Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a work so daring in its proportions, it defies description. It's a Gothic opera. It's a Greek tragedy. It's a Brechtian epic. Its modes include melodrama, music hall and commedia dell'arte. It posits Dickensian social commentary within American expressionism and the filmic languages of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann. There are as many ways of approaching this musical as there are ways of talking about it. 

To me, the most urgent is its searing critique of a system that grinds people into dust – or pulp to be consumed – with impunity. This story pinches a psychic nerve because we know that we exist in such a system today: one in which people are summarily stripped of their humanity by the craven and powerful. And as millennia of storytelling from Medea to Titus Andronicus to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith has tried to warn us, abject cruelty and dehumanisation begets its own reward. The monsters of our making. Sweeney. Sweeney Todd.

My colleagues and I were enormously proud of how WAAPA students faced the dimensions of this work and rose to its myriad challenges. 

Presented by WA Academy of Performing Arts; Musical Direction/ Orchestration, Craig Dalton; Choreography; Jayne Smeulders; Associate MD, Adrian Soares; Set/ Costume Design, Elouise Greenwell; Lighting Design, Kirby Jones; Accent & Dialect, Luzita Fereday; Photography, Stephen Heath