Skip to Content

The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Sweeney Todd

Sutton Foster and Aaron Tveit in Thomas Kail’s revival of Sweeney Todd.

205 W 46th St, New York, NY 10036, USA

Time for your next stroll down Fleet Street, where the marquee for Thomas Kail’s operatically scaled hit revival of Sweeney Todd has acquired two sensational new names. Now it’s Sutton Foster manning the bakery, and if there’s an Olympics for worst pies in London, here’s the champ grabbing the gold. From behind the counter Foster pops up like a Jack-in-the-box, spewing half-chewed carrot, wiping her nose on the dough, and whacking it (the dough) with her rolling pin like Grendel’s mother on the loose in Beowulf. “The worst pies in London!,” she crows, pumping her fists as a straight-faced supposed stranger samples her wares. The house goes crazy. But Aaron Tveit’s new demon barber is a revelation, too. Has any Benjamin Barker—oops! “Sweeney Todd”!—stolen back from the Australian penal colony with such a glow of residual naïveté, so touching an ember of surviving hope? “There was a barber and his wife,” Mrs. Lovett sings, catching him up on the Gothic back story of the empty room above her shop, “and he was beautiful.” In looks, carriage, and his sweet tenor voice, Tveit absentmindedly embodies that beauty to an uncanny degree—and Foster lights up like a Christmas tree. —Matthew Gurewitsch