Death by Haircut. Face2Face Theater

Click on the links below to listen to the songs from the play.

The Punk Rock Cut

I Want To Be Evil

I fought The Law

The Sweeney Todd story

Sweeney Todd is a fictional character, who first appeared in a story called

‘The String Of Pearls’, published in a Victorian newspaper in 1846-7.

Since then the story has been re-told in many different formats, including

Victorian melodrama, theatre, films, dance, television, comics, radio plays, and

a famous Broadway musical. The story has become urban legend, and although

some claim there is a historical basis and that Sweeney Todd was a real person,

there is no evidence to support this.

‘Death By Haircut’ is an adaptation of the

traditional Sweeney Todd story. Here is a

summary of the original plot, as published on

Wikipedia. 

Sweeney Todd is a barber who dispatches his

victims by pulling a lever as they sit in his barber

chair. His victims fall backward down a revolving

trapdoor into the basement of his shop, generally

causing them to break their necks or skulls. In

case they are alive, Todd goes to the basement

and “polishes them off” (slitting their throats with

his straight razor). In some adaptations,

the murdering process is reversed, with Todd

slitting his customers’ throats before dispatching

them into the basement through the revolving

trapdoor. After Todd has robbed his dead victims

of their goods, Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime,

assists him in disposing of the bodies by baking

their flesh into meat pies and selling them to the

unsuspecting customers of her pie shop. Todd’s

barber shop is situated at 186 Fleet Street,

London, next to St. Dunstan’s church, and is connected

 to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means 

of an underground passage. In most versions of the story, 

he and Mrs.Lovett hire an unwitting orphan boy, Tobias Ragg,

 to serve the pies to customers.