[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. Before we start the show today, I want to say to all my fellow New Yorkers, take care of each other and look out for each other and be gentle with one another. You never know what someone's going through right now, or how someone is being affected by world events. Sometimes it can feel like we can't make a difference when the macro problems seem so enormous. We, here at All Of It, want to try to help out in our area and get you to help out in our area in a micro way. All Of It is hosting a blood drive on Monday, October 30th, from 12:00 PM to 4:30 PM in The Greene Space.

New York City's blood supplies are critically low, so we're partnering with the New York Blood Bank. You can sign up for a slot at wnyc.org/giveblood. Come on down, visit us here at WNYC in The Greene Space. I'll be down there for a while. That's Monday, October 30th, wnyc.org/giveblood for more information. While we're on the topic of blood, let's get the show started with Sweeney Todd.

[music - Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd]

Alison Stewart: It's Friday the 13th, so what better way to kick off the show today than to get spooky with the star and director of Sweeney Todd? Tony-nominated Josh Groban's bold voice is deployed to chilling effect as the demon barber of Fleet Street, a man bent on revenge for the loss of his wife and daughter, under the direction of Tony Winner, Thomas Kail, the Sweeney is big. It has a full orchestra, a large and talented ensemble, a two-tiered set, and a lot of blood. Amidst all the fog and gore, the show is really centered in the strange, tender and terrifying relationship between Sweeney Todd and the Baker, Mrs. Lovett, played by Annaleigh Ashford, who was also nominated for a Tony for her frisky take on the character.

You can now listen to Josh and Annaleigh because the Sweeney Todd cast album is out now. We'll listen to some tracks and talk about the whole Sweeney Todd production with Director Thomas Kail. Hi, Thomas-

Thomas Kail: Hello, hello.

Alison Stewart: -and Josh Groban. Hi, Josh.

Josh Groban: Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me on.

Alison Stewart: Of course. There've been a lot of revivals of this show that have been stripped back, some of them. This one, Thomas, is lush and big and inviting in a scary way. Why did you decide to go in that direction?

Thomas Kail: Josh called me in 2019 and said he had a desire to play this part. He said, "Tommy, if I go for that, I wanted to have all of the robustness and the lushness of that original production." We were just in sync immediately. I said, "If I were ever to do it, would you please be Sweeney Todd?" "Yes, thank you. Let's go and try to do that." The fullness of that sound, the full throatedness of the experience was something we were really interested in trying to accomplish. It's one of the most remarkable groups on stage and off down there. We had a lot of fun making it. I think this idea of something that could be maximal in its size and scope, but yet intimate in its emotionality was something we're also really keen to explore.

Alison Stewart: Josh, what was your very, very first exposure to Sweeney Todd?

Josh Groban: My very first exposure to Sweeney Todd was in Los Angeles, actually, where I grew up. I was very, very fortunate that my parents, who are not in the arts professionally, but lovers and supporters of the arts, took my brother and I to see a lot of theater. I was lucky enough to go and see a production by a wonderful company called the East West Players, an entire Asian-American theater troupe in Los Angeles. It was just my first time hearing the music of Sweeney Todd. It was about a chamber-size orchestra. The singing was, of course, spectacular.

I walked away from it feeling all the things that one feels from Sweeney Todd, all of the chills and the juxtaposition of the beauty of the music with the nature of the almost cartoonishly horrible things that are happening in these lives. I just said to myself, "That's something that will stick with me forever and ever." Since then, of course, I've seen many productions and it's been done many times, absolutely brilliantly. As Tommy was saying, to have the opportunity to do it at this size and scope at this time has been the greatest privilege of my career.

Alison Stewart: Thomas, I was speaking with Maria Friedman, who directed Merrily We Roll Along. We talked about how Jonathan Groff's inherent charm, that she really used it because Frank is kind of an unlikeable character at times in that musical. What was your move on taking someone like Josh, who is a lovely, charismatic human who's playing a murderer?

