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SWEENEY TODD – The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street – Birmingham Rep until 15th August

Review: P Alexander 16th July 2026

Birmingham Rep’s Sweeney Todd feels like a show sharpened to a single purpose: cut through the noise and deliver Sondheim’s horror-comedy with full-bodied musical authority. Joe Murphy’s production lands the rare trick of being both operatically grand and claustrophobically nasty, setting up a world where grief and revenge keep tightening until the whole thing snaps. The atmosphere is thick from the first bars, and you can feel the audience being pulled forward—scene by scene, song by song—rather than simply entertained.

At the centre is Ramin Karimloo’s Sweeney Todd, a performance that reads as controlled menace rather than cartoon rage. He doesn’t just sing the part; he seems to conduct it, keeping the character’s simmering rage under a polished exterior. The result is that when he finally lets the voice and emotion break through, the impact lands like the blade finding its mark—less “big moment” than “inevitable consequence.” The force of his key numbers, especially “Epiphany” is one of the production’s defining highlights.

Opposite him, Meow Meow’s Mrs Lovett brings a different kind of electricity. Where Sweeney can be stately and lethal, Lovett is lively, flamboyant, and morally fluid, built like a performance within the performance. Her larger-than-life comic approach is at times deliberately jarring against the production’s colder, more controlled atmosphere, but that’s exactly what makes her such a pressure point: she keeps the show funny and disturbing at the same time, and she does it with genuinely exceptional vocal character work.

Visually, the production leans into stark theatrical design rather than clutter, with a strong sense of mood and geometry. The looming visual anchor (Lady Justice) and a set that uses movement, shadow, and space makes the world feel harsh and surveilled. It seems that the Rep has built a “large stage with intimacy in mind”: the scale impresses, but the storytelling stays tightly focused around the characters and their moral decay.

Musically, this is Sondheim performed at full throttle. The cast across the board are to be praised for both singing and acting—exactly the skill-set this score demands, where diction, ensemble precision, and character logic all have to align. Standout supporting turns include David Bedella’s Judge Turpin (a deep, incisive villain whose menace feels earned rather than performative), Jo Stephenson’s Johanna (tender but steely), and Shem Omari James as Anthony (romantic without becoming sentimental). Even in the show’s darker places, the performances keep the engine running.

The clearest takeaway is tone: this Sweeney Todd is funny—properly funny—yet it never softens the darkness. It frames the brutality as spectacle, but also as consequence: a story about what happens when injustice is allowed to transform into vengeance, and when “they all deserve it” becomes the final thought in the room. If you want a production that makes you laugh and then think about why you laughed, Birmingham Rep’s revival delivers.