Sondheim

The premise is as cheerfully appalling as its title suggests. Queeney Todd, played by the formidable baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, returns to London after a decade away, determined to settle accounts with the men who have mistreated him before he succumbs to the dreaded specter of “twink death.” His particular grievance begins with an expensive evening of preparation for a succession of Grindr rendezvous, none of whose prospective participants bothers to appear. The resulting humiliation inspires a campaign of retribution, although Queeney is considerably less interested in throat-slitting than in a more anatomically specific form of vengeance. His fortunes become entangled with those of Mrs. Lovedick, the proprietor of a struggling sex shop; a procession of unpredictable clients and lovers; and the Barber of Seville, whose arrival threatens to upset the increasingly lucrative enterprise that grows out of an accidental castration. What begins as a revenge fantasy gradually mutates into a gleefully preposterous conspiracy, with the characters discovering that even the most intimate injuries can become commercial opportunities. The writing, credited collectively to the show’s director Kemar Jewel, Jacob Ashworth, Peregrine Teng Heard, and Garrett Bell, understands that the most effective obscenity is not simply a matter of saying the unsayable. It is a matter of constructing an entire theatrical universe in which the unsayable becomes the organizing principle. [more]