Thomas Kail: I have a couple thoughts about Jonathan Groff as charming, but that's for another podcast. It felt to me early on when Josh and I were having those initial conversations, then as we did a little workshop a few years later and then started the rehearsal process, was Josh and I were both interested in the same thing, which was the story of a man who became a monster. This idea of who was he before he was transported, who was he before he was taken away? I think what Josh brings to the role and the reason why I think that the experience that audiences have been having over this last seven or eight months is one of deep entertainment.

I think there's thrills in it. I think it's funny. I think they're moved at the end. I think we were really interested in not being afraid to move people. I think that humanity, this idea of a person who lived a life and then had to become something else because the world took the things that he cared about. Then you see progression, you see evolution, and you also understand underneath it is this incredible warmth, this desire to be back with his loved ones that was taken from him. This is what happened when you push him to this edge.

Alison Stewart: Just want to follow up with you, how did you find empathy for a serial killer?

Josh Groban: I had to reach back and reached deep into who Benjamin Barker was. I had to find who the person was, who had a small business, who was a family man, who liked to make his baby daughter laugh and dote on his wife, and for all intents and purposes, had a number of atrocities done to him, and he had not committed any at that point in his life. Under the right amount of time and pressure and trauma, how does somebody snap and go to the other side. For certainly the first half of the show, I like to lean into who that person is that left and is now coming back, and how many changes have happened since he was away.

Then of course, once epiphany happens, everybody's bearing witness to what can happen when the snap occurs, and then the callousness that can occur after the emotionality of that. To me, that was far more interesting to lean into the lyric of, "Isn't that Sweeney, there beside you?". This is not somebody who's punching holes in walls. This is somebody who's inviting people quite calmly and gently to sit in this luxurious chair. That's far more terrifying to me than saying, "Hey, that's the monster in the room."

Alison Stewart: My guests are Josh Groban and Thomas Kail. We're talking about Sweeney Todd on Broadway. It's got this big full orchestra. Is it 26 members?

Thomas Kail: That's right.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a moment in the score where the orchestra really gets to shine. This is the transition between the Barber and his wife and worst pies in London. This is from the Sweeney Todd Broadway cast album.

[music - Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd]

Alison Stewart: Josh, for you as a performer, how does that massive full orchestra impact you as a performer?

Josh Groban: Oh my gosh. There is no greater feeling as a vocalist, as an actor up there to dance that dance with-- and absolutely another extension of our cast is this extraordinary group of musical storytellers that are down there. To be able to ride the wave with them every afternoon and evening is just a thrill beyond any other. This score is flawless. From start to finish there isn't a weak moment in it. To be able to have Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrated vision for the first time on Broadway in many, many, many years, decades, truly I can't believe my luck as a singer that I get to do this every night.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting you said that there's not a flaw in it because Thomas, you'll know, as someone who's worked in the field a long time, it takes a long time to get to that point where there aren't any flaws. It's work, it's writing and rewriting. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit, about that process of getting a musical or a score from what you hope it to be and want it to be, to when it actually gets to that point of being it.

Thomas Kail: As someone who spent most of their career on new work, let me tell you, it's really nice to go this one say, "Wait, we don't need anything acted? Lay out. Lay it all out. Let's see what happens.

Josh Groban: Let's not mess it up.

Thomas Kail: Yes, exactly. To those that came before us, thank you. The process of making something is often how I learn how it might be realized. To that end, I asked Jeffrey Seller, our producer, coming out of the pandemic when things were starting to open up again, I said to Jeffrey and to Josh and Alex Lacamoire, a wonderful music director. I said, "I'd love to just be inside this, just music. Nothing else. Let's be with some music stands, a couple of musicians, and 10 or 11 people." That's, I think, going to be the best way that I can really learn how to create the physical world for the show, because that's what I did, whether it was in the Heights or Hamilton. It's so iterative.

