If you seek Broadway’s equivalent of Mount Rushmore, you could do worse than head to West 46th Street near Times Square. There you will find that Sweeney Todd, possibly the greatest stage musical of the 20th century, has pitched up across the street from Hamilton, probably the greatest of the 21st (so far).
A quasi-opera about the fictional demon barber of Fleet Street and a rap-infused history of the first secretary of the US treasury seem odd bedfellows. But they find connective tissue in Thomas Kail, who directed both shows at the Lunt-Fontanne and Richard Rodgers theatres respectively – and who contends that there would be no Hamilton without Sweeney.
“When we were thinking about Hamilton in those earliest days, 2011-12, we were making a show about a person who was misunderstood and perceived to be one thing and in fact was something else,” the 45-year-old recalls via Zoom. “Sweeney is and was perceived as a monster; Hamilton in his own time was understood and misunderstood and perceived and misperceived.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rendering of Alexander Hamilton is a force of nature who writes like he’s running out of time. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd finds expression with the razors (“At last, my arm is complete again!”) that he will use to shave the faces – and slit the throats – of gentlemen.
“Hamilton used his language to try to move his station, and Sweeney, who felt that he could not, had to rely on his skill set, which was not language but in fact was this creative act that he made destructive,” Kail adds.
As the comparison implies, there can seldom have been a production of Sweeney Todd in which the audience is rooting for the eponymous anti-hero with such abandon (at a preview performance, his bloody dispatch of innocent customers was greeted with effusive applause).
The first clue is in the casting: Sweeney is played by Josh Groban, a pop-classical singer with the genial, impossible-to-dislike quality of a Jack Lemmon or Tom Hanks. From the moment that Groban first appears, his face etched with years of torment, it is apparent that his vengeful motivations come from anguish fathoms deep. He is a Frankenstein’s monster, corrupted by a corrupt world.
This notion is reinforced by the parade of grotesques that populate Victorian London, a timely observation at a moment when the malign premise of the British empire is under historical scrutiny. Among them is the lecherous Judge Turpin who sent Sweeney, then Benjamin Barker, to an Australian penal colony for a crime he did not commit, preyed on his wife and entrapped their daughter, all with the help of the oleaginous Beadle Bamford.
Kail comments: “We were interested in acknowledging and embracing the fact that Benjamin Barker was a person who became Sweeney Todd and so we wanted to watch the becoming. When Josh steps on stage and he talks about his wife, this longing and this child, you feel that ache. It’s in him.
“Josh has many gifts and one of them is his ability to make us believe in the depth of his feeling, because he is indeed feeling those things. That’s what we were building from: if Josh is Sweeney then how does it inform everything else and then every other piece of casting and architecture and light emanates from that. I was so struck by that the very first time I got to see him on the material.”
Kail, the son of a lawyer and an archivist who grew up near Washington, reflects that much of his work has been about people losing the ability to do what they feel born to do. One example is the dancer Gwen Verdon in his TV drama Fosse/Verdon (starring Michelle Williams, now Kail’s wife). It was a disorientation that became familiar during the coronavirus pandemic, which made Broadway go dark for nearly 18 months – the longest shutdown in its history.
“In a lot of the stuff I’ve done is this idea of reckoning with what happens if who you are is taken and I realised, oh, that’s Sweeney also. He comes back, he is is a husband, he is a father, he is a person with an occupation that he loves and two of those things are taken and one of them remains, so he uses that as a way to seek justice.”
The humanity in Groban’s performance, and in Kail’s interpretation, gives the lie to the notion that Sondheim, who wrote Sweeney Todd’s music and lyrics, is all head and no heart, all wit and no feeling. It is a charge that also gets levelled at playwright Tom Stoppard, equally unfairly. Kail, for one, never believed it.
“If you look at Sondheim’s work, there is the deepest ache in Company and Follies. There’s yearning in Merrily [We Roll Along]. I mean, he wrote a show called Passion, let alone Sunday in the Park [with George]. There is so much deep feeling and I was interested in this idea of taking the melodramatic propulsive form and still exploring human moments. Those were ideas that we talked about a lot in the room. It’s everywhere and we were interested in bringing that to the fore.”
Sondheim died aged 91 in November 2021, just as the production of Sweeney – which Groban had first proposed to Kail in 2019 – was being born.
