Sweeney Todd

Three posts in one day!! Armidale is getting exciting!

We're off shortly to a live performance of the musical Sweeney Todd - the demon barber of Fleet Street. We're not short of culture in the form of theatre, musicals, chamber music, symphony concerts, and the last night of the Proms (creating down under an almost exact replica of the famous Albert Hall event) - not to mention fine art events.

Sweeney Todd is the second musical in town this year, with the other being Joseph and his Multicolour Dreamcoat. The latter was excellent for an amateur rendition and the reviews of tonight's performance have been very good.

We might be 500 km from a large city where such events are common, but it's great to see the locals taking up the challenge. We even have a sort of Glyndebourne nearby! Once a year there members of the Australian Opera turn up to a farm near Inverell (about 130km from here) for "Opera in the Paddock". We've never been, but might go next year to sit under the stars and listen to Mozart and Verdi among others. The event has its own web page: http://www.operainthepaddock.com.au/ , and it's cheap with tickets costing A$50 (a little over 20 GBP).

Postscript:

Sweeney Todd was very well done and enthusiastically received by the large audience. The plot is unbelievably gory, as you'd find out from a quick look at the internet. Stephen Sondheim's music and lyrics are atmospheric and a long way from the schmalz of Andrew LLoyd Webber. The Armidale Playhouse Inc, who do the productions, announced that the next musical will be Titanic. This opened on April 23, 1997 on Broadway and ran for 804 performances. I suppose an on-stage representation of the Titanic's sinking is little different to staging the final Act of Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth. There the Rhine floods and drowns the villain and the Rhinemaidens reclaim the 'ring'.

AS