Razor's Edge

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The first time around, Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a deranged barber who slits customers' throats and a pragmatic landlady who bakes the victims into meat pies, was a Victorian penny dreadful by way of Brecht. Everything imitated him: Hugh Wheeler's book, Stephen Sondheim's score, Harold Prince's staging and even the set, which resembled an iron foundry; it hissed and clanged of the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. Audiences in 1979 flinched at the spewing blood and spoken bile: it seemed there had never been so cynical a musical.

A kinder, gentler Sweeney was unimaginable until Susan H. Schulman's intimate reconsideration arrived on Broadway last week. This time the tale comes by way of Dickens. London's gaslit windows ring the circular seating. Tattered gray laundry sags from clotheslines all around. Turbulent street life spills into the aisles. Gloomy, angry and unjust Sweeney's world remains, but human connections now matter.

Sweeney and his landlady are at bottom leftist abstractions. He is the innocent man turned criminal by a wicked power structure; exiled by a corrupt judge who lusted after his wife, he returns vowing to show nobody any more mercy than he received. Mrs. Lovett is a singing, dancing and grimacing Mother Courage, sapped of moral scruple by economic privation and sheer will to survive. Beth Fowler and Bob Gunton sing nobly, and the production's intimacy includes a welcome emphasis on natural, unmiked sound. She enriches Lovett with a lifelong ardor for Sweeney and a pixilated fondness for romantic fancy. < He believably underscores the improvisatory quality of Sweeney's first murders, turning him from a monster into a man who howls piteously over the body of his beloved wife, lost and too late found. As corpses pile up in the apocalyptic finale, this version urges spectators not only to think but also to feel.