New Play

Sweeney Todd. Rich, ruddy, raucous melodrama, vintage of 1842, in two murderous acts and eight vein-chilling scenes, telling the bloody history of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was revived. Wendell Phillips Dodge, producer, calculated (accurately) upon obtaining the same effect as that produced by an old family tintype with the head-clamps showing.

The plot curdles. Home from the bounding main with a wreath of gigantic pearls for his sweetheart, a sailor man stops on his joyful way for a shave. Woe is his, for Sweeney Todd, barber, gnawed by the weevil of avarice, has long had the vile habit of dropping his rich customers through the floor, chair and all, to a subterranean death chamber; there slitting their throats, robbing them, erasing all traces of crime by transforming the corpses into "veal" pies, succulent, rich in gravy, spiced with hairs and buttons. Such is the mariner's fate -until the last scene where he unexpectedly returns, all in one piece, in time to witness the confounding of his malefactor by three of the latter's former apprentices.

Triumphant virtue thumps splendidly in the chaste breast of Johanna Oakley, his faithful hoopskirted light-of-love; the gallant thorax of Colonel Jeffrey of the Indian Army, confidant and sub-hero. Thirteen other characters, broadly "in period,' pad out the piece to bursting.

Nineteenth Century atmosphere -complete with cigar-chewing "house manager," candle footlights, handbill including an original notice by Dickens -is built up to give the audience a sense of superiority that enables it to laugh not only at the play but at the whole age which took such plays seriously.

"No one should miss seeing bweeney Todd," wrote 'Charles Dickens when he reviewed the play :or The London Morning Chronicle in 1842. Very similar remarks were passed by Manhattan critics last week.

Robert Vivian's "Sweeney" is gorgeous; Percy Baverstock's "Colonel Jeffrey" a masterpiece of recreation.