Sherri Edelen as Mrs. Lovett in ‘Sweeney Todd.’ Few shows walk the line quite as successfully as Sweeney Todd. Whether the line be between horror and absurdity, good and bad taste, gore and slapstick, Sweeney is there to push the boundaries. And Signature Theatre’s gleefully bloody, winking but impassioned production is firmly in that spirit. Courtesy of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (hearing the tweens in Signature’s audience Wednesday debate the merits of the…

>> The Culkin School of Traditional Irish Dance isn’t anywhere nearly as embarrassing as Riverdance and its ilk — think real jigs without the terrible music and costumes. Accompanied tonight on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage by traditional Irish musicians Billy McCominskey, Zan McLeon and Jim Eagan. Free, 6 p.m. >> Three Stars alums The Beanstalk Library are playing the Black Cat’s backstage, with John Wayne Hero. 9 p.m., $8. >> It’s a little…

We’ve got a secret for you: Sweeney Todd is a musical. We understand there might be some confusion about that, seeing as how the television ads don’t have a single note of singing in them, and if you blink during the theatrical trailer, you’ll miss the five seconds of Johnny Depp singing buried in the clip. Make no mistake, though. The vast majority of this film is told in song. On the one hand, it’s…

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Foreign: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Imagine writing a book when your typing speed is roughly half a word per minute. That picture of painstaking persistence only scratches the surface of the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French Elle magazine editor who suffered total paralysis after a stroke that left him only able to communicate…

Mid-December has arrived, and with that comes the inevitable flood of best-of lists. The Washington Area Film Critics’ Association has, for the previous five years of its existence, been in the habit of trying to get their own list out ahead of most of the other critics’ societies. We can’t really blame them. Considering the fact that none of the critics from the city’s biggest newspaper are members, not to mention the fact that the…

His lyrics have poignantly expressed everything from the inner turmoil of assassin John Wilkes Booth to the life lessons Jack learned when climbing the beanstalk. And the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washingtonis kicking off its 25th Annversary season by giving DC audiences the chance to appreciate his incomparable career. The man in question, of course, is the almost universally-admired Stephen Sondheim, and the chorus’ latest production, “Everything’s Coming Up Sondheim,” takes a one-song sample…