Why are they always trying to drag Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd kicking and screaming into the opera house and concert hall? Well, obviously, it’s the operatic manner and Grand Guignol extravagance, to say nothing of the sheer volume of eminently singable music in the piece that leads people mistakenly into thinking that it can be best served with legitimate (meaning operatic) voices. But it’s
a musical through and through, and one in which show voices and seriously good actors (as witness the recent Chichester/West End revival with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton) can find its dark heart, thrilling and amusing in equal measure.

My heart sank as this live concert performance from Germany (where the piece is extremely popular) began its creepy ostinato into the opening Ballad and a well-drilled German choir with impeccable English manners but overly schooled and slightly accented enunciation politely asked us to ‘attend the tale of Sweeney Todd’. First point: this shouldn’t in any sense sound like a ‘chorus’ but rather an ensemble of individuals. And while it’s good to hear a full-blown symphony orchestra – the Munich Radio Orchestra – find its way around this score and serve it with precision and finesse, there is also a sense in which these players don’t fully understand its very particular language. If you want an authentically cast symphonic account, then the fabled New York Philharmonic concert with Patti LuPone, George Hearn et al, thrillingly directed by Andrew Litton, is a corker if you can find it.

The casting there was primarily sourced from Broadway but the bias here is towards the operatic world (English and American in the main) and is in a couple of crucial cases thoroughly wrong-headed. First, and worst, is the Nellie Lovett of Wagnerian mezzo Jane Henschel. Her wicked entrance number, ‘The worst pies in London’, has to be heard to be believed. Singing entirely in fruity operatic voice with over-ripe vowels and no trace of a cockney accent, she sounds alarmingly like Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley trying to communicate with a congregation of non-English speakers. Transformed into a kind of dirge at half-tempo, she manages the seemingly impossible feat of mistiming and misplacing all the laughs.

The dialogue is worse still. I know Mrs Lovett puts on airs but a parody of Lady Bracknell she is not. The other inexplicable piece of casting is swarthy Gregg Baker (a great Crown in Porgy and Bess) as Anthony Hope. His dark, broody bass-baritone is wholly inappropriate for a role which should be all about the youthfulness of a bright, ardent top on the voice; and when he and Judge Turpin (Jonathan Best, very good) and Sweeney (Mark Stone) are heard together, it’s hard telling them apart, so uniform is the vocal colour. Stone makes a decent fist of Sweeney, though he doesn’t exactly curdle the blood in ‘Epiphany’ and is hopelessly sabotaged by Henschel in the great music-hall rug-puller ‘A little priest’.

The best of this Sweeney comes from Rebecca Bottone’s sweetly sung Joanna, Diana DiMarzio’s authentic-sounding Beggar Woman and Pascal Charbonneau’s eager and affecting Tobias. But it’s a non-starter in so many other respects and I can’t believe Sondheim gave his blessing to change the line about the General in ‘Little priest’ from ‘with or without his privates’ to ‘parts’. Even if the joke was lost on the German audience, what point removing it altogether?

Penny dreadful? No, just dreadful, I fear.