 Benjamin Barker, a skilled barber with a lovely wife who is pregnant with their child, suddenly loses everything. He is sent away on a trumped-up charge to prison at Botany Bay, by the nefarious Judge Turpin, who has designs on his wife. Fast-forward some years later, when Benjamin escapes with help from the steadfast friendly sailor Anthony Hope. Returning to London and taking the name Sweeney Todd, he seeks to find out what has happened to his family. Mrs. Nellie Lovett, the widow who ran the bakery downstairs from Barker s shop, (and always had a crush on him), tells him of their horrible fate, which sends Barker/Todd over the edge into madness, consumed by the thirst for revenge against the Judge. Ever-practical, with the possibility of murder and mayhem afoot, Mrs. Lovett thinks of a fiendishly clever way that they can both make a killing...literally. But she hasn t been forthcoming about everything, unbeknownst to her new partner, and the engines of Fate begin to grind and roar, bearing all the parties involved to an unexpected and devastating denouement...