At first glance, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a gothic horror story, drawing both from the Victorian penny dreadful novel that inspired it and the suspense movies that Stephen Sondheim loved. In Grand Guignol stagings of the show—the most recent New York revival had characters pour blood back and forth between buckets—this horror can overwhelm the moral content of the show, particularly among audiences who are used to straightforward, bloodthirsty thrillers.

The show traces the vengeance of Sweeney Todd. He was once a peaceful barber, but, when a corrupt judge lusts for his wife, Lucy, the magistrate has Sweeney deported to Australia, rapes his wife, and steals his daughter Johanna. When Sweeney returns to London, he seeks revenge, and establishes himself as a barber. He partners with his landlady, Mrs. Lovett, to butcher his customers and bake them into pies, while he lays his plans to capture the judge.

For John Lahr, a critic of Sondheim’s work, the show is deeply and hopelessly savage:

“A society that feels itself irredeemably lost requires a legend of defeat. And Sondheim's shows are in the vanguard of this atmosphere of collapse. He shares both the culture's sense of impotence and its new habit of wrenching vitality from madness (Sweeney Todd revels in murder).”

But far from “making alienation beautiful,” as Lahr claims, Sondheim has revealed a world far more monstrous than his demon barber protagonist. If Lahr cannot recognize the work as a tale of good and evil, it is because he is accustomed to the world of early musical theatre, without irony and existentialism. In Sweeney Todd, Sondheim and Wheeler have succeeded in writing a morality fable for a world that doubts the very existence of good and evil.

Sondheim’s Sweeney is far more sensitive to moral concerns than the Sweeney of either the original penny dreadful or the original theatrical adaptation by Christopher Bond. Sweeney suffers some qualms in the Bond script, but they seem to be about fear of physical weakness, rather than moral compromise. When he discusses his plans for revenge with Mrs. Lovett, she reminds him that, in his former life, he had a tendency to faint when confronted with the sight of blood. Unlike Sondheim’s Sweeney, Bond’s barber seems emotionally uninvested in the incidental murders he commits.

Bond’s Sweeney, when confronted by bloodshed, has a tendency to sound like an office worker, supremely distanced from his work, discussing his killings in the language of necessity. When contemplating Johanna-in-disguise’s imminent death, he uses only the passive voice, saying, “Here’s another must complete the score … He forces me to hurry … he must die.” This Sweeney avoids statements that would acknowledge his own agency like “I will” or “I choose.” Instead of the Demon Barber promised in the title, Bond’s Todd more closely resembles the little Eichmanns described by Hannah Arendt. There is a banality to his evil that lets him see it as separate from himself and his identity.

Ultimately, Bond’s Sweeney believes that he can shuck off his Sweeney persona as easily as he put it on. After the murder of the Judge, Todd sheathes his razors and declares, “Now that my vengeance is assuaged I long to see Johanna.” This line could never be delivered by Sondheim’s Sweeney. Unlike Bond’s murderer, Sondheim’s Sweeney understands that the evil he embraces will warp him and prevent him ever seeing his daughter again. In “Epiphany,” the song in which Sweeney decides he will kill at will, rather than only destroying the Beadle and the Judge, he declares, “We all deserve to die./And I'll never see Johanna/No I'll never hug my girl to me—finished!” Although most of the song is performed in a desperate rasp, in these sections, the music drops into a resonant register and is sung more sweetly, symbolizing the humanity Sweeney is putting aside. His decision to kill sunders him from his morally pure daughter.

Sweeney’s renunciation of his daughter is chosen. When Sweeney helps her beau Anthony plan his elopement, he makes no attempt to see her. In Act Two’s reprise of “Johanna” he goes further, singing that he can see her only in his imaginings, so that she can remain as she is, untouched by his darkness.

“And in that darkness when I'm blind

With what I can't forget—

It's always morning in my mind,

My little lamb, my pet, Johanna …

You stay, Johanna,

The way I've dreamed you are.”


Sweeney believes himself to be as dead to his daughter as his wife Lucy is to him. His recognition of this loss makes him profoundly more tragic than Bond’s Todd. Sondheim’s Sweeney understands that his vengeance comes with a terrible cost: the perversion of his own soul, which renders him unfit to see his innocent daughter. The harm he inflicts upon himself cannot be erased or set aside, as Bond’s Sweeney believes. Sondheim’s Sweeney is aware that there is a moral law, even as he transgresses it. His knowledge forces him to refrain from harming the truly innocent, unlike his partner in crime, the truly nihilistic and villainous Mrs. Lovett.

