Artistic Director Hamish Keddie brings the musical thriller Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to the Port Players Theatre on Lord Street in May.
In 1830, George Dibden-Pitt penned the story of the fictitious “Sweeney Todd”, which was published in London as a ‘Penny Dreadful’, similar to today’s tabloids. The story was well received and Dibden-Pitt soon wrote a popular stage version of the melodrama.
In 1968, British actor Christopher Bond was scheduled to appear in the play but found the show “crude, repetitive, and simplistic — hardly any plot and less character development” and so rewrote it, crossing, as he notes, Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy with a bit of Shakespeare and local “market patter” thrown into the mix. Audiences approved of Bond’s version, which was revived periodically until Stephen Sondheim saw it in London in the mid-1970s and now the Tony award-winning Broadway musical tells the story of the legend of Sweeney Todd, a London barber whose clients somehow end up in his neighbour’s meat pies.
Sweeney Todd has been celebrated time and again by directors of theatre, including Tim Burton’s recent interpretation starring Hollywood favourite Johnny Depp.
Be prepared, this Port Players Inc production, will dish up a musical full of pie-filled tragedy and will continue the vein of the “Penny Dreadful” and yet will also light up the minds of local audiences for years to come.
Performances are from May 6 to May 29 – Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sunday 2pm. To book, contact Glasshouse box office 6581 8888 or Players Theatre on the corner of Gordon and Lord Streets (one hour prior to show).
