Theatre and music form the swamp in today's reviews.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

The Gate Theatre, Dublin

An avenging barber who sliced his cut-throat razors viciously and injudiciously through 18th-century London, Sweeney Todd, it seems, was also a rather canny entrepreneur.

Thanks to the nifty engineering possibilities of the Industrial Revolution and an obvious gap in the baked-goods market, he supplied the morally flexible Mrs Lovett with juicy filling for meat pies. Or so the tale goes . . . do they really expect us to swallow this stuff? The reason that Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical thriller still goes down such a treat, and why Selina Cartmell's outrageously entertaining production is a must-see, is that both writer and director perfectly understand the preposterous appeal of this morbid myth. Stropping his way through Penny Dreadfuls, melodramas and musicals, Todd is part-tragic hero, part-bogeyman; his tale should carry both a shiver and a giggle.

Sondheim's score - his most operatic in ambition - recognised that Grand Guignol deserves utter seriousness. Cartmell - who does Guignol the Grandest - knows how to turn a wicked tale into an exquisite spectacle. And though the Gate's production uses 14 performers and just seven musicians, thus qualifying as a "Teeny Todd", the arrangement and superb musical direction (by Andrew Synnott and Cathal Synnott respectively) ensures that it never lacks amperage.

Everything about the show is balanced on that razor's edge between horror and kitsch: David Farley has constructed a London of industrial grime and confectionary glow, his costumes gleefully disregarding the period. David Shannon, dressed like a Goth with a New Romantic hairdo, makes a compellingly intense and beautifully voiced Todd, while Anita Reeves's brilliantly comic Mrs Lovett, a predator in a candyfloss wig, sums up the wit and nimbleness of the entire show (her opening-night ad-lib, when a bonbon slipped her fingers and rolled into the audience - "Oh, you have it" - means we are duty-bound to love her forever).

Together they sing A Little Priest, a showstopper both gruesomely funny and sneakily subversive, making us more complicit in the unfolding horror with every laugh. From here on in, like a Victorian morality tale or a revenge tragedy, everything must go to hell, and Cartmell's entrancingly grim scalpings hold us fast for the ride. Performances alternate between the fantastic and the revelatory. Casting the chanteuse Camille O'Sullivan as a grotesque beggar is a good joke by any standards, but the bigger surprises are Mark O'Regan's captivating falsetto (as gold-lamé resplendent fraud Pirelli) and Barry McGovern's raspy baritone as the self-flagellating Judge Turpin, whose quasi-incestuous desire for Todd's daughter, Johanna (Lisa Lambe), spurs the whole tragedy.

Lambe, as the caged songbird, is pitch-perfect and beguilingly acrobatic, and though Cartmell recognises substance in the role, she can't resist the campy fun of disguising Lambe in a sailor suit, as though Johanna and Simon Morgan's naval suitor might elope to a nearby production of On The Town.

But such is the thrill of this musical: despite its technical complexity, its rough-edged aesthetic or Todd's morbid psychology, it always finds room for an illuminating joke and a stirring device, dispatching its victims not with torrents of blood but with puffs of flour. A show to give you goosebumps, this Todd is as sinister a treat as Mrs Lovett's wares, its contents dark and delicious.

Runs until June 16

Peter Crawley

Tilt

The Granary, Cork

In Tilt, her first play, pianist and composer Ailís Ní Ríain has slanted her view of domestic violence and child abuse so that the remembering voices of three siblings seem to run from the top of a family incline to the bottom.

Their reminiscences, touched off in an almost light-hearted sequence of recall, tell a familiar story, in a tone more of astonishment and sadness, than of anger. Where the telling darkens - especially in the outbursts of Aidan O'Hare as Olan - the panic is momentary; it is as if the re-telling is an assurance that nothing lasts forever, except perhaps the tenderness of the children's relationship with one another.

In this Granary Theatre co-production with Liverpool's New Works, director Graeme Maley has chosen to give one of the male roles to Hannah Burke. This means that we do not see the play as written or even, perhaps, as intended, but it also means that we see an excellent actress at work.

All three, with Rachel O'Shea as the leading voice, present a compelling ensemble, even though this is not a profound play and, at 55 minutes, it is a short one. Probably characteristically, the voices are orchestrated, the exchanges brittle and punctuated occasionally by unlikely adjectival excess, as if a melodic line were to counterbalance the staccato. What emerges is a sense of the sweetness of a shared victimhood, created with such delicate intensity that it feels as if the audience itself is holding its breath.

Runs until Sat

Mary Leland

Cold War Kids

Ambassador, Dublin

They might have come together in Fullerton, California, but Cold War Kids sound as if they've sweltered their way through a dog-hot summer or two in the Deep South. Their songs shake and howl, throw hands to the heavens and stomp around the room, with ramshackle rhythms hammered together by panel-beating skill.

Much has been made of the fact that three of the band met at a Christian college, and in interviews they carefully sidestep the God issue - the music, though, sounds as if it comes from the hearts of believers. Not your dress-up-on-Sunday, psalm-singing churchgoer; more your speaking-in-tongues, fire-and-brimstone, serpent-handling evangelical.

Live, this comes through in the music, lyrics and stage presence. They might stroll on stage nonchalantly, but they explode into the set, hurling their way around the stage, slinging their guitars and pounding the drums and piano as if the instruments have been picking a fight. This swamp rock is marred by some woeful sound engineering, which mires the whole set in a muddy sound over which Nathan Willett's vocals are jarringly loud.

The dominant factor here is undoubtedly Willett's voice. On the album Robbers and Cowards, his howling lyrics are tethered to the ground like a junkyard dog during the verses, and let loose only in the choruses. Live, any self-restraint is thrown out the window, and he opens up his throat unceasingly. At first it's searing, but towards the end of the set it becomes tiring, and robs the songs of their taut dynamic and bitter melody.

When the band lock the tracks down, however, the results are superb. Hang Me Up to Dry is relentless, pulling no punches and slugging the crowd mercilessly, while Hospital Beds threatens to set the room on fire. St John veers between gospel blues (with Willett hand-clapping and swaying like a preacher without his pulpit) and down-and-dirty soul, thanks to some deft vocal sparring with Jonnie Russell and bar-room beats from Matt Aveiro.

Diamonds in the rough, then, of a slipshod sound mix, and perhaps not shining brightly enough to convert the entire crowd to the Cold War cause.

Laurence Mackin