Sweeney Todd was revived (odd word considering the number of corpses in the play once the curtain goes down, ain't it?) on Broadway in 2005, adapting a small English production from earlier in that year. And boy, the times done changed.
the original production of Sweeney was HUGE, with a large cast, a full orchestra and a complicated set with slides and levers and diabolical machinery everywhere. The contemporary version is almost impossibly small, so small in fact that the actors, apart from fulfilling their roles as characters, also fill in as the production's musicians and the never leave the stage, even when their characters are killed off - the staging is so intricate that you almost forget that there's a musical going on and get sucked into watching, say, the piano player / Beadle play his instrument while singing backing vocals before jumping up in a break to move bits of the set around. It must be exhausting for the cast, but the energy they exude is infectious.
Doing it this way also allowed the production designers to do some interesting things with their casting - the two young lovers both play cello, and watching them sing a duet while cradling their instruments is the most delicately conceived love scene I've ever seen in theater - it isn't much of a stretch to imagine them, well, playing each other. Likewise the two symbols of authority, the Judge and the Beadle, both play trumpets, highlighting their rigid and militaristic natures. The symbolism involved in the whole thing is enrapturing. And then there's Patti LuPone, strutting around the stage and honking on a tuba. It sounds ridiculous but it's more disturbing than anything else.
One other change was made that flips the whole thing on its head - instead of a straightforward telling of the story by people standing over Todd's grave, the play was re-envisioned as a play put on by the inhabitants of a mental institution, kinda like Man of La Mancha with straight razors. Putting the obvious symbolism of that aside (Johanna, the young and slightly absent-minded love interest, ends up being committed to an institution in the play proper) staging it this way allows for a bit of whimsy as a necessary break from all the killing - characters who're killed off are dressed in blood-stained doctor's coats before retaking their seats at the sides of the stage, instruments in hand, and the piece of the set that gets repurposed the most is Sweeney's black coffin.
It's dense and, to the uninitiated, probably incomprehensible, but it's one of the best.
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