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    Review: The Many Thrilling Flavors of a Full-Scale ‘Sweeney Todd’

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    Sondheim’s masterpiece, restored to its proper size and sung to the hilt by Josh Groban, makes a welcome Broadway return.How do you like your “Sweeney Todd” done?Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the score, favored the musical thriller take: the one that focuses on gore and shock. Blood spouts everywhere when Sweeney, “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” slits the throats of his customers; when his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, grinds the corpses into meat pies, you wince at every crunch.Also rather nice: the social critique version promoted by Harold Prince, the director of the original production in 1979. In that one, Sweeney, seen as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, isn’t so much a villain as a victim. The greed of the overlord class, mimicked by the grasping Mrs. Lovett, is what makes mincemeat of the proletariat.Or perhaps you prefer your “Sweeney” intimate, with razors so close you recoil. Or psychological and stripped to the bone, with barely a set and Mrs. Lovett on tuba.If there are so many worthy “Sweeney” options, that’s because the show isn’t just one of the greatest American musicals but several. Sondheim’s score, a homage to the sinister soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann, cannibalizes the book (by Hugh Wheeler) and the book’s remoter sources (a 1970 play by Christopher Bond, a 19th-century penny dreadful) until only their bones remain. But in return you get arias so beautiful, and musical scenes so intricately layered, that every possible genre seems to be baked inside.Now comes a new special on the menu: the ravishingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious “Sweeney” revival that opened on Sunday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, and directed by Thomas Kail, it has a rictus on its face and a scar in its heart.Gaten Matarazzo, left, and Ashford dancing on a table (and Groban’s Sweeney, with a client, on the set’s upper level). Thomas Kail’s production favors naturalistic detail within an expressionistic palette, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe “gorgeously sung” part is no surprise with Groban, whose quasi-operatic pop baritone perfectly encompasses the range of the role, and whose technique makes sure every word is bell clear. That some of the songs are thus even prettier than usual is all to the better; Sondheim’s technique of setting the most grotesque moments to the most romantic music — as when, in “Pretty Women,” Sweeney prepares to murder the judge who raped his wife and abducted their baby daughter, Johanna — is beautifully served.And though it can’t be said that Groban invokes terror, that’s partly the result of Kail’s attention to naturalistic detail within an expressionistic palette. Even dwarfed (and unfortunately sometimes obscured) by Mimi Lien’s awesomely vast sets, we always see Sweeney as a human being, albeit a strange one. Perfectly matching Sondheim’s first description of the character — “His skin was pale and his eye was odd” — he looks almost overexposed and, squinting throughout, as if he needs glasses. Some of the production’s humor comes from his growing resemblance to an impassive suburban husband whose job happens to be murder, as Ashford’s Mrs. Lovett tries to domesticate him.But most of the humor comes from Ashford herself, a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means. Her Mrs. Lovett — despite a tip of the wig to Angela Lansbury, who originated the role — is not the music-hall zany Lansbury created, but a brutal schemer for whom zaniness is a useful cover. As she hilariously enacts her romantic dramas with a noncompliant Sweeney, you see that she is also trying to protect herself from his mania by getting his mind off avenging his wife and reclaiming Johanna. Later, as the evil begins to crowd in closer, the jokes go dry on her tongue.It’s a great, very specific performance — and very well sung — if occasionally pushed too hard histrionically and often too hard to hear. (Both she and Jordan Fisher, beamish as the sailor who falls in love with Johanna, seem to be under-amplified.)That the rest of the cast is also so specific is a Kail trademark even more in evidence here than it was in his staging of “Hamilton.” The evil judge (Jamie Jackson), his oily beadle (John Rapson), a “half-crazed beggar woman” (Ruthie Ann Miles), a rival barber (Nicholas Christopher) and the barber’s abused assistant (Gaten Matarazzo, who sings an especially haunting “Not While I’m Around” with Ashford) all find curious ways, within the confines of the archetypes they must inhabit, of suggesting that the archetypes got that way for a reason. And as the grown-up Johanna, Maria Bilbao makes fascinating sense of an often-bland character by turning her into a bird, twisting with tics and scratching as if to escape the cage of her own skin.Jordan Fisher and Maria Bilbao as the young lovers Anthony and Johanna.