In the modern world of relentless change, the concept of fate holds a strange, seductive power over those who try to make sense out of chaos. For thousands of years, fate has helped bring order to an overwhelming world and to history itself, for those who believe in it.

In its student-run production of the 1979 Broadway smash Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stanford University’s Ram’s Head Society brilliantly plays on the idea of fate to construct an aura of inevitability, of certain destiny, only to turn audience expectations on their head with the musical’s tragic, unexpected ending.

Set in the mid-19^th century, the action begins with Benjamin Barker’s arrival back to London after a lengthy exile on trumped-up charges, engineered by the lustful Judge Turpin as a way to steal Barker’s wife Lucy. During Barker’s absence, the Judge rapes Lucy, who then poisons herself. Thereafter, he adopts Barker’s daughter, Johanna.

When Barker returns home, his former life fully destroyed, he assumes the alias of Sweeney Todd and, with the help of meat pie-maker Mrs. Lovett, hatches a plan. He resolves to resume his old career of barbering, lure his enemies in for a shave, and then kill them with his razor. The Judge and his crony, Beadle Bamford, are his main targets.

The plot has all the trappings of a good-old-fashioned revenge drama, complete with plenty of blood and no shortage of allusions to Greek mythology. Like Atreus and Tantalus in Greek legend, for example, Sweeney and Lovett dispose of the bodies by baking them into Lovett’s meat pies, which ironically become extraordinarily popular. The Greek myth is a tale of certain revenge, of killings that demand more killings, of human agency played out against the backdrop of a larger fate. In Sweeney Todd, these overtones inflect and inform the unfolding of Sweeney’s own mission, which seems destined to succeed.

Director Jean Ansolabehere and set designer Caleb Jordan bring the idea of fate to life through the imagery of the stage itself, flanked on both sides by factory-like gears and cogs, which also appear on the costumes of key characters like Sweeney, Lovett, and his daughter Johanna. When Sweeney, played by the deliciously furious James Everett, first hatches his murderous plot for revenge, more gears and cogs drop down into view at the top of the stage’s illuminated red backdrop. As Sweeney murders more and more people on his path to Judge Turpin himself, the cogs drop down further and further, revealing more of the machinery that seems to drive the murderous plot slowly but surely onward to its completion. One song’s lyrics describe Sweeney himself as a “perfect machine.”

As modern spectators who by now expect industry and technology to function predictably and flawlessly, the audience has no doubt how the story will end—Sweeney will have revenge on the Judge, thus avenging his past. The gears simultaneously evoke the contemporary and the ancient, our trust in machines and our yearning for the Greek-style fate that brings both justice and certainty.

But, in good modern fashion, things are not what they seem; the plot is as comic as it is dark. Cannibalism elicits horror but also provides the foundation for the show’s best song by far, “A Little Priest,” in which Sweeney and Lovett grotesquely but hilariously explore how pies made out of different kinds of people would taste. When Sweeney pretends to ask about pie made out of poets, for example, Lovett responds, “No, y’see, the trouble with poet is/ 'Ow do you know it's deceased?/ Try the priest.”

Later on, while sharpening tools that look more like weapons than cooking utensils, Lovett—played marvelously by Olivia Haas—sings about her desire for a beach house and the accoutrements of a middle-class lifestyle, complete with fashionable clothes and a steady income, in “By the Sea.” Sweeney responds to her romantic entreaties like any good sitcom husband would, with one-word answers and his mind elsewhere. On a deeper level, the song touches on one of the musical’s central themes: what is madness? Indeed, who is more insane—Sweeney for killing with cold and brutal detachment to get his revenge, or Lovett for encouraging him to do so because she needs human meat for her pie business?

This madness reaches its climax in the musical’s final scenes when Sweeney reaches his own climax of murder, a determination and blind energy that both accomplishes and undoes his efforts at once. To be more specific would ruin the surprise ending, of course, but the twist itself is all the more startling and unsettling against the backdrop of the ever-present gears and machinery that promised an all-too-certain outcome.

Despite its 19^th-century setting, Sweeney Todd has as much to do with blood and revenge as with the uncertainties of the modern world, in which notions like inevitability may lend us a comforting but false sense of understanding and cause us to forget the contingency of history, the power of individuals to affect the course of their world and their own lives, for better or for worse.