Sweeney Todd’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Judge Turpin (Steve Gunderson), who not only raped his wife Lucy but also sent Sweeney to jail in Australia for life on trumped-up charges.

Fifteen years later, Sweeney is back to find that Turpin plans to marry Sweeney’s pretty young daughter Johanna (Ashley Fox Linton), whom he has kept a virtual prisoner all these years. Sweeney wants revenge.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lovett (Deborah Gilmour Smyth), proprietor of a failing London pie shop, is in need of inspiration, better recipes and customers.

These two will collaborate in Stephen Sondheim’s bloody revenge musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Cygnet Theatre’s latest offering, extended through May 9 at the Old Town Theatre. Sean Murray both directs and plays the murder-bent Sweeney.

Part of a dramatic tradition that includes Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and the French Grand Guignol theater (which features criminals, prostitutes and other lower class types) as heroes, the 1979 Broadway production of Sweeney Todd won eight Tonys and is one of Sondheim’s most successful musicals.

Dark and grim of plot, this features the most operatic of Sondheim’s scores, with mostly angry, angular, discordant music that you either can’t or wouldn’t want to leave the theater humming.

Okay, that’s my bias. But even I have to admit that this is a spectacularly fine production that deserves its extension and a long run.

Murray and Smyth are perfect protagonists: Murray a glowering presence, Smyth a blowsy, grasping widow eager to make a buck and not too picky about how. Both are consummate singing actors and commanding presences.

But this cast is loaded with talent. Tom Zohar is terrific as Mrs. Lovett’s assistant Tobias Ragg, as are Ashley Fox Linton as Johanna and Jacob Caltrider as sailor Anthony Hope, Johanna’s would-be suitor.

Steve Gunderson as the ill-fated Judge Turpin and his friend The Beadle (Geno Carr), Kürt Norby as magician Pirelli and Cynthia Marty as the beggar woman are excellent as well.

And the set! Just entering the theater is an experience – dark, dingy, foreboding, there’s no doubt that something evil this way comes.

Kudos also to the five hidden musicians who accompany the singers, and to Shirley Pierson’s costumes, Matt Lescault-Wood’s sound design and Eric Lotze’s spectacular lighting design.

Sweeney Todd probably isn’t your grandma’s favorite musical. It isn’t mine either, but Cygnet has given us the best production of it we’re likely to see.

Cygnet Theatre’s production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been extended through May 9, 2010 at the Old Town Theatre. Shows Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets, call 619-337-1525 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

Life is not as lovely as Marty Burnett’s expansive living-room set for Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts would suggest; in fact, the vast array of bay windows at the back will, over the course of this scandalous play, reflect mostly the numbing fog-gray of stunted lives, with occasionally touches of red and the tentative colors of dawn.

David Ellenstein directs a magnificent cast in Ibsen’s scathing commentary on 19th-century morality through May 2 at North Coast Repertory Theatre.

Sex, lies and hypocrisy (and not a little infidelity) have had full sway in the Alving household for years. When the play opens, Helene Alving (Rosina Reynolds) is about to dedicate an orphanage in her late husband’s name. But the captain is not deserving of honor: he was a lifelong lecher and drunkard whose reputation was preserved by his wife’s cover-up.

It isn’t that Helene didn’t try to escape: early in the marriage, she fled to the arms of family spiritual adviser Pastor Manders (John Herzog). But Manders resisted and sent her back to “her duty,” where she remained, tortured by her husband’s sordid doings even a decade after his death.

The Alvings’ 27-year-old son Osvald (Richard Baird), who has been off living the artist’s life in Paris, returns for the dedication, not because he cared about his father but because he is sick himself. Osvald is practically a stranger in the house – his mother, wanting to shield him from his profligate father’s influence, sent him away to school at the age of seven, and he hasn’t lived in the house since. But the father’s sins have been visited upon him: Osvald has is congenital syphilis; it is this that will eventually bring the family down.

Also in the house is the maid Regina Engstrand (Aimee Burdette), pretty, vivacious and a bit of a social climber, who has visions of marrying above her station. Everybody else in the house has plans for her too, including the carpenter whose last name she bears. Engstrand (Jonathan McMurtry), opportunist extraordinaire, is not shy about lying and blackmail when it suits his purpose. He wants Regina’s help in a new venture: a home for sailors.

And the smug, self-righteous Pastor Manders proves himself a hypocrite as corrupt and deceitful as the worst of society.

Ghosts was so scandalous of subject matter that it had to cross the pond for its first theatrical run – in Chicago in 1882. It had one performance at a private club in London in 1891. But the play attracted a gaggle of bad reviews describing it as “literary carrion,” “a loathsome sore unbandaged,” “abominable” and “revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous.”

Makes you want to rush right out and see it, doesn’t it?

Ellenstein has marshaled a terrific cast for this production, anchored by the rock-solid performances of Rosina Reynolds and Richard Baird as Helene and Osvald, wringing all the nuance and pathos out of these stunted lives. Baird has even suffered for his role: he lost 35 pounds in order to convince as the sickly Osvald.

Burdette, who charmed us as Miranda in the Miracosta/Old Globe production of The Tempest, does it again here, with a Regina just as bewitching but more calculating.

Herzog has the difficult task of convincing us that Pastor Manders believes what he says, no small task considering how out of touch it is with 21st-century attitudes. On opening night, Herzog was not always successful; not having complete mastery of his lines did not help, and both conspired to inspire occasional titters from the audience.

McMurtry convinces as the obsequious-but-sneaky Engstrand, who will do anything for a sufficient financial reward.

The themes in Ghosts have not lost their relevance: duty, honesty, ambition, hypocrisy and lust. North Coast Rep has mounted a fine production of this timeless classic.

Ghosts plays through Sunday, May 2, at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. Select Wesnesdays at 7 and select Saturdays at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 858-481-1055 or visit www.northcoastrep.org.