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuthie Ann Miles as the Beggar Woman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese details help compensate for the extremity that has been somewhat leached from the title character. Steven Hoggett’s choreography, much more central than in other productions, has a similar effect, filling the stage with strange, disorienting gestures: extreme leaning, ratlike huddling, abdominal contractions that look like retching. Mrs. Lovett’s upward mobility can be traced, as if on a graph, in the lines of Emilio Sosa’s costumes. Natasha Katz’s extraordinary lighting is likewise expressionistic, its silvery beams often stabbing the gloom like a set of knives.These effects are certainly large. (Sweeney’s trick barber chair is a production in itself.) But the original staging included the framework of an actual iron foundry, so nothing here feels out of scale. And scale is one of the reasons we’ve had so many so-called Teeny Todds: The work is usually deemed too difficult and expensive to pull off at the size Prince imagined and that Sondheim, in his gigantic score, achieved. Even with a few discreet cuts, the nearly three-hour show is about 80 percent sung, which is why some people call it an opera.Certainly Kail’s production makes a convincing new case for “Sweeney” as a Broadway-size property, with its cast of 25 (I’ve seen it with as few as nine) and its orchestra playing Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations for 26. (You can’t believe the difference three trombones make in creating the sound of doom, especially compared to none.) Under Alex Lacamoire’s musical supervision, the musicians’ performance, like that of the ensemble in the choral numbers, is glorious.Full disclosure: My parents, responding to an ad in The Times in 1978, invested $1,800 in the original production, and after 10 or 15 years earned a profit of, I think, $80. But even putting that windfall aside, I have never not loved “Sweeney.” In a pie shop or a foundry, I am always transported, largely by the music, to a place where grief twists people into nightmares, and others find ways to monetize that.I hope the current producers likewise find ways to monetize Kail’s production, because what is Broadway for if not a “Sweeney” that, however rare, is this well-done?Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet StreetAt the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan; sweeneytoddbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      In ‘Up Here,’ the Song Stuck in Your Head Might Be Your Mean Ex-Crush

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      Developed by a team of Broadway and Hollywood all-stars, the new Hulu series sets a chorus of inner critics to song.The rats were not on the call sheet. They turned up anyway.For the members of the brain trust behind the new Hulu musical series “Up Here,” this balmy September night last year was to be a precious occasion: After more than two years of cross-country video calls, the writer and executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel had flown in from Los Angeles during the last full week of production, finally giving her a chance to hang out on set with her collaborators — a gang of Broadway powerhouses that included the highly decorated songwriting couple behind “Frozen,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.“She was one of our best friends in the pandemic,” Anderson-Lopez said at the time, at an outdoor shoot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hudson Heights. “We spent six to eight hours together a day during 2021. And we just hugged in person for the first time 10 minutes ago.”And then Sanchez-Witzel got a dose of New York City realness. As they gathered around the monitors, with the cameras rolling just a few yards away, a few enterprising rodents decided to join the fun. Snacks were stashed. Sanchez-Witzel nervously pulled up her feet. Someone joked about creating a viral video to promote the show.It was just the latest twist in the bigger challenge faced by the illustrious team behind “Up Here,” which dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Friday: how to merge that most classically New York of art forms, the stage musical, with a much younger Hollywood one — the bingeable half-hour streaming sitcom.Stage musicals have been adapted into movies for decades; live television adaptations have made a comeback in recent years, too. But turning one into serialized television is new. This alone would make “Up Here,” developed from an original musical by the Lopezes, stand out.The developers of “Up Here” on a location shoot in Manhattan, from left: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, Robert Lopez, Steven Levenson, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Thomas Kail.Sarah Shatz/HuluThe Lopezes created “Up Here” as a stage musical that debuted in San Diego in 2015, but soon shelved it. They made significant changes for the TV adaptation. Sarah Shatz/HuluAdd to that the Tony-winning creative powers of the writer Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and the director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”), and the series also comes courtesy of Broadway’s equivalent to a Marvel superteam.“I think they wanted to make sure someone hadn’t won a Tony in this group,” Sanchez-Witzel said. (She, Levenson and the Lopezes are all credited as developers.) She joked that over the years she had spent “thousands of dollars on StubHub” to watch her new collaborators’ shows.Given the surrealistic premise of “Up Here,” it was perhaps always well suited for the screen — think “Herman’s Head” with music, or “Inside Out” with nagging parents, mean ex-crushes and former friends instead of lovable little gremlins. Set at the turn of the millennium, it centers on Lindsay and Miguel (played in the series by Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes), a young couple who meet outside a bar bathroom where Lindsay’s roommate is having sex with a stranger.If a show about the lurid dating lives of 20-something New Yorkers feels a little familiar, the twist is that the characters’ thoughts, as personified by people from their lives, constantly speak up — or, rather, sing up — to interfere.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes about trying out for his role. He had ample show-tune experience.