Melanie Dworak Photos.
A factory whistle knifed the air. From the pit, dark orchestral music roiled and churned. Over a dozen performers clad in Victorian undergarments—boning visible, corset strings hanging—flooded the stage. Their moves were precise, their voices soaring, their focus intense. Countless hours of hard work had led to this moment.
High expectations are an act of love, as is the work required to meet them. This ethos seems to be the driving force behind Rosetint Community Theatre, a New Haven-based theater company in its infancy. Last Friday and Saturday, it was on full display during the company’s second and final weekend of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as an 18-piece orchestra and large ensemble cast took over the arts hall at the ACES Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street.
Nearly ten months ago, in December 2025, Rosetint hosted its inaugural production, a one-night-only winter talent showcase at East Rock Market. Two cabarets, Love Notes and Idiot Box, quickly followed, presented as building blocks in the service of the theater’s highest ambition: producing full-scale musicals and plays in the New Haven community.
Rosetint’s run of Sweeney Todd marked the achievement of this end, and a whole new beginning for the theater. In a note in the playbill, Rosetint Artistic Director and Sweeney Todd Director Tyler Harding commented on the choice of musical to be Rosetint’s first.
Melanie Dworak Photos.
“We wanted a show that Rosetint was not quite ready to produce,” Harding wrote. Sweeney Todd is a “respected piece of work, beloved by our staff and audiences, that would force Rosetint to grow quickly into an undeniable force.”
Piece of work indeed. Sweeney Todd demands much of the artists that seek to produce it. The music, characteristic of Sondheim, is brilliantly intricate and athletically grueling. The tale of Sweeney Todd, a barber-turned-convict-turned-barber-again who seeks to avenge his wife’s assault and the abduction of their child by slitting his clients’ throats and cooking them into pies, is as big a lift emotionally as it is technically. The industrious company of Sweeney Todd rose to the occasion. And yet, the production’s tremendous achievements were more technical than they were narrative, with some emotional beats of the story that remained skin deep.
Ethan Sachs, as Sweeney Todd, carried the show with his voice—his clear mastery of the music and the detached richness of his timbre. Sachs refused eye contact with his scene partners throughout the performance, preferring a thousand-yard-stare that deepened Sweeney’s characterization as heartbroken killer traumatized off his rocker. But it sometimes contributed to the impression that the Sweeney performers were acting next to each other more than they were acting with each other. When Sweeney, after committing his first murder, lifted his razor to the air and declared, “At last my arm is complete again!” I wanted to laugh, then felt I shouldn’t. I hadn’t gotten the Brechtian wink-wink of permission.
Sweeney Todd is a cutting critique of industrial capitalism in the guise of a fast-paced, pulpy, thriller. But many beats of Rosetint’s production seemed neither as comical nor as critical as they could be.
Alongside the musical's main action of murder and capitalism, for instance, a more pernicious sub-plot unfolds. Todd’s erstwhile shipmate, the young Anthony Hope (the golden-voiced Colin Anderson) attempts to court Johanna, ward to the evil Judge Turpin (Casey Pickett) and long-lost daughter to Todd himself. Saturday, Anthony serenaded Johanna (Denise Wray) with a captivatingly gorgeous melody that belied the sinister lyrics: “I'll steal you, Johanna,” “Even now, I'm at your window,” “I am in the dark beside you.”
Harding had Anderson button the song by breaking the birdcage Anderson-as-Anthony held in his hands, a heavy-handed visual metaphor that somehow failed to underscore the dissonance baked into the song. The gesture was both violent and liberatory, but performed with such straight-forward earnestness it was hard to read as either. Seriousness took the place of camp. Where it might have chilled me, it instead just left me cold.
Melanie Dworak Photos.
A few stand-out performances gave the audience permission to laugh with a wink that pulled them (us) out of high melodrama, as in Sweeney’s “Epiphany,” and into the territory of the epic and the satirical. As Mrs. Lovett, the floundering pie shop owner obsessively in love with “Mr. T,” Ashley Hamel turned every line into a pitifully desperate seduction attempt. Sebastián Colón Peréz, as the charlatan hair growth wizard Adolfo Pirelli, seemed at times to be the only person onstage having any fun, and delivered one of the liveliest performances.
Harding and the rest of the Rosetint team chose Sweeney less for its story than for the effort required to tell it, for what this production could achieve for the company in the long-run. “We built a production standard capable of handling Sweeney Todd, so that Rosetint would leave this show capable of handling almost anything,” wrote Harding in his director’s note. “We did not build Rosetint up so that we could produce Sweeney Todd. We produced Sweeney Todd so that we could build Rosetint up.”
The ambition is admirable. And yet this reviewer, sitting in the packed ECA Arts Hall Saturday night, found something strange in the way Rosetint presented itself and its art. The language of “undeniable force,” of “building up,” of “production standard” rang an uneasy bell with the language and aesthetics of industrialism that Sweeney Todd seeks to critique.
The set, visible when entering the theater space, illustrated industrial decay. A rickety-looking staircase led up the side of a featureless, rusting, white box to the top: a platform straight out of an OSHA nightmare. Stage right were piled giant ash-grey geometrical shapes, like a child’s block set from hell. This production’s ensemble of “deceased factory workers,” according to Harding, was a nod to Hal Prince’s direction of the 1979 original production, which was itself a nod to Russian auteur Vsevolod Meyerhold’s mechanical Constructivist Theatre of the early twentieth century.
Nowhere was this aesthetic exemplified better in Sweeney Todd than in its iconic barber’s chair, which with the pull of a lever, drops Sweeney’s victim, shaving cream died red with blood, down a trapdoor.
Rosetint, drawing from a comparatively high budget for a community theater production (in an email, Managing Director Charlotta Lebedenko said the full production budget was $50,000 and brought in “more than 90 local artists, musicians, technicians, and volunteers”), had a chair with all the trimmings. Over and over we watched actors get reclined, then slide, disappearing down a hidden chute. After bows on Saturday night, the company auctioned off a ride in the chair (sold for $350).
“There’s a foam mat at the bottom,” Pickett (Judge Turpin-turned-auctioneer) reassured the crowd.
Rosetint aims to be a theater that remains “forever proud of its non-professional distinction.” And at the same time, the company’s public-facing statements demonstrate a real anxiety around the erroneous idea, held by many unfamiliar with the rich creative ecosystem that is amateur theater, that community theater is not artistically ambitious.
Growth, for community theater, should never be about eventually “growing up” and forsaking the amateur for the auteur. Amateur aesthetics aren’t sloppy or unprofessional or safe. The word “amateur” comes from the Latin word “amare” meaning “to love.” An amateur is someone who makes art for the love of it, not for the money.
The Rosetint community is bursting with love for the craft of theater making and passionate dreams for its future; both the theater’s love and their money are going into growing the company’s new youth educational program, Rosebuds, which will be presenting its first show this December.
But in attempting to disprove the misconception that community theater isn’t artistically ambitious, Rosetint has overcorrected, seeming to fixate on proficiency, capacity, scale, and growth, over the true spirit of the show—camp, satire, fun. At the performance I saw, the performers seemed exhausted, even for a closing night. “We can finally sleep!” Lebedenko (who is also in graduate and medical school) said at intermission.
Exhaustion was and is par for the course when working at as high a level of professionalism as Sweeney Todd has achieved. And at the same time, shouldn’t community theater be about doing art for its own sake, not for where it can get us or what we can use it to prove? High expectations are an act of love and a slippery slope. Which is great, as long as there’s a soft place to land.