Why aren't there more musicals about cannibalism? The idea that you'd eat or be eaten by someone else is about as absurd as the idea that you'd break into song every ten minutes. Yet, it wasn't until the late 1970s that Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler put two and two together and wrote a musical about a "demon barber" and his pie-making accomplice who…well, consumed Victorian England. And what a treat the play is.

In 1846 a ship docks in London, carrying a sailor and a very strange man. Disheveled and ghastly pale, he's been imprisoned for 15 years on a made-up charge. Returning to his old life is impossible: his wife has poisoned herself and his daughter is locked away, a prisoner of the lecherous judge who sent him to prison.

But all is not lost for Sweeney Todd (George Hearn). He meets up with the motherly Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury) who makes terrible meat pies on Fleet Street. A barber by trade, he turns the floor above the shop into a tonsorial parlor. But then Todd's enemies start coming in for shaves-and they don't come out. He needs to get rid of the bodies, and Mrs. Lovett's pies need fresh meat.

The Demon Barber and Mrs. Lovett have been making meat pies since at least the actual 1840s. Sweeney Todd was the "hero" of a play by George Dibdin Pitt called The String of Pearls, which Pitt adapted from his own novel. But when Stephen Sondheim wanted to base a musical on some "bloody tub" Victorian melodrama, people were skeptical. But when Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway, the show was such a hit that it won 8 Tonys (including Best Musical) and its company went on tour in 1980. In 1982, their performance at Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was recorded for the Entertainment Channel. Twenty-two years later, Warner Home Video finally released it on DVD, and the disc is well worth the wait.

While Pitt's Sweeney Todd is an unmitigated psychopath who thinks only of money and not getting caught, Sondheim's and Wheeler's is sympathetic-heroic, even. He sees himself as an angel of death, a bizarre Robin Hood figure taking life from the rich and putting the poor out of their misery. In the song "Epiphany," Sweeney exclaims: "[T]here are two kinds of men, and only two./ There's the one staying put in his proper place, and the one with his foot in the other one's face…no, we all deserve to die."

Mrs. Lovett doesn't have such noble (if twisted) aspirations. She wants only two things: wealth and the mysterious Mr. Todd. When the money rolls in thanks to her new "secret ingredient," she dreams of moving with Sweeney to the seaside. But he's too fixated on revenge to notice her affection. Both Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd think they feel love: she for the barber, he for his wife Lucy and daughter Johanna. But what they call "love" is only selfishness. Once Mrs. Lovett gets what she wants, Sweeney's needs start to annoy her. "Always harping on the bloody old judge," she whines. And though Sweeney plans to get Johanna out of the judge's clutches he admits: "I think I miss you less and less as every day goes by." He's not avenging his family anymore--he's just getting revenge for his own sake. The couple's shortsightedness shoves them into a whirlwind of fear and murder and lies, all leading to the shocking but inevitable conclusion.

Sweeney Todd's London is a filthy, yet tightly-controlled place. A whistle calls the chorus like a cuckoo from a clock; they warn us to "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" and tell a story already crystallized into urban legend: "He shaved the faces of gentlemen/Who never thereafter were heard of again." Within the first five minutes we know most of what's going to happen, and can only let the story run its course. Even characters planning intricate revenge schemes nod to a power greater than themselves. "It's almost like fate!" exclaims Mrs. Lovett, when the sailor falls in love with Sweeney's daughter and begs to hide her in the tonsorial parlor. And when his archenemy Judge Turpin stops by the shop, Sweeney Todd gasps, "Providence is kind!"

The many songs, too, make us feel that the people who sing them are just puppets of some greater cosmic force. The play is more like a short opera than a musical, because there's more singing than speech. Almost everything its characters say is bound by nests of musical constraints: rhyme, meter, repetition, ("Pretty women, sir! Pretty women, yes! All the pretty women!") short phrases and strange grammar ("More hot! More pies!"). Like blinded birds in cages, people in Sweeney Todd are forced to sing without stopping, trapped in a world with so many rules that it collapses under their weight.

Unfortunately, the disc doesn't have much in the way of extras: no commentaries, no "making-of" featurettes, no still galleries or liner notes. But the play's presentation more than makes up for this dearth of goodies. While it has no widescreen arrangement (originally being a television broadcast), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been totally remastered. A made-for-TV play from the early 1980s should not look this good. The print is free of scratches, dirt, grain, or hiccups. Colors are as rich as the day they were filmed. Nothing-not Mrs. Lovett's orange hair, not Sweeney Todd's pallor or the bright red blood of his victims-is washed out. Sound, too, is excellent. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track has a consistent clarity. There's no buzzing, popping, hissing, or wild vascillations in volume.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street isn't the only play in which people sing and get eaten, but I think it stands out even in that elite group. Like its cousins, Sweeney Todd doesn't take itself too seriously-its song "A Little Priest" is best described as "Dr. Seuss does cannibalism"-but it's also deeply tragic in a way that Little Shop of Horrors and Cannibal! The Musical are not. If an operetta about serial killers stuffing people into pies sounds like your cup of tea, step into Sweeney's tonsorial parlor. You may not want to come back.