Sweeney Todd
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50 free Sweeney Todd trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sweeney Todd has been frightening and delighting audiences for the better part of two centuries. The barber who dispatches his customers, and the pie-maker downstairs who finds a use for them, began as a piece of Victorian pulp, became a staple of melodrama, and was then transformed into one of the most admired musicals ever written for Broadway. This quiz covers the whole story. There are questions on the plot and characters of the stage show, from the barber's return to London to the grim final scene in the bakehouse, on the songs and the people who first performed them, and on the major revivals, concerts and the 2007 film. Others reach back to the legend itself: where the tale first appeared, how it has changed, and the odd places the demon barber's name has turned up since. It is written for theatre fans, students studying the show, and anyone who has just seen it and wants to test what stuck. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future rock star fronted the Canadian glam band Sweeney Todd as a teenager before launching a solo career?
Bryan Adams
Bryan Adams replaced original singer Nick Gilder in the Vancouver band, whose hit Roxy Roller had topped the Canadian chart. He left within a year, after one unsuccessful album.
Q 02Which actress, later a famous television sleuth, created the role of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd on Broadway in 1979?
Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury won her fourth Tony Award for the part and stayed with it for 14 months. Murder, She Wrote made her a worldwide star five years later.
Q 03Fleet Street, the London home of Sweeney Todd's barber shop, later became shorthand for which British industry?
Newspapers
Newspapers made the street's name: London's first daily, the Daily Courant, was published there in 1702, and by the 20th century most national titles had offices on it.
Q 04Which Pirates of the Caribbean star took singing lessons to play the title role in the 2007 film Sweeney Todd?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp was not known as a singer, and the film's producer called casting him a gamble. It brought him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Q 05In the musical Sweeney Todd, to which distant land was the barber transported on a false charge before his escape?
Australia
Australia is where the barber spends fifteen years as a convict. That wronged-man backstory was added by the stage play the musical is based on; earlier versions gave him no such sympathetic motive.
Q 06Which pop-classical singer returned to Broadway in 2023 to play the title role in a revival of Sweeney Todd?
Josh Groban
Josh Groban earned a Tony nomination for the part. The revival began with a workshop held just three days after the show's composer died in 2021.
Q 07Sweeney Todd first appeared in 1846 in which kind of cheap, lurid Victorian serial sold in weekly parts?
Penny dreadfuls
Penny dreadfuls cost a penny for each weekly part of 8 to 16 pages. Boys who could not afford one often formed clubs to share the cost and passed the flimsy booklets from reader to reader.
Q 08Which Broadway composer and lyricist wrote both Sweeney Todd and the fairy-tale musical Into the Woods?
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim saw a play about the barber in London in 1973 and pictured a small horror piece. It became his fourth show to win the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Q 09Which Stranger Things actor played Mrs. Lovett's young pie-shop helper in the 2023 Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd?
Gaten Matarazzo
Gaten Matarazzo was a Broadway child actor, playing Gavroche in Les Misérables, before finding fame as Dustin Henderson. He left the revival in November 2023.
Q 10Which Victorian novelist joked about pies filled with cat meat a decade before Sweeney Todd first appeared in print?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens gave the joke to Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers. In Martin Chuzzlewit, two years before the barber's debut, a character frets that a friend will think he has been made into meat pies.
Q 11Which director cast his then partner Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett in the 2007 film of Sweeney Todd?
Tim Burton
Tim Burton insisted the film be bloody, feeling that stage versions which held back lost their power. On set the fake blood was coloured orange so it would look right on the desaturated film.
Q 12What is the surname of the corrupt judge who transports Sweeney Todd and raises the barber's daughter as his ward?
Turpin
Turpin shares his name with the highwayman Dick Turpin, another favourite of cheap Victorian fiction. In the musical the judge decides to marry the ward he has raised.
Q 13Which Harry Potter actor played the corrupt judge who destroys the barber's family in the 2007 film Sweeney Todd?
Alan Rickman
Q 21The Uris Theatre, where Sweeney Todd opened in 1979, now carries which name as the long-time Broadway home of Wicked?
The Gershwin
The Gershwin became its name in 1983, in honour of two songwriting brothers. The original Sweeney Todd played 557 performances there before closing in June 1980.
Q 22Which actress, later Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, won an Olivier Award as Mrs. Lovett in London's West End?
