Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

His skin was pale and his eye was odd.

He shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again.

He trod a path that few have trod.

Did Sweeney Todd?

A demon barber of Fleet Street.

And with the ballad of Sweeney Todd, so begins our tale for today as performed by Len Carreyu

and Company in the original 1979 Broadway cast recording.

Since he first made his appearance in the flimsy pages of a Victorian penny dreadful,

Sweeney Todd, the murderous and demon barber of London's Fleet Street,

has captured the fascination of audiences from Victorian adolescence to modern-day theater audiences.

What makes this frightening fellow whose skin was pale and his eye was odd,

gripping to us is that his crimes were violent, vengeful, and took advantage of the unsuspecting.

Why, that could have been us.

His story has been adapted and expanded since those penny dreadful days of Victorian London's 1830s,

to more modern times to portray a man whose life has gone very, very wrong.

If it's possible to see any humanity amidst his horrific crimes, modern-day dramatists have attempted to tell that tale.

Most notably, of course, is Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's groundbreaking musical adaptation

that opened on Broadway in 1979.

The Broadway stage is about to get a new production of this brilliant and classic musical,

and hence the Gilda Gentleman finds this a good moment to go back in time to look at the

sources for just who Sweetie Todd was, the Victorian

...