While Sweeney removes himself from his paternal role, lest he taint his daughter, Mrs. Lovett delights in her relationship with Tobias, the street waif she adopts. This relationship, invented by Sondheim, does not redeem Mrs. Lovett; it reveals the depths of her depravity. Although she appears solicitous, Lovett sends Tobias down into the cellars to work on the pies, even though this decision puts him at risk of discovering their human origins. In Bond’s play, when Lovett and Todd lock Tobias in the cellar, this is a calculated decision to unhinge and destroy him. In the musical, Todd would have killed Tobias but left his innocence intact, while Lovett deliberately drives him mad.

For Lovett, perhaps, this is not as fearful a prospect as it would be for a normal human being. In Sondheim’s musical, Lovett has gone so far mad as to appear sane again. Unlike Sweeney, she no longer sees her madness and immorality as tragic. While Sweeney keens for the loss of his goodness and his daughter, Mrs. Lovett remains cheerful and quick-tempoed in her songs. She may not even recognize the terror she visits on Tobias as harm.

In the original production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the ethical differences between Sweeney and Lovett were heightened by their costumes. Sweeney appears as has become standard in later stagings: his face is ashen, cheeks hollow, and he appears in black and dingy white. In contrast, Mrs. Lovett is a portrait of vitality. She appears in yellow, one of the brightest colors in the whole company, and her make-up is bright and music hall-tawdry. Closer up, the effect is a grotesque, heightened version of Johanna’s more natural make-up.

More than any other character, Mrs. Lovett is deliberately artificial. Her performativity reaches its height when she sings “By the Sea,” an imaginative song in which she tries to draw Sweeney into her fantasy world. She sees no inconsistency between the grisly murders she and Sweeney have committed and the happy, carefree life she envisions.

To understand the true horror of Sondheim’s London, and thus the extent of Mrs. Lovett’s self-deception, one only has to consider the degradation of the chorus over the course of the show. The first human sound of the show is a piercing, agonized scream. But, as the audience quickly discovers, this sound is a counterfeit; it is a factory whistle, not a person. The sound recurs throughout the show during Sweeney’s murders, substituting for the screams of the dying.

The score blurs the line between automaton and human; the company first appears as a Brechtian chorus in the opening number “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.” They address the audience directly, breaking the fourth wall but without any sense of intimacy. The self-conscious commentary on the action instrumentalizes the chorus. They are cogs in the service of the larger play, just as their characters are part of the mechanized, industrializing world.

The chorus first takes on character in the lead-up to Sweeney’s contest with the rival barber Pirelli. In this scene, the crowd is used and manipulated by Tobias, Lovett, Sweeney, and Pirelli in turn. They are extremely suggestible, responding first to Tobias’s sales pitch, and then working themselves into a vengeful fury instigated by Sweeney and Lovett. However, the passion of the crowd is not accorded the same respect as Sweeney’s revenge plotting.

Their anger is just a tool for Sweeney and Lovett, carefully designed to put Pirelli on the defensive. The crowd loses their Brechtian self-awareness to become oblivious extras in a drama staged by Sweeney and Lovett. Instead of sharing a laugh with the audience, they are the butt of the joke. They are dehumanized before Lovett and Sweeney ever consider murdering them.

In the final number before intermission, Sweeney and Lovett plan the murders of passersby, and, when the curtain rises on Act II, the chorus reappears and does nothing to make us think we’d mourn their deaths. In “God that’s Good,” the crowd joyfully wolfs down meat pies made from their slaughtered neighbors and cries out for more. The mass of people at the pie shop richly deserve the Greek epithet of “mere bellies.” Their hunger overrides their reason, turning them into bestial, craven creatures, possibly unworthy of life.

Except for a brief introduction in which members of the crowd sing different lyrics as they call for Tobias, the chorus sings lines in unison. This is unusual for Sondheim. In Finishing the Hat, the first volume of his annotated lyrics, he writes that he disapproves of the usual dramatic trick of having a chorus sing full-throated as one.

