SOURCE: Mollin, Alfred. “Mayhem and Morality in Sweeney Todd.” American Music 9, no. 4 (winter 1991): 405-17.

In the following essay, Mollin asserts that although the main characters of Sweeney Todd have different “motives that prompt them to their common venture” in mass murder, the play “reveals the terms upon which these disparate characters can unite without sacrificing their individual perspectives.”

The two principal characters of Sweeney Todd¹ conspire in mass murder. However, the motives that prompt them to their common venture differ considerably, and these differences make intelligible much of the play's dramatic movement. The play reveals the terms upon which these disparate characters can unite without sacrificing their individual perspectives; at the culmination of the drama, both are presented as punished, in appropriately different ways, for their complicity.

I

The story opens with Benjamin Barker's return to London under the pseudonym “Sweeney Todd.” For fifteen years, he had been...