NEW YORK — Many Broadway revivals of musicals from decades past insist on revising, reconsidering and imposing. Thomas Kail’s triumphant revival of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” does none of that. At once funny, scary and disarmingly moving, this must-see production is content to peel back any cobwebs or artifice and let Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Gothic revenge tragedy of a musical howl anew with the agony of human injustice and the ameliorating constancy of love.
All of Sondheim’s musicals have risen exponentially in fame and commercial viability since the Great One’s death. But “Sweeney,” first seen under Hal Prince’s direction in 1979, was always his most accessible and populist show: A penny dreadful-inspired thriller set in Victorian London about a vengeful barber who returns after being transported to Australia on trumped-up charges, only to use his razors to slash the throats of enemies in his chair and then pack them off as tasty fillings for Mrs. Lovett’s struggling pie shop, conveniently located downwind and downstairs.
They’ve long been Broadway’s most lovable cannibalistic murderers, and they have never been more fun, nor more potent, than when played by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford in a shrewdly deceptive production that makes you think you are watching a minimalist staging designed by Mimi Lien and evasively lit by Natasha Katz, until the mechanizing brutality of Victorian London explodes all over the stage before you and kills whatever humanity you thought was left.
