DICKENS ABRIDGED Opens at London's Arts Theatre Tonight

London's Arts Theatre's DICKENS ABRIDGED opens tonight, December 2 and runs through January 5, 2014. Tickets are £39.50, £37.50, £20.

Dickens Abridged is the brainchild of Adam Long, a founding member of The Reduced Shakespeare Company. It's a high-speed comic journey through Dickens' Greatest Hits, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations (in under sixty seconds), David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities (complete with a fully functioning guillotine and singing severed head), Nicholas Nickleby, Old CuriosityShop, and, of course... A Christmas Carol as the grand finale in which Tiny Tim Rocks the house with a searing electric guitar solo.

In just ninety minutes, an absurdly talented cast of five Charles Dickens devotees from Santa Cruz, California, bring hundreds of Dickens' best loved characters to life: Ebeneezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit, Miss Havisham, Bill Sykes, Fagin and The Artful Dodger, Little Nell, Charles Darnay, and The Downtrodden Poor of Eighteenth Century France, to name but a few. We're also taken on a journey through the bizarre-but-true story of Charles Dickens' own life - his complicated romantic entanglements, his exotic illnesses, and his inexplicable enthusiasm for performing the bludgeoning scene from Oliver Twist over and over and over again. A Californian love-letter to the life and works of the great man, Dickens Abridged is unlike any Dickens-based show you've ever seen before.

For tickets, visit: http://sjcptheatre.com/dickens/