Chicago Tribune
- Highly Recommended
"...To see Doyle’s intensely powerful revival again—in an exquisitely sung, just exquisitely sung, first national tour graced with a superb star performance from Judy Kaye and a cast of the very highest order—is to be reminded of its singular blend of precision, simplicity and humanity. As you can also see in his current Broadway show, “A Catered Affair,” Doyle directs with great compassion for the broken man."
Chicago Sun Times
- Somewhat Recommended
"...The synergy between performer and instrument can have its charms. But in most cases it just ends up creating a distracting, distancing effect, diminishing the physical and emotional connection between the characters. (Or maybe it's just the Thorazine.) The production also has the effect of making Sweeney (David Hess, who gives us a rather suppressed psychopath) almost seem like a secondary character."
Daily Herald
- Highly Recommended
"...The robustly sung and expertly acted national tour is led by the compelling David Hess, who won a 2007 Jeff Award winner for Marriott's "Shenandoah." He's haunted and anguished as Sweeney, the barber unjustly exiled to an Australian penal colony, who returns years later to take revenge on the corrupt judge who destroyed his life and family. The macabre tale details his murderous spree slicing and dicing his enemies, who wind up as filling for meat pies."
SouthtownStar
- Somewhat Recommended
"...As it is, this "Sweeney Todd" is more a concert -- in which performers do triple duty singing, acting and playing band instruments -- rather than a full-fledged musical worthy of downtown big bucks."
Chicago Reader
- Highly Recommended
"...This ironic rendition of Sondheim's dark masterpiece won't suit everyone's taste, and, because of the stylized stagecraft, those unfamiliar with the plot may find some of the narrative confusing. But Sarah Travis's stripped-down orchestrations give the operatic score a thrilling astringency, and the superb cast do full justice to Sondheim's genius for musical storytelling. David Hess's performance effectively conveys Sweeney's spiral from depression to insanity. Broadway veteran Judy Kaye brings crisp comic understatement to the part of Sweeney's accomplice--a role that often lures actresses (including the part's creator, Angela Lansbury) into hammy overplaying."
Chicago Free Press
- Highly Recommended
"...There’s a reason innovator John Doyle eventually won a Tony for this inspiring new “Sweeney,” initially birthed three years ago for a cash-strapped regional British theater. Casting just 10 performers (“Sweeney” has nine featured singing roles) and demanding that they also be their own chorus and band—well, it’s a dangerously bold idea, a choice born out of financial necessity. It probably should’ve tanked, but instead it paid off in huge artistic dividends. Credit not just Doyle’s clever concept, but also the quality of the pared-down orchestrations and, of course, the hugely talented cast pulling triple duty and making it look simple."
EpochTimes
- Highly Recommended
"...The audience does not get cheated by this smaller version of this classic musical as they get the full drama and emotion that Sondheim's score was meant to produce. In fact without the large orchestra, there is never a time when the sound of the music overpowers the voices and the story itself. With no real set, but the use of a great number of props we get the picture of what the story is all about."
Copley News Service
- Highly Recommended
"...The show has its humor but the dominating tone remains one of rising intensity and horror as Sweeney takes his revenge against his enemies and learns a shattering secret about a crazed beggar woman he kills to keep her quiet. The show’s emotions may be outsized and the action grand guignol, but by the end of the evening the audience is riveted by the intensity of the passions on stage."
Time Out Chicago
- Highly Recommended
"...Performed by a mod-looking, tricked-out cast of merely ten, all of whom double as the show’s orchestra, Doyle’s representational staging was justly the toast of the Broadway season a few years back. And even though this touring version has washed out the almost-dehydrated drollness of the original’s sense of humor and replaced it with a slightly condescending farm-state bawdiness, Sondheim’s thrilling, amoral masterwork still stands up, Shakespeare-style; in any form, Sweeney Todd somehow remains a baroque balustrade and a salty slasher opera at the same time."
ChicagoCritic
- Recommended
"...Doyle’s less is more, with the cast doubling as musicians, is a workable concept worth using in other productions. Neither the singing nor the music suffered. This Sweeney Todd is worth a look."
