and challenge to what the Broadway musical had become that it changed the form forever.
Over the past 46 years, successful stagings across the world have also shown how versatile Sweeney Todd can be. Sometimes it's an indictment of industrial capitalism, other times it's a gory and glorious maximalist mess, with blood spraying and bones crunching. To those in 2025, it's probably best known for its film adaptation starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter and directed by Tim Burton, some of the best work in their careers, but never reaching the heights that it hit on the stage.
The Dubai Opera staging, running until Saturday, harkens back to Sondheim's original intentions for his "musical thriller", albeit less gruesome. There are sound effects for when the bodies thump to the ground from the barber's chair, but there are no sprays of blood or crunches of bone. But the performances harken back to the original cast, with Sweeney Todd performed as a tortured and obsessive tragic figure, and Mrs Lovett played in exaggerated fashion as if she just wandered in from a Victorian music hall.
The intricately written music, which in mood harkens back as much to Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score as it does to Wagner, remains as bleak and beautiful as ever, stirringly performed and emotionally effective. The power of the story, which feels as grand and unfathomable as the great Greek tragedies, has lost none of its potency.
This is one not to be missed, and one to drag along your friends who think that musicals have become a pithy commercial endeavour full of overly-familiar radio tunes by ageing pop stars and half-heartedly adapted film stories.
