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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a 1979 musical thriller with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler. The musical is based on the 1973 play Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Christopher Bond. Sweeney Todd opened on Broadway in 1979 and in the West End in 1980.
It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Olivier Award for Best New Musical. It has since had numerous revivals as well as a film adaptation.
The character of Sweeney Todd had its origins in serialized Victorian popular fiction, known as "penny dreadfuls". A story called The String of Pearls was published in a weekly magazine during the winter of 1846-47. Set in 1785, the story featured as its principal villain a certain Sweeney Todd and included all the plot elements that were used by Sondheim and others ever since. The psychopathic barber's story proved instantly popular – it was turned into a play before the ending had even been revealed in print. An expanded edition appeared in 1850, an American version in 1852, a new play in 1865. By the 1870s, Sweeney Todd was a familiar character to most Victorians.
Sondheim's musical was, in fact, based on Christopher Bond's 1973 spooky melodrama, which introduced a psychological background to Todd's crimes. In Bond's reincarnation of the character, Todd was the victim of a ruthless judge who raped his young wife and exiled him to Australia. Sondheim first conceived of a musical version of the story in 1973, after he went to see Bond's ghoulish take on the story at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Bond's sophisticated plot and language significantly elevated the lurid nature of the tale. Sondheim once noted, "It had a weight to it . . . because [Bond] wrote certain characters in blank verse. He also infused into it plot elements from Jacobean tragedy and The Count of Monte Cristo. He was able to take all these disparate elements that had been in existence rather dully for a hundred and some-odd years and make them into a first-rate play."