As 'Sweeney Todd' returns to Broadway, 4 Sweeneys dish about the difficult role
Joan Marcus
Norm Lewis and Carolee Carmello in the 2017 off-Broadway production of Sweeney Todd.
All four Sweeneys talked about a pivotal moment in the show; the song "My Friends," a tender ballad that Sweeney sings to his
razors
. Here's the set up: the corrupt Judge Turpin had lusted after Sweeney's wife, so he had him falsely convicted and sent to Australia. But Sweeney's escaped. Now, back in London thinking his wife dead and his daughter Johanna captive in the judge's house, Sweeney is determined to get his revenge. Then, Mrs. Lovett gives him the perfect instrument.
"
And says, 'Oh, by the way. I have your razors,' " Cariou describes, " 'I saved them for you.' "
"All of these stories are starting to develop," says Josh Groban. "These seeds are being planted that are maniacal. But the music itself is some of the most lush and romantic that I've ever heard. And "My Friends," I think, is the first opportunity as Sweeney to lean into that romanticism."
"Musically, it's sort of opening a door into a part of Sweeney that you haven't seen yet," explains Michael Cerveris. "You know, there is this loving person in him and there's a tenderness that you see in that song, in relation to these cold pieces of steel."
Cerveris adds: "I sort of felt if he had come back and found Johanna and his wife and been allowed to, he would have just left town. Like, I didn't feel like he was there to exact revenge, necessarily. But in 'My Friends' I think you see that that potential version of him."
"Yeah. I've always said to people," says Norm Lewis laughing, "if he had found Johanna and his wife. Curtain!"
But Len Cariou's not so sure.
"
He was going to have his pound of flesh," Cariou explains, "that was his motivation. That's what got him from Australia back to London ... was Turpin."
As the song goes on, Sweeney focuses on his razors, but Mrs. Lovett focuses on him. "There's a survivor element to Lovett," says Groban. "And they're both looking for a means to achieve what they need. These duets are crafted so brilliantly; to be able to show both of those plans happening simultaneously."
Cariou recalls the excitement of the original rehearsal room, where his Mrs. Lovett was Angela Lansbury. "Almost immediately everybody kind of sat up," says Cariou. "Something was happening. We knew it. We didn't quite know what it was, but we knew that something was going on here and that this may be the most exciting piece of theater that we'd ever been a part of."
Now, of course,
Sweeney Todd
is in the pantheon of musical theater. "I've always said that Stephen Sondheim was the musical theater Shakespeare," explains Norm Lewis. "And this role has always, for me, been the Hamlet of musical theater, because all the baritones always want to play this role and put their spin on it."
And all four of these actors acknowledge it's exhausting playing a murderous sociopath, while dealing with stage blood, a mechanical barber chair and singing complex music. Josh Groban says Michael Cerveris gave him tips. "Michael and I had a drink before we started previews," Groban recalls, "and I was lucky enough to kind of sit with him and get some wonderful advice and support ... And he said, 'just wash it off in the sink, man. Like, when you take the makeup off, take it all off, you know?'"
The musical's success, in 1979, was far from inevitable. Len Cariou remembers that the original company had never finished technical rehearsals before the first performance. They didn't know what to expect. "When it was over, people really reacted to it," says Cariou. "And I came backstage to my dressing room, and Sondheim was standing outside of it, and he said, 'They understood it. They f------ understood it.' And we had a great big hug."
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Wednesday, March 29, 2023 at 9:14 am