You're just doing these little pieces, and as you do those pieces, things start to emerge. I wanted to make sure I wasn't approaching this from outside. That actually allowed me-- I took this technique of making new stuff and just said, "That's how I've learned in this other way, so what would be like to just be around it?" While I was in there, it started to inform some of the two-tieredness, some of the scale, some of the materiality that then Mimi Lana and I could go and talk about as we were imagining what the world could be.

All that then cascades into the conversations with Emilio Sosa, our costume designer, Nevin Steinberg, our sound designer, and especially with Natasha Katz, because this idea of shadow and fog, this idea of what we see and what we don't see. There's so many lines in the show, "Could it be--? Is that somewhat--?" This inability to recognize. That stuff starts to swirl around also. I feel like it was nice to be inside of it in that way and it reminded me of my roots as a fool who sometimes tries to make musical theater for the first time from scratch.

Josh Groban: I would say, as an actor working under that environment, to be able to play with that openness and that discovery in the way that Tommy so wonderfully does, it allowed us to mine for new moments, new beats, new energies that are always unexpected when you have a work that you've loved for 40 years. It allowed us to come in with a nimbleness and an openness that can sometimes go missing when you have a piece that you hold in your hands as something so extraordinary that you just want to keep polished. We had rehearsal days where we dared to throw it around a little bit and find out what else was there. It was in those moments and in those days, and we still keep finding. We had show 200 last night, and we found new things. That's the miraculous thing about a work like this, and it started with that process that Tommy and Lac gave us.

Alison Stewart: Being a director, Thomas, is about making decisions. Every director I've ever talked to, film, stage, it's about you have to make decisions. You have to make a choice. What was a tough choice that turned out to be the right choice?

Thomas Kail: What a question. You're saying it to someone who wears the exact same outfit every day [laughter]. Josh can tell you the pants I'm wearing.

Josh Groban: We had a Tommy Kail Day at the theater where we all wore the same navy blue shirt and dark jeans and white sneakers. It was terrifying. Maybe even scarier than the show.

[laughter]

Thomas Kail: The fact that I didn't recognize it as anything, I was like, "Finally they've come around," and that's all I was seeing.

Josh Groban: It's like a Jordan Peele movie.

Thomas Kail: He says as he plays for time, a tough decision. I think one of the things that I feel paid off-- Steven Hoggett is our movement director in this. Sweeney doesn't often have a significant physical vocabulary, or I haven't seen as many productions with that. The original staging was quite operatic and had a lot of movement to it in the original Hal Prince production. We have choreography. We have movement that is also storytelling along with underlining, highlighting throughout the transitional moments in this show.

I'd wanted to work with Steven for a long while, and it felt like there was a real match here. Steven is also just an incredible collaborator and a director in his own right. The way that he was able to help unlock physical language, actor to actor, was something that I think was of enormous beneficialty for our show. I think the idea of really trying to not be, again, as I said, don't be afraid of what the thing is, which means it doesn't have to be what it was. To try to inject movement as another character in our story was, I think, a little bit of a gamble, but I feel like it deeply paid off.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Director Thomas Kail and actor Josh Groban. We are talking about Sweeney Todd on Broadway. Of course, we have the cast album is out now, and some of the most beautiful songs in this show take place during some gory and horror-filled moments. Let's listen to you, Josh, singing a bit of Johanna from Act 2. Listeners, keep in mind, while Josh is singing this song, his character is slitting the throats of customers.

[music - Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd]

Josh Groban: Are you beautiful and pale with yellow hair like her? I'd want you beautiful and pale the way I dreamed you were, Johanna. If you are beautiful, what then, with yellow hair, like wheat? I think we shall not meet again, my little dove, my sweet Johanna. Goodbye, Johanna. You are gone and yet you're mine. I'm fine, Johanna. Johanna.

Alison Stewart: Josh, how do you play with the dissonance between what you're singing and what you're doing on stage?

