the razor's edge; Straight off a smash run on the West End, Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd", writes Adam Green, gets ready to slay 'em on Broadway.(Theater Review)

About ten years ago, the Scottish-born theater director John Doyle found himself in Liverpool on the horns of a dilemma: his budget for a production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide was large enough to pay for either a cast or an orchestra but not both. So Doyle came up with a novel solution-hire actors who can play instruments-and, in the process, stumbled on a fresh approach to musical theater. Since then, his intimate reinterpretations of such well-known works as Pal Joey, Cabaret, and Fiddler on the Roof, performed by small casts of actor-musicians, have won high critical praise. This month, New York audiences can have a look at what Doyle has been up to, as his radical take on Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's brooding, bloody 1979 masterpiece, arrives on Broadway.

Adapted by Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler from a Christopher Bond play based on a nineteenth-century penny-dreadful villain, Sweeney Todd was almost certainly the first Broadway musical about serial murder, cannibalism, and rape. Under the imaginative direction of Hal Prince, it was epic in scope and depicted a Dickensian London being crushed in the jaws of the Industrial Age. The musical itself tells the story of a once-decent man who returns from an unjust exile in Australia, seeking revenge on the corrupt judge who destroyed his family and his life. Twisted by grief and rage, he remakes himself as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a self-appointed executioner whose unlucky customers receive the ultimate in close shaves and wind up as lunch specials at the pie shop run by his enterprising mistress.

What lifts Sweeney Todd above pure melodrama, of course, is Sondheim's passionate, almost operatic, score, perhaps the finest ever written for the American stage. The music is emotionally varied and psychologically acute; sharp dissonances and lush melodies are woven together by unsettling themes that pay homage to Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. The virtuoso brilliance of the lyrics is unmatched. Sondheim, who remains a cultural titan rather than a box-office king, largely because of his compulsion to explore the dimly lit corners of the human soul, found Sweeney's combination of horror, black humor, and ruinous obsession irresistible. "I wanted to really scare audiences, but to do it in a way that didn't let them keep him at arm's length," he says.

Doyle aims to draw the audience closer still. The spare set, designed by the director to suggest a nineteenth-century operating theater, is dominated by a coffin, buckets of blood, and shelves lined with surgical tools, specimen jars, and other creepy memento mori. The evening begins with an invitation to "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd," sung by a lad who has just been released from a straitjacket. He is joined by the rest of the nine-member ensemble, costumed by Doyle not as Victorian caricatures but as contemporary urban types.

With cellos, horns, and flutes, the cast remains onstage throughout the evening-acting, playing music, or just watching. "Without an orchestra, there is nothing physically between the audience and the actors, which creates a feeling of ...