The story of the demon barber of Fleet Street has been a classic since 1847 and was the feature of Queen Victoria's first command performance. Mr. Burton's version is laced with both song and humour in the best of old fashioned melodramatic styles.5 women, 11 men

This grisly melodrama stirs powerful feelings of revulsion and terror in a modern reader with imagination and with an uneasy respect for evil. The labyrinthine cellars beneath Sweeney's shop are as twisted and murky as the psychological abyss from which spring all human nightmares, and Sweeney himself is a genuine monster of the id. No one who suspects that evil can take on human features could fail to tremble at his memorable line: 'I believe I am not easily forgotten by those who have once seen me'. - Marilyn Stasio. Variations on this play have been filmed and put on Broadway as a musical. This version, carefully restored by author and scholar Marvin Kaye, returns to the original text and clears away many of the problems created by lesser talents trying to revise the text. Footnotes and an afterword on staging a production of Sweeney Todd based on this text provide useful additional information.