I really don't like musicals, never have, and most likely never will. I used to think it was because I just couldn't stand people bursting into song at the drop of a hat, but then I realized it wasn't the music or the songs I had anything against, it was the plays themselves I couldn't stand. Oklahoma, South Pacific, and the rest of the so-called classics of American stage and screen were simply pitiful excuses for theatre; facile plots, no character development, and nothing to hold the audience's attention aside from the song and dance numbers.

Aside from being performed in the same type of facility that people go to see performances of plays in, I see no connection between them and the works of Shakespeare, O'Neill, Pinter, or any of the great dramatists the world has known. It's not that there aren't great pieces of theatre that have music and songs in them, because there are; but plays like Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht have been theatre first and musicals second.

While big budget theatre productions in most major metropolitan centres seem to be still dominated by the blockbuster musical production, film has been reluctant to embrace the genre as often as it once did. Aside from Chicago a few years ago, there haven't been any major attempts to capture a musical on film until 2007 when Tim Burton's adaptation of Steven Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street splattered onto screens around the world.

While I've never been overly fond of Sondheim's work, I've always appreciated it for its intelligence and originality. His work has always been as much theatre as musical with a real plot and characters who actually develop as the play progresses. Therefore I hoped that the combination of Tim Burton's direction, and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter tackling the lead roles would make the film version of Sweeney Todd worth watching. For a variety of reasons I never saw it in the theatres, so I picked up a copy of the DVD (two-disc special edition) when it went on sale Tuesday.

I was delighted to see that the support cast included Timothy Spall (Wormtail in the Harry Potter franchise) and Allen Rickman, whom I've always liked, and a bit concerned by the appearance of Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat), who I usually find too over the top for my tastes. I know there had been some fuss made about none of the leads being "musical theatre" people, but as far as I was concerned it was a plus that actors had been cast rather than singers and dancers. It's a Tim Burton film for goodness' sake; were they expecting a lot of happy capers and jigs or uplifting songs?

For those unfamiliar with the plot of Sweeney Todd, it's a straightforward revenge tragedy. Sweeney Todd had at one time been a happily married barber with a lovely wife and daughter. An evil judge (Alan Rickman) fell in lust with Sweeney's wife, and had him framed and deported. Fifteen years later Sweeney returns to London where he's told by a certain Mrs Lovett, who runs the pie shop below his old barber shop, that his wife took poison and his daughter was adopted by the evil judge.