Stage:

...Jim Dale seems to be having a marvelous time with his role as a flamboyantly high camp actor-director...

...Although London, as a place and as an image of injustice and greed, is at the center of this tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the original production turned the city into a high tech phenomenon, presumably a metaphor for the ugly side of industrialization...

...The figures were almost totemic in the original, grand grotesques by virtue of their make-up and the performance of Cariou and Lansbury...

...A masochistic hypocrite...

...Beth Fowler, as Mrs...

...His score gets more impressive with every hearing...

...GERALD WEALESRALD WEALES...

...It is set in Singapore and the Malayan jungle in 1948, at the beginning of the guerrilla action which was called the Malayan Emergency ("softly, softly officialese" for war, says Major Flack), and it concerns an army song-and-dance unit caught in an ambush...

...The current production retains the shrill factory whistle to punctuate the narrative at particular grisly moments (sound as exclamation point), but it has neither the space nor the funds for so elegant a set...

...Playgoers, who sit as usual on three sides of the Circle playing area, enter beneath hangings that look like a cross between tattered banners and wet wash...

...Their absence does no great harm to the script...

...Sweeney, a victim of class privilege, was transported on a false charge to clear the way for the judge's rape of his wife and theft of his daughter...

...It lets him move from the stage within the stage, on which he plays Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, and Carmen Miranda, sometimes chewing up the songs for the sake of broad imitation, to backstage where he can flounce his way through minefields of double-entendres and rest occasionally for a sentimental moment...

...There is a permanent set at one end of the playing area, but at the other is a movable, detachable, multilevel set that gives the production the flexibility to present the intermeshing stories and the restlessness of the urban setting...

...No one is going to worry about the cuts and changes in Privates on Parade (except for the occasional niggling scholar of modern drama like me...

...SPIRITED REVIVALS 'SWEENEY TODD' & 'PRIVATES' The new Sweeney Todd at the Circle in the Square inevitably lacks the shock and surprise of the original 1979 production of the Stephen Sond-heim-Hugh Wheeler musical...

...The play-and even more the film-was as tough as Sweeney Todd in its view of a world in which the consequences of colonialism and the British class system make pawns and victims of ordinary men...

...The audience is enveloped in the city because it is enveloped in the story and the music and the characters...

...She bakes Todd's victims into meat pies because it "Seems an awful waste...

...Although it is a restaging of last year's revival at the tiny York Theater it does not have the intimacy of the television version (now available on VCR) in which George Hearn is an electrifying Sweeney, even more appealingly frightening than was the admirable Len Cariou...

...With the price of meat what it is...

...When the show first appeared, it was labeled-in the program, on the record cover, in the published version-"A Musical Thriller...

...They are more human as Gunton and Fowler play them, easier to sympathize with, even identify with, which is one of the points of the musical, to elicit our complicity because we find such murderous people so attractive...

...He returns to take revenge on those who wronged him, but he ends by killing at random because "We all deserve to die...

...Sondheim should not have restored or added it to the musical...

...Reg is still a villain at the Roundabout-a woman-beater, a gunrunner, a black marketeer-but his death is real, an event that renders both his early scenes and the attack confusing...

...Aside from the system, the chief villain of the original piece is Reg, the sergeant-major who stages a fake death for himself and then organizes the attack on his comrades-in-arms...

...Simon Jones, who had a small part in the original Aldwych production, plays Major Flack (the role John Cleese played in the film) as a perfect model of a sincerely priggish Christian warrior...

...The ghosts of two heavyweight S weeneys hover over this production, but Bob Gunton holds his own in their company-a forceful, scary, sometimes touching, even playful Sweeney...

...This version, which seems to be an amalgam of the play and the movie with important hunks of plot and color cut away, is more amiable, except for a scene in which one soldier mourns his dead friend and lover while the major speaks platitudes on the other side of the stage...

...While Sweeney Toddis making a welcome return to Broadway, Privates on Parade, another product of the late 1970s, is in New York for the first time-if you do not count the 1982 movie version of the 1977 "play with songs...

...The Peter Nichols-Denis King show has had a spirited production at the Roundabout...

...I vote the last of these...

...Lovett, like a looter in St...

...Neither these nor the long blue streamers through which the company weaves during the "City on Fire" number seems to have anything to do with Todd's "great black pit" of a London...

...I am not quite sure what is intended by a scene, not in the original, in which the judge flagellates himself while he sings of Johanna, his ward, Todd's daughter, whom he is planning to marry against her will...

...however, the play loses some of its resonance because the England Sylvia has invented out of her dead father's memories and the London Illustrated News is no more imaginary to the ordinary soldiers than the Berkshire world Major Flack lives in when he is home...

...Instead, the director (Susan H. Schulman) and her designer (James Morgan) have chosen to wrap the audience in a tatty suggestion of the city...

...More human...

...There are a great many small cuts, mostly of very English references in the mouth of Sylvia, the Welsh-Indian woman who has never seen England...

...The musical numbers, most of which had thematic or character point in the original, have made it to the stage with the fun intact, but the play has undergone some odd changes...

...Lovett, stakes her own claim to a character, some small corner of which is forever Angela Lansbury...

...For the rest, there is the fun itself...

...Banners aside, Schulman and Morgan have found the means in the awkward space at the Circle to let the musical happen as it should...

...A creative mistake...

...This kind of vigilante justice might be taken as a special case of a Sweeney driven mad had not a recent Philadelphia Inquirer carried a story about four white men who beat two black men, waiting on separate corners for buses, because three blacks with no connection to the victims had earlier mugged the girlfriend of one of the baseball bat wielders...

...Musical it is and thrilling, but that is a reductive label that hardly does justice to a work concerned with both social and personal evil...

...There is still enough direct and oblique social criticism to feed the playgoers who like a little substance with their fun...

...Croix, has a more practical response to societal inequities...

...The two principals are surrounded by a small but strong company (particularly Jim Walton as the sailor), but the real star of the show is Stephen Sondheim...