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe original musical premiered in San Diego in 2015, then was shelved while the Lopezes worked on other things. It didn’t stay on the shelf for long. Early in 2020, Kail, who since directing “Hamilton” had begun to develop a solid reputation in television (he was an executive producer and director of the acclaimed FX series “Fosse/Verdon”), was looking for a new project he could sink his teeth into. He knew the Lopezes from the theater world — in addition to their songs for the “Frozen” movies and “Coco,” Lopez had co-written “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” — and he asked if they had anything lying around.They were keen to take another crack at “Up Here.” Kail saw potential. He soon pulled in Levenson, his fellow developer of “Fosse/Verdon.” All agreed that “Up Here” would work best as a comedy series. There was just one problem.“We quickly decided none of us had any experience in half-hour television,” Levenson said. So Kail contacted Sanchez-Witzel, whose credits included “The Carmichael Show” and “New Girl.” She signed on but continued to work from Los Angeles. (Kail, the Lopezes and Levenson are also executive producers.)The team’s central task was figuring out how to translate the stage version to episodic television. The idea, as Levenson explained it, was to create a musical that spanned eight episodes but where each was also its own mini-musical. And the tunes had to be more than an accessory.“The show needed to function like a musical, where the songs actually were necessary to the storytelling, so that if you removed them, the show wouldn’t work,” Levenson said.The learning curve was steep for both sides.“Danielle told us about certain structures of a 30-minute comedy,” Anderson-Lopez said. “And we talked a lot about how when we’re looking for songs in theater or animated musicals, we’re always looking for a moment when a character is having a feeling so big, they can’t speak anymore. It was really fun figuring out those spaces in a half-hour comedy.”Eventually, the set list from the San Diego production was almost entirely put aside. The male lead’s name was also changed from Dan to Miguel.Valdes as Miguel in a scene from the series. The male lead was called Dan in the stage version. Sarah Shatz/Hulu“I felt strongly that this time around he should be not white,” said Lopez, the youngest person ever to win an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — and also the only person to have won each award more than once. He and Sanchez-Witzel share “a similar experience being nonwhite and feeling disconnected from both the white mainstream and from our immigrant histories,” he added. (Lopez is of Philippine descent; Sanchez-Witzel is Mexican American.) “We thought that’d be interesting to put into this character.”To find their lead actors, the New York-based creators followed a procedure they were all familiar with. This was an advantage for Valdes.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes, who is best known for playing Cisco/Vibe on the CW’s “The Flash” but has extensive show-tune experience, including appearing in the Broadway hit “Once” a decade ago.“It had been a long time since I’d been in that kind of musical theater space, but it felt so familiar,” he said, “like a homecoming.”Landing the part was more fraught for Whitman, whose extensive television résumé (“Parenthood,” “Arrested Development”) had not prepared her for an old-school tryout. “I had to fly to New York and stand in front of a table full of people next to a piano player and have to sing,” Whitman said in a joint video call with Valdes. “It was terrifying. I can sing, but I’d never done anything like that.”As for the actors handling Lindsay and Miguel’s inner voices, they tend to straddle both worlds. Portraying Lindsay’s parents are the writer, humorist and actor John Hodgman and the Broadway and “Brockmire” veteran Katie Finneran. Team Miguel includes Scott Porter, an original cast member of the Off Broadway hit musical “Altar Boyz” who went on to star in “Friday Night Lights.” That evening in Hudson Heights, he was rocking a goatee and suspenders that made him look like a cocky late-90s corporate bro, which is exactly what he plays.Lindsay leaves her partner (George Hampe, far right) for New York City in the pilot. The voices in her head (played by, center left, Sophia Hammons; Katie Finneran; and John Hodgman) follow her.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom his experience in theater and on “Fosse/Verdon,” Kail had learned that things went smoother if you had everyone in the same building; aside from the portions shot on location, the entire production was concentrated at a compound in Long Island City, Queens, from the writing to the choreography to the costume making.“The thing with theater is, there is a moment when you move into the theater and everybody’s under the same tent,” he said. “We wanted to try to do that here and bring everybody in.”Except, of course, for Sanchez-Witzel, who until the final full week had to make do from Los Angeles. It was great that technology had allowed her to observe the set from 3,000 miles away, she said, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of finally watching it all in person: the strips of ratty off-white carpet evoking dirty Manhattan snow, the whispers between takes, the in-person chemistry between Whitman and Valdes.Then there was the massive boulder in the middle of a block in Hudson Heights, where Lindsay and Miguel share an important kiss.“To see the rock in person — it’s probably hard for you to imagine how exciting it is,” Sanchez-Witzel said, laughing. “But to me, it’s extremely exciting!” More

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      Who Needs a Shave? ‘Sweeney Todd’ Is Back.

