Jack Wells BTEC National Diploma in Performing Arts 3/4/2009
Sweeney Todd:
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (18)
(Rated 2/5)
The opening credits oozing onto our screens with amazing and gruesome effects are typical of Tim Burton. His colourful computer graphics are a brilliant start to such a dark musical.
Once a happily married barber, Benjamin Barker (Sweeney’s original name), is transported to Australia by an envious judge (Alan Rickman), who lusts after Sweeny’s wife. Fifteen years later a vengeful Benjamin Baker returns to London, he has taken on a new name Sweeney Todd a pale faced, deadly and manic killer with revenge in his mind. After being reunited with his beloved barber’s blades “My friends”, he plots to murder the judge and slit his throat “the closest shave I ever gave”, and kill anyone else who gets in his way, with many bystanders too. Sweeney is callously indiscriminate as to whom his victims are, believing that they should die “they all deserve to die”. Those who lack his skills as a barber are brutally murdered and turned into pie fodder for his partner in crime the landlady Mrs Lovett.