Always had a fondness for you, I did…

So over the years I have naturally seen the show as often and as in many different versions as possible: from a thrilling promenade production at the Bridewell to Elaine Paige’s superb comic turn as Mrs Lovett at New York City Opera, with productions at the National, Washington DC’s Kennedy Centre, Leicester Haymarket and New York’s Circle in the Square amongst others too numerous to count. I’ve had my share of disappointments, too: the John Doyle version that came to the Trafalgar Studios in 2004, for instance, incensed me by its cavalier treatment of the score as well as the drama, as it shoehorned both into an overhaul that had the actors playing their own instruments with little regard for either the music or the drama.

I wrote crossly in the pages of the Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine devoted to his work, at the time that “Instead of intensifying its claustrophobic, macabre tale of murder and cannibalism, it has been comprehensively diminished, with a magnificent score being forever scratchily compromised. The urgent, dangerous tones of Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations are entirely missing, and by the time ‘By the Sea’ received a twinkling jazz underscoring, the gimmick had gone too far.”

I went on, “If the singing or acting compensated for the playing, however, it might be retrievable; as it is, this production fails again, being barely above adequate on either count. Far from offering a triple threat of talents as singers, actors and instrumentalists, it could be said that this company is variously thrice deprived instead. But then no one is helped, either, by John Doyle’s staging that may provide atmosphere in spades in the light and smoke flooding in through the slatted floorboards of the set (also designed by Doyle), but makes little sense of time or place at any time. The result is that it’s more like a novelty concert staging than a full-blooded one, in every sense, but given its severe musical limitations, makes it entirely pointless as such. It short-changes its audience on just about everything, including the inflated price you have to pay to see it. At £36 for the best seats, you get less of Sweeney Todd than you’ve ever seen or heard before.”

Then came the release last year of Tim Burton’s Gothic film version that abbreviated great chunks of the score, and I thought I was very nearly Sweeney-ed out. But now, to see the show returning last night to its full-blooded basics in the dark, dank setting of the Union Theatre in Southwark, my faith in the brooding, hulking magnificence of this show is entirely restored; and this superbly staged, constantly inventive production by the Union’s artistic director Sasha Regan is quite simply one of the best I have ever seen.

It’s partly a question of a studio setting magnifying its claustrophobic intensity; but also, in these close-up quarters - with the cast sending shivers up your spine as they literally surround you - the unamplified singing of this always sensational score a chilling, thrilling delight. And the Union, whose star is rising fast, has managed to secure lots of rising stars to be in it; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better, sweeter-voiced Johanna than Katie Stokes, and Emma Francis as Mrs Lovett is like a young version of Helen Mirren, full of sparky sexual energy and allure. But there isn’t a weak link anywhere. It is not to be missed - except that the entire run is now already sold out. The only mistake that the production has made was to schedule it for a run of only three and a half weeks. It deserves to run for three and a half years.

Just a fortnight ago I was part of the judging panel that awarded the Union this year’s Peter Brook… Empty Space Award for up-and-coming venue; and that faith has been triumphantly vindicated by this production. By coincidence, one of my fellow judges Fiona Mountford was there last night; she’s also a major Sondheim-a-holic, and was saying to me how much she is looking forward to seeing a preview of the Menier’s A Little Night Music next week — her favourite piece of theatre ever, narrowly beating out Three Sisters, she says. But she missed the original Sweeney Todd at Drury Lane, alas, for understandable reasons: she was four at the time!

And if Sweeney has been part of my life for a long time, so has the idea of a musical about the Mizner Brothers been a long part of Sondheim’s. He first had it in 1952, after reading Alva Johnston’s biography “The Legendary Mizners”; but it wasn’t until he teamed up with John Weidman, his collaborator on Assassins and Pacific Overtures, that he finally made it a reality, and in 1999 a workshop production was staged of the first result, Wise Guys, at New York Theatre Workshop by director Sam Mendes. It was then re-tooled as Gold!, but never produced, before then being re-staged as Bounce, this time reuniting Sondheim with long-time directorial collaborator Hal Prince, in Chicago and Washington DC in 2003.

I saw both Wise Guys and Bounce; and last weekend in New York, I caught the third attempt to bring it to the stage, now under the title Road Show, at the New York Public Theatre, this time directed by John Doyle - the same British director whose work on Sweeney had so upset me! Fortunately, he doesn’t expect his actors to play their own instruments this time; and his deliberately paired-back approach pays off dividends in focusing dramatic attention on the core relationship here.

The official opening was last night, and as David Rooney says in his Variety review today, “Expectations are inevitably inflated for the show, but whether or not this production turns out to be its definitive version, the rocky history feels oddly appropriate for a story about two restless masters of reinvention.”

While Mendes’s approach portrayed their lives as a musical vaudeville (much as Follies casts its characters in a recreation of a Follies extravaganza), and Prince brought his typically vivid theatrical flair to it, Doyle turns it into a somewhat earnest study in brotherly love, set against the tumultuous events of their lives and the constantly changing boom-and-bust economics they live through. This may be its bravest shot yet - but if, as one of the brothers puts it in the closing moments of the show, “Sooner or later we’re bound to get it right”, that may also be its creators speaking, too, who haven’t yet done so with their show.