“Sweeney Todd” at Birmingham Rep
Simon Thomas in the Midlands
★★★☆☆
19 July 2026
Directed by incoming Artistic Director Joe Murphy, Birmingham Rep’s Sweeney Todd is surely one of the best-sung productions in the show’s nearly 50-year history. It’s unfortunate, then, that it is so over-amplified that much of the nuance of Stephen Sondheim’s wondrous score and miraculous lyrics about the demon barber of Fleet Street gets lost. It sounds like an opera heard on a transistor radio and watching it is like seeing an AI-generated stage production, with not a natural sound all evening. Maybe that’s a sign of the times and an indication of the direction in which musical theatre is going but I hope not.
Ramin Karimloo and Meow Meow.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
Where it pays off is in the massive sound that a mere seven-piece band can make, sounding like a much bigger and fuller orchestra, and in odd moments such as – towards the end of the show – when the ensemble’s singing of Todd’s letter to Judge Turpin has an eerie distant sound that serves the composer well. Had the miking been more natural throughout with effects reserved for this and the scenes of Toby in the cellar, the sound production would have been varied and far more effective.
Sweeney Todd can work very well in a studio-sized staging but Birmingham Rep’s main stage, The House, is quite a bit bigger, so a pared-back production presents other problems too. We all know about budgetary constraints in the current climate but the show badly lacks a full ensemble, with main cast members filling in and just two other players billed as “ensemble”. You don’t get a sense of London’s teeming crowds with so few people on the stage, and they get lost on Elin Steele’s vast, sepulchral, and rather sterile set, dominated by an overpowering statue of Justice, sword and scales in hand.
Perhaps in an attempt to give the show a different look from previous stagings, the production team opt for an 18th-century setting, rather than a penny dreadful, Victorian one and it loses something in the process. Although soot climbs the otherwise pristine white walls, a foggy Jack the Ripper, rat-infested look would evoke the atmosphere better. The decision is based on the fact that the folk tale, adapted first in the 19th century and further in Christopher Bond’s 1970 play (on which Sondheim and collaborator Hugh Wheeler based the musical) originated a century earlier. It has to be added that Murphy and team go all out for Grand Guignol grotesqueness, more readily associated with the Victorian era, in the latter part of the show.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
There’s much to enjoy in the performances of the 11-strong cast. Ramin Karimloo is a very experienced West End performer and his Todd is a strongly voiced, if slightly colourless characterization; he rightly gets an enormous ovation after his mighty and terrifying “Epiphany” scene. It would be nice to see more of a twinkle in his eye in the ensuing “A Little Priest” but he does the brooding, vengeful bit extremely well.
Meow Meow suffers more than most with clarity of words and her performance as Mrs Lovett is of the broadest comedy kind, evoking little empathy in her pursuit of laughs but with some lovely touches such as kneading the pastry of her hideous pre-Todd pies with her bare feet.
Shem Omari James gives one of the best-delivered numbers with the gorgeous “Joanna” and Jo Stephenson is mellifluous as the object of his ardent longing. David Bedella, another hugely experienced lead (he has played Todd himself in an earlier production) is a nuanced Judge Turpin, although his “Johanna/Mea culpa” number is maybe too heavy on the masturbation and cuts out entirely the self-flagellation, something that is clearly indicated in the music.
The highly talented cast is completed by Julius D’Silva (an oleaginous Beadle), Jack Gibson (hyperactive as the boy Toby), high tenor Silas Wyatt-Barke as Pirelli, and Florence Andrews as the Beggar Woman. Todd’s final encounter with the latter, by which time Murphy has ratcheted the tension up to fever pitch, is as genuinely tear-jerking and moving as in any production I’ve seen. The two stalwart ensemble members are Emily Ivana Hawkins and Hadrian Delacey.
Birmingham Rep’s Sweeney Todd deserves to be considered a major revival of Sondheim’s masterpiece and followers of the composer plus, one hopes, many new audience members are sure to travel from far and wide to see it.