Josh Groban: This is probably my favorite of many in the show from a singing standpoint, from a physical standpoint. There's so much juxtaposition in this moment. It's the first time that there is a strange and sick calm that has come over. A sociopathic calm that has come over when Sweeney has gone full Sweeney. Benjamin Barker is now basically saying goodbye to Benjamin, he's saying goodbye to Johanna. He's saying goodbye to the life that he had had some semblance of hope that he could hang onto by a thread is now-- he's cut the thread and there is no humanity left in him. There is just mission.

Yet, in the incredibleness of what Steven wrote there, is that there are some of the most operatically beautiful lines that are happening there in that calm, that is inside Sweeney, there is chaos around him. From a purely physical standpoint, I also have this new fancy chair that is very clunky. It's built like a 1950s Winnebago. It clunks. It is heavy. It has levers, it has pedals. It has a clutch. To sing a song that's as smooth and liquid as this song is, and also maneuvering the blade and the chair and dumping people down the trap door, it's just such a great physical and vocal puzzle out there, and one that's so satisfying to be in the middle of.

Alison Stewart: Thomas, I wanted to ask about the chair. The chair is maneuvered just like flying down a chute repeatedly. How did you figure out the staging for that? How did you work around these snafus?

Thomas Kail: Snaf? What?

Alison Stewart: What's the snafu?

[laughter]

Thomas Kail: Very carefully. I say that not glibly, but there are so many moving parts, so many people that went into actualizing this. Mimi and her team of designers then work with engineers, and then there's one specific shop that builds this chair, and then there's the test driving. There's a lot of learning that comes just from doing. Then, of course, repeated doing changes things because stuff gets stuck. Obviously, I'll let Josh speak to that and in specific. Then you also have different company members on, depending on if somebody's sick or bumped their elbow. You have different folks going down who have varied relationships to it.

Some people have done it 100 times. Some people might be like, "Hi, it's a Wednesday, nice to see you." There you go. Obviously, everyone has rehearsed and practiced for sure, but it was an absolute process. The chair and the way the audience responds to the chair, which Josh can also tell you from up there, the thrill of it, what it unleashes in people. The chair could get its own curtain call at the end, quite happily. We just didn't know where to put it. It was hard to get out. It's really something that-- it was such a collaborative spirit that needed to accomplish that because you can do that gesture more stylized, but there's something quite literal and mechanized. It felt like it was in the world of the play we were making.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Just I'm curious about the audience reactions. There's like a, "Oh, did that just happen?"

Josh Groban: Brilliantly, he wrote the line 'Goodbye, Johanna' on the same moment that the first body is dropping down the chute. There is this twisted humor to it in the audience. There is this air being let out of the balloon where they actually really in a strange way are happy to have [laughs] the moment and laughing and sometimes they applaud. It's a weird thing that we've now got them with us in this strange journey of Sweeney's. The chair, if you treat her nice, she treats you nice. It can be fussy, but as Tommy said, we've got an amazing team of people at theater that from the moment we leave the stage, there's a cleaning. I mean, there's lots of fake blood everywhere. That's another thing.

We wanted this to be visceral. We didn't want it to be something where we were showing what it might look like in your imagination, or a red light and the tap on the shoulder. We wanted everything to be right there in front of everybody, and to get that reaction is great, but it does take a lot of people doing a lot of work to make sure that it runs smoothly.

Alison Stewart: I want to bring in Annaleigh Ashford to the conversation. We had her on the show. She's a delight. How much room, Thomas, is there for Annaleigh to improvise on a given night, because she's given a really sort of saucy, frisky Mrs. Love. I think at one point she practically climbs up Sweeney Todd like a tree, when she's singing one of her songs. How much is improvised? How much is tightly choreographed? I'm really curious.

Thomas Kail: Annaleigh, her fidelity to the text is of the highest regard. There's not improv in that way. The things that have happened have come out of rehearsals where we're trying things. On one night it might be this, and one night it might be that, but Annaleigh has the ability to make the science of comedy also simply the underpinnings of something that feels like it never could have happened before, so she really applies deep rigor to that, but there's Annaleigh in all of this. Is it 'all of it'? I'm sorry.

