Sweeney Todd dogs alerting neighbors and the gendarmes. The two confess, and are summarily burned alive; the houses where the crimes took place are then razed. Whether this version of the story is based on "The String of Pearls" or its dramatisation, or a much older tale alluded to by Féval is unclear. In any case, it may well be the source for some recent versions that move the tale from London to Paris. In 1875, Frederick Hazleton's c. 1865 dramatic adaptation "Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: or the String of Pearls" (see below) was published as Vol 102 of
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street she told him: "Oh God – I didn't know this was what ["Sweeney Todd"] was about. It's nothing to do with Grand Guignol. It's the story of your [own] life." What Sondheim thought of as "a small horror piece" eventually became a colossal portrait of the Industrial Revolution in the hands of director Hal Prince. At first, Prince was not interested in directing the show; to him it was just another melodrama, not very experimental structurally. Then he discovered a metaphor which expanded the story into an essay on the human condition. On the stage of the Uris Theater in