Sweeney Todd First performance in Kingston

Bottle Tree Productions presents Sweeney Todd-The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The School edition. Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Hugh Wheeler
Directed by Anne Marie Mortensen. Choreography by Chelsea Swain. Stage Manager Judy Roberts

The first performance of Sweeney Todd in Kingston!

The recent Tim Burton movie starred Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter as the partners in gore. Adam Eliot and Hannah Smith lend their gifted voices to the merchants of mayhem. Anton Kaduck is a revelation as the hanging judge. Megan Ready-Walters and her sweet soprano voice makes her the perfect ingenue. The Gothic church that is The Wellington Street Theatre is the perfect environment for Fleet Street and its sordid neighbourhood. Adam Eliot's Sweeney Todd arrives back in England after being unjustly sentenced for crimes he did not commit. All he ever loved has been taken from him and he is looking for revenge. He falls in with Hannah Smith's Mrs. Lovett, and between them they go on a murderous spree, which ultimately consumes them in the fires of hate.

Sweeney Todd has been regarded for years more as urban legend than actual real-life flesh and bones. Cheap sordid novels in the early eighteen hundreds
chilled and thrilled English readers. Sweeney Todd was the Freddy Kruger, the zombie horde, the vampire of his time. Some evidence exists to suggest that Mister Todd did himself exist. Sondeim and Wheeler have given Sweeney more noble reasons for what he is driven to do, more noble then the avarice and greed accorded him by earlier writers, but the end result is the same.

Sondheim's brilliant, complicated music and Hugh Wheeler's clever script are complicit in providing a great night's entertainment.

Show dates:

February 25,26,27 Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are $15 General admission.
At The Wellington Street Theatre, 126 Wellington Street, Kingston, Ontario
www.bottletreeinc.com 613-542-0070
Grand Theatre Box Office 218 Princess Street Phone 613-530-2050
Box Office open Mondays-Saturdays from 12 noon to 6 pm.
www.kingstongrand.ca