Longtime listener, first time caller, but I just want to say there's something about the spirit of possibility and anarchy that she brings and that she and Josh unlock in each other, so when we get to Little Priest at the end of Act 1, if you've ever seen a group of 1,500 people ready to go on a ride, I invite you to the Lunt Theatre at about 9:25 PM, because they're just right there with them. They're like, "Take us wherever you want to go." That's one of the real thrills of the construction of the piece and watching the way that Josh and Annaleigh intertwine and play through each other and off of each other.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit of A Little Priest and we can talk about it on the other side. This is from Sweeney Todd.

[music - Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd]

Lawyer is rather nice.

If it's for a price

Order something else, though, to follow,

Since no one should swallow it twice

Anything that's lean?

Well, then, if you're British and loyal,

You might enjoy Royal Marine

Anyway, it's clean

Though, of course

It taste of wherever it's been

Is that squire on the fire?

Mercy, no, sir, look closer

You'll notice it's grocer

Looks thicker

More like vicar!

No, it has to be grocer

It's green!

The history of the world, my love

Save a lot of graves

Do a lot of relatives favors

Is those below serving those up above

Everybody shaves

So there should be plenty of flavors

How gratifying for once to know

That those above will serve those down below

Alison Stewart: Josh, understanding that you are a professional and this is your job, how do you keep it together on nights when Annaleigh is particularly--

Josh Groban: When she's on one?

Alison Stewart: When she's out there?

Josh Groban: [laughs] Annaleigh has such a tool belt of abilities and experiences and training. She comes from, of course, the world of traditional acting, but Shakespeare and clowning and improv. Having her as a partner in crime literally up there and during the rehearsal process, there is so much to react to. There is so much to bounce off of, and we have each other's back in so many ways out there with the light in the dark. Then Sweeney finds his light through Lovett's humor, and Lovett finds dark through Sweeney's journey. To be able to go through that, we are genuinely laughing out there every single night. We're doing it in character, but we don't ever break to 'we're Josh and Annaleigh now', but it is funny, because what the characters are going through at that moment is maniacal and it is funny.

The physicality that's been given to us to do there, it's impossible not to feel that humor when you're going through it. With the audience roaring, it just becomes a real party immediately after what is the absolute bottom of the barrel depth of despair that Sweeney has gone through with epiphany. It's the polar opposite, so it's an incredible way to end the act.

Alison Stewart: Every video, Thomas, you look up for this show has comments underneath, tons of them saying, "Will there be a professionally recorded performance of this production at some point?" On behalf of all of those commenters, any plans in the works for this to be recorded at some time?

Thomas Kail: Not presently. I'm not sure with also the way some of the labor negotiations are right now, things are particularly complicated. I hope people continue to talk and resolve and work towards resolution. I'll say that.

Alison Stewart: Josh, what is a moment you look forward to every night?

Josh Groban: Oh my goodness. Honestly, there's an incredible feeling every time I'm laying on the trap door that brings me up at the beginning of the show and I can hear this second to none extraordinary ensemble of just the most incredible voices I've ever heard on the stage, and they're singing those high soprano notes and they're blasting, "Sweeney sweet," to the audience. I'm laying there and I give myself a moment of just childlike gratitude every time I'm down there and think about what it means to do the show, what it means to tell the story again to this new audience as Sweeney is resurrected every night to have to do this.

I think about who's out there who's never seen a Broadway show before, who's out there who's never seen Sweeney before, who's the me that's out there who's saw it when I was 13, who am I going to do that for tonight? I just give myself that moment to reflect, and then I say, "Let's go do it." Then they pull me out and we ride it, but there is no better way to start an evening than to have the one that I get to do every night. It's one that I'm deeply grateful to have the chance to do.

Alison Stewart: Sweeney Todd is now on Broadway. I've been speaking with its director Thomas Kail, and it's star Josh Groban. Thanks for the time, guys.

Josh Groban: Thank you so much for having us, Alison, really appreciate it.

Thomas Kail: Thank you. Appreciate it.

 

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