An acclaimed ballet version of Johnny Depp’s 1990 cult classic Edward Scissorhands is set to cut a swath through Australian theatres.
Made with the blessing of Depp and the film’s director Tim Burton, this oddball modern-Gothic fable about a boy with scissors for hands has been playing to sell-out audiences in Britain and America since its London debut in 2005.
This lavish production in which a shock-haired outcast wanders into candy-coloured mid-50s America is bound to do the same when its Australian tour brings it to His Majesty’s Theatre from July 1 to 6.
Sending expectations through the roof is the creator of Edward Scissorhands, British choreographer Matthew Bourne, whose revolutionary Swan Lake featuring a rugby scrum of feathered hunks had audiences gasping when it played in Perth last year. Bourne’s new work — a loose adaptation of the original film — has made just as big a splash as Swan Lake, with Time magazine declaring: “Edward’s magic shears make shear theatrical magic.”
Traditionalists, however, continued to turn up their noses at Bourne’s shameless populism and trademark blurring of the lines between ballet and theatre. He calls it musical theatre while cynics have dubbed his productions “dansicals”.
At the tour launch at the Sydney Opera House yesterday, Bourne said he had been dreaming of turning Edward Scissorhands into a ballet since he emerged in the early 1990s as Britain’s most exciting young choreographer.
But it took almost a decade for him to persuade Burton, co-writer Caroline Thompson, film composer Danny Elfman and 20th Century-Fox to give him the rights to recreate the struggle of Pinocchio-like Edward to find acceptance in prejudiced middle America.
“In a way Edward Scissorhands is Tim Burton,” he said. Bourne got the mother of Helena Bonham Carter, who is the partner of the London-based Burton, to cajole the director into seeing one of his productions.
Bourne was most nervous about Johnny Depp as he was the one who gave Edward his soul. It took many months but Depp finally caught up with the show in Los Angeles.
“He spent an hour with the company and tried on the hands. He wrote to me afterwards and said he was ‘teetering on the edge of tears all the way through it, mate’.”
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