“One of the more unconvincing things about it is that as a crowd, whether of peasants, soldiers, reporters, cocktail party attendees or any other general congregations, they all sing the same lyric; that is to say, they all apparently have the exact same thought at the exact same time … [A]lthough I happily accept a great many theatre conventions, this one irritates me.”

Sondheim inserts this commentary immediately following “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” which carefully divides up the overlapping sung lines to allow each character to be treated as an individual. This makes the unanimity of “God that’s Good” much more striking. It begins in the same style of overlapping, individual lines as “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” but the unified chorus takes over quickly. While Lovett and Todd keep the plot moving, the chorus becomes a throbbing, insistent background beat. The lines that they sing are not the individual, argumentative lines from “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” but a stripped down expression of need and desperation: “More hot pies!/More hot!/More pies!” Every note falls on an accent, removing the expression and human quality of speech.

The chorus, which begins as Brechtian commentary, loses its privileged perspective to become the easily manipulated crowd in front of Pirelli’s display, and finally is reduced to barbaric mere bellies at Lovett’s pie shop. They reappear only briefly as the lunatic chorus in “City on Fire” before having their characters erased again for the final repetition of the “Ballad of Sweeney Todd.”

The twisted leads, Sweeney and Lovett, and the chorus they manipulate, are shaped by the world that Sondheim has constructed. In this world, no authority is legitimate or righteous—a substantial departure from the source material. In the penny dreadful version of Sweeney, the demonic barber is a startling aberration in a basically decent world. There is no cruel and rapacious Judge Turpin; instead, the lawyers come to the rescue after hearing a claim sworn out against Todd and arranging a sting.

In contrast, Sondheim builds up a world that is practically impervious to goodness. By the end of the show, both the chorus and Tobias have made a complete break with the sordid reality in which they find themselves and have descended into madness. The residents of the madhouse are honest; they testify to the way they have been wounded by their world.

Mrs. Lovett is terrifying because she refused to acknowledge her own brokenness. She embodies the cheerful nihilism that Lahr tried to ascribe to the whole production. She doesn’t escape the harshness of the world by trying to ignore its immorality; she denies that immorality is abhorrent. She never sees a distinction between Sweeney’s revenge on the Judge and the deaths of anyone else unlucky enough to enter the tonsorial parlor. The cruelty of men is not tragic for Lovett, but as natural as a thunderstorm. Both are threatening, but neither carries moral content.

Sweeney, even in the depths of his despair, is never won over to Lovett’s amoral view; he clings to the idea of justice for moral transgressions. Before Sweeney yields to death and madness, he is determined to take at least one part of his terrible world down with him. His pursuit of Judge Turpin and the Beadle leads him into depravity, but he has the satisfaction of knowing his evil was in the service of opposing evil.

At the end of the show, it is not clear if Sweeney has won any lasting victory—Johanna and Anthony are free and relatively safe, though they may one day succumb to the relentless cruelty of their world. Even so, Sweeney has won them a measure of peace, and, by dying without ever revealing his relationship to Johanna, he has protected them from complicity in the evil he did to destroy the Judge.

Lahr argues that Sweeney’s triumphs are too small and too depressing to make him a moral figure.

“Other writers as various as Joe Orton and Tom Lehrer have exploited the macabre to satirize the rapacity of mankind, but with a difference. Behind their fury is a moral impulse. Their worlds admit a sense of sin; and their unrelenting laughter is essentially forgiving. But Sondheim simply fulminates.”

Lahr does not understand that fulmination and simple resistance can be heroism in a world that is no longer confident in forgiveness. Sondheim’s audience may not be certain the inhabitants of that world merit forgiveness, but Sweeney offers a measure of morality, even in the most cynical circumstances.

Sweeney Todd isn’t a revolutionary; he doesn’t set out to upend the entire malevolent society in which he lives. He commits himself simply to resolving the worst abuse within his scope. If, in his quest, he descends into despair, depravity, and madness, it’s worth remembering that “everyone does it and seldom as well.” Sweeney is in a losing fight, but he never loses sight of the stakes or the costs of his battle. Sweeney remains committed to his opposition, refusing the retreat into madness that is tantamount to surrender. In this choice, he is as moral a hero as one could ask for in a dystopian world.