A Little Priest

There is a gleeful wickedness at the heart of this duet that makes it one of the most unsettling comedy numbers ever written for the stage. The orchestration is deliberately light — a music-hall bounce, almost vaudevillian, with a tinkling piano and a brisk waltz-time feel that sits in grotesque contrast to the subject matter. Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd volley back and forth in a kind of twisted intellectual game, each line more darkly absurd than the last, their voices locking together in harmonies that sound almost celebratory. Angela Lansbury's delivery is all cheerful pragmatism — she treats mass murder like a business opportunity, and her breezy, conversational tone is what makes the number genuinely disturbing rather than merely dark. The comedy is Swiftian in its logic: satire of class, of industry, of what London's poverty reduced people to. It belongs to a tradition of Grand Guignol theater where laughter and horror share the same breath. You reach for this when you want something that makes you question your own amusement — when you want art that is simultaneously brilliant and morally vertiginous, the kind of thing that makes you laugh and then feel strange about having laughed.