Sweeney Todd 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 152 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. Sweeney Todd first appeared in a story titled "The String of Pearls: A Romance". This penny dreadful was published in 18 weekly parts, in Edward
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