Kail recalls: “I think it was 10 of us in a room on the 28th of November and Sondheim passed on the 26th, so it took on this whole other meaning. It felt like being in chapel. We walked into this room and there was nothing else but the music. It was just music stands and these actors and it allowed me to start to visualise the world.
“After that we all felt encouraged and buoyed and wanted to do it in a way that would make Steve proud since we knew he wouldn’t be able to see it. Steve was supposed to come to our reading on that Friday and so we were carrying that with us as well.”
Sondheim had witnessed, and admired, less-is-more productions of Sweeney. There was a 1989 version with small cast and synthesiser score dubbed “Teeny Todd”, a 2005 production by John Doyle featuring 10 actor-musicians and a 2017 version set inside a pie shop that ran longer than any other Sweeney before or since.
But Kail has gone the other way with a big budget, a cast of 25 actors and the first 26 player orchestration of the show since its premiere in 1979-80. The result is a dark and dazzling Greek tragedy underneath the arches of Victorian London, with Annaleigh Ashford on exquisitely riotous form as Mrs Lovett, the pie shop owner who puts Sweeney’s victims through the meat grinder.
No one is left in any doubt that this is a major theatrical event: you could cut the atmosphere with a razor blade. At one preview, Guardian critic Alexis Soloski observed, “the audience greeted the opening notes with the demented enthusiasm of the crowd at a boy band concert. Were these Groban fans? Or Sondheim stans? Or Kail supporters who had followed him across the street from Hamilton? This is a show that confirms the worst suspicions of human nature and leaves most of the dramatis personae to bleed out. But the crowd? It was amped.”
Although he saw that small Sweeneys could be beautiful, it is hard to imagine that Sondheim would have been left unmoved by this ravishingly sung Gesamtkunstwerk.
Kail muses: “There’s something that Steve said in an interview about the work: I just want it to be done and done and done. I thought about all the Sweeneys that have existed in all of the forms: pie shops, John Doyle and abroad and everywhere. I thought there was something about the power of the score and trying to unleash the power of the score.
“There is an initial impulse that something could have scope and scale but we could also explore humanity within that, and that we didn’t have to make the Sweeney Todd production small to also investigate small moments. I was interested in that contrast. Could you do both of those things?
“But I also wanted to hear those 26 pieces. I wanted to sit in the back of the house and have the hair on my neck stand up just like everybody else and hear those orchestrations. The sitzprobe of this show is one of my happiest memories in the theatre: being in that building and everybody crying as soon as the brass came in. You hear those violins for Sweeney’s entrance and you just can’t believe it.”
At such moments there is a sense of Sondheim at the height of his powers after a decade of matchless fecundity: Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976) and Sweeney Todd (1979) – all directed by Broadway titan Hal Prince. Kail has directed two Miranda musicals so far: In the Heights (2005) and Hamilton (2015). Miranda has channeled some of his prodigious energy into several projects for Disney to thrilling effect; even so, musical theatre fans may be feeling that his next big collaboration with Kail is overdue.
The director says: “I don’t want to speak for Lin but I will say this: it was important for me to continue to make stuff so it didn’t become: what’s the thing you’re doing next? A year after Hamilton happened and opened on Broadway, I had done three or four very different things. I’d done small plays for a hundred people in an audience, I’d done a live musical [Grease Live! for television] and I just thought, OK, now there’s no what’s next? I did the what’s next things.
“It takes so much time to make a new musical and Lin and I have made a bunch of stuff together. The two musicals that we made together took five or six years for each of them. We definitely did not say: and now we have to get another one out. When you look at Prince and Sondheim in the 70s, you realise, well, that was a moment that cannot be repeated. When you acknowledge what happened between 1970 and 1979, that’s never happening again.”
But Kail, who was close to Prince until his death in 2019, adds: “This idea of wanting to be a part of a theatre community is so present for Lin and I and so we always want to feel connected to it in that way. There’s writers writing as you and I talk – I can’t wait to see what they’re up to.”
He was reminded of this on a recent visit to the Drama Book Shop which he, Miranda and other Hamilton alumni helped rescue a few years ago (Kail and Miranda had worked on In the Heights there). “Two people huddled over that table, three people over there – I was like, oh, they’re making the next thing. That’s what’s on the horizon so I’m as excited to see that as anybody else.”