Imelda Staunton
Imelda Staunton starred opposite Michael Ball in a staging that moved the story from 1846 to the 1930s. Both of them won Oliviers, and so did the production.
Q 23Which comic duet closes Act I of Sweeney Todd as Mrs. Lovett proposes baking the barber's victims into pies?
Alan Rickman, the films' Severus Snape, was joined by two more Harry Potter co-stars: Helena Bonham Carter and Timothy Spall, who plays the judge's henchman, the Beadle.
Q 14Under which real name did Sweeney Todd work as a London barber before a judge had him transported?
Benjamin Barker
Benjamin Barker was the former tenant of the room above Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, and she promises to keep the returning stranger's secret.
Q 15What is the profession of Anthony Hope, who rescues Sweeney Todd at sea and befriends him on the way to London?
A sailor
A sailor newly docked in London, he falls for a girl he sees singing at a window, unaware that she is his new friend's daughter.
Q 16What is the name of Sweeney Todd's daughter, raised as the judge's ward and loved by Anthony Hope?
Johanna
Johanna shares her name with the heroine of the Victorian original, who is no relation to the barber and disguises herself as a boy to work in his shop.
Q 17Which comedian famous for prank-interview characters played the flamboyant rival barber in the 2007 film Sweeney Todd?
Sacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Baron Cohen was cast in October 2006. He sang on screen again five years later as the innkeeper Thénardier in the film of Les Misérables.
Q 18Where does Mrs. Lovett meet her death once Sweeney Todd learns she lied to him about his wife?
In her own oven
She perishes in her own oven after the barber pretends to forgive her and dances her wildly round the bakehouse. In the Victorian original he poisons her instead.
Q 19Which character finally kills Sweeney Todd in the bakehouse at the end of the musical?
Tobias Ragg
Tobias Ragg, driven mad and with his hair turned white, crawls up from the sewer and cuts the barber's throat with the barber's own blade.
Q 20In which guise has Sweeney Todd's wife Lucy been living on the streets of London, unrecognised by her husband?
A beggar woman
A beggar woman who drifts through the story turns out to be Lucy, left insane by the poison she took. The barber kills her in haste and sees her face clearly only afterwards.
A Little Priest
A Little Priest was deliberately paired with the barber's most nightmarish solo, which comes just before it. In the play the musical is based on, the whole scheme took less than half a page of dialogue.
Q 24Which Oscar-winning actress made her New York stage debut as Mrs. Lovett in a 2014 concert staging of Sweeney Todd?
Emma Thompson
Emma Thompson had not acted on stage for 24 years when she joined the New York Philharmonic concerts, singing opposite the opera star Bryn Terfel. PBS later broadcast the performance.
Q 25The showman barber in Sweeney Todd who is really former assistant Daniel O'Higgins poses as a native of which country?
Italy
Italy is the claimed homeland of 'Adolfo Pirelli', who sells a sham cure for hair loss in the market. He drops the accent in private to blackmail the barber, and becomes the first victim.
Q 26In Cockney rhyming slang, Sweeney Todd stands for which London police unit, giving a 1970s TV drama its title?
The Flying Squad
The Flying Squad became 'the Sweeney' to Londoners, and the nickname passed to the television series starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman.
Q 27Which fantasy author portrayed Sweeney Todd as a barber traumatised by the Napoleonic Wars in the 2012 novel Dodger?
Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett made the barber a tragic figure rather than a villain, and has the young hero Dodger bring about his arrest.
Q 28In the Sweeney Todd song My Friends, which long-lost possessions does the barber greet as trusted companions?
His silver razors
His silver razors are handed back to him by Mrs. Lovett, and holding them again persuades him to take up his old trade.
Q 29Where does the judge lock away Sweeney Todd's daughter after learning that she plans to elope with Anthony Hope?
An asylum
An asylum run by the corrupt Jonas Fogg becomes her prison. Anthony Hope gets inside by posing as a wigmaker who wants to buy the inmates' hair.
Q 30Which poison does Mrs. Lovett say Sweeney Todd's wife Lucy swallowed after her husband was sent away?
Arsenic
Arsenic is what Lucy took, but Mrs. Lovett leaves out one fact: the dose left her insane rather than dead. The barber learns the truth only in the final scene.