Sweeney Todd was written in 1842 by George Dibdin Pitt for the Brittania Theatre. The play has been adapted from its original form over the years. It has been viewed as one of the first out-and-out crime plays. Sweeney Todd was originally portrayed as a cartoonish and outlandish monster, killing victims left and right by pulling a lever to a trap door that sends them flying into the basement. After taking all valuables off his victims, he then turns them over to Mrs. Lovett, who would bake them into pies and sell them to customers. Many of Sweeney’s victims held no morales. Nonetheless, Todd is still ruthless. The first victim he killed was for a necklace. This necklace is how the play got its original name, The String of Pearls. The original play contained many shocks and false endings with Sweeney Todd escaping prison, breaking down on the witness stand from madness, being haunted by the ghosts of his victims, and narrowly evading heroes. In 1970 Christopher Bond gave Sweeney Todd a dose of humanity by adding a revenge plot to the demon barber’s back story. More specifically, Benjamin Barker is the victim of being unjustly convicted and exiled to Australia for 15 years because a corrupt Judge had taken a romantic interest in Barker’s wife. He dawns the alias Sweeney Todd to plot his revenge upon returning to London with the help of his former landlady Mrs. Lovett. This version of Sweeney Todd is eventually what Stephen Sondheim based his musical on, under the same name in 1979. Sweeney Todd has been adopted into many different movies and TV shows, one of the most well-known adaptions being directed by Tim Burton in 2007. This play hit the Hamline stage in November of 1954.
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