Sun. Nov. 4

Last day alert.

Who can resist a murderous barber and loving partner who turns his victims into meat pies? We couldn’t when we saw Tony-winning Angela Lansbury reprise her Broadway role a quarter-century or so back, and we can’t at the moment, as John Doyle’s more stark and abstract version of “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” starts a national tour in Boston. It’s up at the Colonial Theatre through Sunday Nov. 4, and it is indeed a lean, mean killing machine. Judy Kaye has Lansbury’s role as Mrs. Lovett. The poor, but ambitious, woman’s meat pie business is going down the tubes – she makes the worst in London! she boasts – until she concocts a a brilliant idea to of use the fresh meat of victims slashed by Sweeney Todd. Now, Todd (David Hess) has returned from a long stint in prison – he went in as Benjamin Barker – broke and looking for his wife in daughter in London. He’s a trifle ill-tempered, we soon learn, as he sings a rude/comical refrain concerning his general take on most of humankind, who are, of course, scum: “There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and it's filled with people who are filled with shit!/And the vermin of the world inhabit it!”
Not finding wife and daughter, Todd’s attitude gets worse. Believing his wife dead and his daughter Johanna (the lovely Lauren Molina) taken “ward” by a Judge Turpin  (Keith Butterbaugh), Todd looks to exact some revenge on the hypocritical judge – who wants more than just care-taking Johanna, if you catch my drift. Todd figures he’ll entice the Judge to his barber’s chair and slash his throat. He gets him to the chair in the first act, but, situations prevail, and he doesn’t get to do the deed. But Mrs. Lovett gets Todd in practicing mode by convincing him slicine up losers society won’t miss or care about, that is to turn them into corpses for her to grind (three times for best consistency) and bake. (Yes, these pies are big sellers. Which reminds me, I covered an Australian rock band once called the Longpigs. Why the name I asked? They said that when the English first came to Australia they found the cannibal Aboriginal people called their captured white invaders long pigs because they were long and tasted like pork.)
Is “Sweeney Todd” gruesome? Oh yes, Alice Cooper gruesome, the perfect Halloween season treat for the theatrical crowd. Comical – that too. This is Stephen Sondheim after all, where wit and melody do a smart dance and dissonance is not banished (at least here at the Colonial.)

 What makes this production novel is that the ten actors also play the instruments. (The Judge and Todd are both trumpeters, Johanna a cellist, etc.) and the arrangements of the songs are particularly prickly. Nothing very lush. No, it’s rather grim, wry stuff. There’s a smattering of stage blood, when the murder’s are signaled visually by harsh red stage lighting and a truly dissonant shriek. The dead person then gets up and dons a white, blood-spattered smock. By the end of the play, quite a few of these folks are walking around. (So to speak).
This is a Broadway Across America production, but my first thought was that it could be something staged by the American Repertory Theatre. Indeed, in lighting, music and mood it’s reminiscent of the A.R.T.’s recent “Oliver Twist,” another story about dirty, uncaring old London. (It's set in the time of the Industrial Revolution, after all, and if we know anything we know it's how industry can grind up people.) I’ve always enjoyed it when horror and comedy can merge without either looking stupid and British director Doyle does that expertly here. The story, in fact, begins and ends with “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” with a young fellow, Tobias (Edmund Bagnell) in a straightjacket singing lead. Hess is a towering, glowering Todd and Kaye is all malevolent sweetness-and-light. She sings a lovely song about taking their slice-and-bake business to the seaside, setting up life as a proper couple, not just as a barber who happens to have a shop that sits over a meat pie maker. Todd’s less enamored of that idea. He’d rather do his business – and business is good – right in London, certainly up until he finally lures the smarmy judge back for a shave. We’re not going to tell you how it ends – well, we did already, a reprise of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” – but you’ll probably exit with a tight little smile on your face. Tickets: $91 - $42.50. It’s up closes today Sunday Nov. 4 with shows at 2 and 7:30.

106 Boylston St., 866-523-7469 www.BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com/boston