Preview — Sweeney Todd · 2026 Production

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical thriller with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, first staged on Broadway in 1979. The figure of Sweeney Todd began as a villain of Victorian penny-dreadful fiction, but the musical draws on Christopher Bond's 1970 play, which gives him a new story: not a killer for profit, but a man whose life was taken from him by a corrupt judge. Set in nineteenth-century London, the work asks what remains of a person when obsession born of loss hardens into a single purpose.

Often described as standing between musical theater and opera, the work is carried almost entirely by music. Sondheim threads the medieval Dies Irae through its recurring ballad, and the chorus returns scene after scene to draw the audience into the tale. Dark humor and tragedy are so tightly entwined that audiences often find themselves laughing even as they feel a chill of dread.

Sweeney Todd is a barber who returns to London under a new name after fifteen years of unjust exile. Julian Jootaek Kim shares the role with Cho Seung-woo and Kang Pil Seok. The role demands the weight of a low voice and a wide range, and has long been performed by opera singers as well as musical theater actors. Sondheim himself once called the piece a "black operetta." For Kim, whose career spans both opera and musical theater, it is a role where the two genres meet.

Rather than presenting Sweeney as a monster from the start, the musical follows how a wronged man becomes one. He is defined not by cruelty but by loss, and by an obsession that leaves room for nothing else. In this production, Sweeney Todd is expected to emerge less as the demon barber of legend than as a man consumed by grief and vengeance, unraveling as he stands before the audience.