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On this day in New York · March 1, 1979

Sweeney Todd Carves Up Broadway

A Victorian penny dreadful about a murderous barber walked into the Uris Theatre and walked out an opera, with Angela Lansbury grinding the bodies into meat pies eight blocks from Times Square.

The facts

Opened
March 1, 1979, at the Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin Theatre)
Stars
Len Cariou as Sweeney Todd, Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett
Run
557 performances, closing June 29, 1980
Tony Awards
Nominated for 9, won 8, including Best Musical

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened at the Uris Theatre on March 1, 1979, directed by Hal Prince with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler. Len Cariou played the vengeful barber and Angela Lansbury played Mrs. Lovett, the pie shop owner who finds a use for his victims. The material came from a Victorian penny dreadful called The String of Pearls, later reworked into a 1970 stage play by Christopher Bond, but Sondheim and Prince blew it up into something closer to grand opera than melodrama. Critics who watched Todd's razor and Mrs. Lovett's oven that opening night were not entirely sure whether they had just seen a musical or something bigger.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. Because it is an opera. A modern American opera.

    Schuyler Chapin, former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, responding on opening night to critic Harold Clurman's demand to know why he had not staged it at the Met

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. Our production was larger in scope. Hal Prince gave it an epic sense, a sense that this was a man of some size instead of just a nut case.

    Stephen Sondheim, comparing the Broadway staging to the earlier London production

    Source: Wikipedia

Why it still matters

Sweeney Todd is the moment Broadway stopped apologizing for taking musicals seriously as drama, proof that a show with a throat-slitting barber and a cannibal pie shop could still win Best Musical and get compared, seriously, to the Met.

Sources

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