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      “Less is more” was famously one of the composer Stephen Sondheim’s aesthetic credos. But in the case of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” the bloody, quasi-operatic 1979 revenge tragedy that many consider his masterpiece, Sondheim went big in a way he seldom had before and never did again: in the size of the orchestra and performing ensemble, in the sheer quantity of music written for the score, and in the dramatic freight (and body count) borne by the tale of a murderous Victorian-era barber.“Sweeney Todd” has accordingly joined the repertoire of many opera companies, where it holds its own with such 20th-century titans as the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” and Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw.” But in the theater, “Sweeney” has found notable success by getting a haircut. Since the original Broadway production closed in 1980 — an artistic success, winning the Tony Award for best musical, but a financial disappointment, recouping just shy of 60 percent of its costs — its two Broadway revivals were trimmed-down renditions. The first, staged in the round at Circle in the Square in 1989, earned the nickname “Teeny Todd” for its small ensemble and two-piano reduction of the score, while John Doyle’s 2005 production memorably stripped the show down to a 10-member company of actor-musicians.The property’s biggest commercial success was Off Broadway: The Tooting Arts Club’s immersive pie-shop staging at the 133-seat Barrow Street Theater in 2017 became the longest-running “Sweeney,” recouping its investment in 24 weeks, then continuing for a year after that.So the stakes are high for the new Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, now in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where it is scheduled to open on March 26. With a capitalization of $13.5 million, a company of 25 actors and an orchestra of 26 players, this is “Sweeney” as it hasn’t been seen or heard in New York for 43 years. We’re used to “Sweeney Todd” deconstructed. Can it be reconstructed?And is there a plentiful paying audience, not only for the show’s stars, who include Gaten Matarazzo and Jordan Fisher, but also for Sondheim himself? His death in 2021 led to fresh encomiums for his unparalleled legacy, but that season’s “Company” revival lost money, and last year’s popular “Into the Woods,” now on a national tour, has not announced whether it has recouped.Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Sweeney” (and “Hamilton”), recently acknowledged that the revival constituted a “large risk,” adding that he’s encouraged by strong ticket sales. He did initially wonder, he said, “Does New York need or want another ‘Sweeney Todd,’ only four or five years after the pie shop? And the answer was: Maybe, if we give them something they haven’t seen in 40 years, a full-scale production with a full ensemble and a full orchestra.”Rehearsals of the show at Open Jar Studios in Manhattan. The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick barber’s chair and blood packs. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesGaten Matarazzo during rehearsals.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe idea of the revival germinated with Groban, a pop-classical singer who made his Broadway debut in 2016 in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” He approached Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” about tackling “Sweeney” with a full orchestra, and Kail enlisted Alex Lacamoire, the “Hamilton” music director, and the choreographer Steven Hoggett (“A Beautiful Noise”).During a phone interview two days before previews began, Groban said Sweeney had been on his wish list since he was in junior high and first saw a mid-1990s production by Los Angeles’s East West Players, with Orville Mendoza in the lead. It was also his introduction to the work of Sondheim, who teamed with Hugh Wheeler, the show’s writer.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“It was a kind of secret language that I just got,” Groban recalled of his early explorations of Sondheim’s musicals. “Even at a young age, when I still needed to grow into so many of the themes he was writing about, I just seemed to understand it on a weird unspoken level.”While Groban’s lush baritone is undoubtedly a good fit for the music, does he perhaps seem a bit too genial and easygoing to play a serial killer whose quest for revenge swells into a sociopathic death wish?“That’s actually one of the reasons I was attracted to doing it,” Groban insisted. He said he figured that “the way to earn a connection with the audience that’s frightening on a deeper level than, ‘Hey, that’s the monster in the room,’ is to find whatever humanity there is between that guy and whoever’s sitting in the audience.”For his part, Kail said he’s leaning into the show’s strains of longing, not only those of the embittered Sweeney but also from his helpmate and desultory romantic partner, the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett, played by Ashford.“What we’re really keen to explore,” said Kail, “is can you make something thrilling, something entertaining, something hilarious, something scary — and can we also break your heart?”Ashford, who played Dot in the 2017 revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” (which did recoup its investment), is on a similar wavelength.“I’ve always thought of it as a great love story, though maybe one-sided,” she said. Without ignoring Lovett’s depravity — it is she, after all, who suggests grinding Sweeney’s victims into meat pies, in the tour de force duet “A Little Priest” — Ashford said she is keying in on Mrs. Lovett’s unrequited passion for Sweeney as well as her maternal affection for the orphan Toby (Matarazzo).Not to mention finding connections to the role’s originator, Angela Lansbury. “You feel her breath and her warmth and her humor all over the piece,” Ashford said.The production aims to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” said Kail, above right, with Ashford and Groban.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIndeed, the imprint of the original production, memorialized in a telefilm recording of a 1980 tour stop in Los Angeles, is unavoidable. That’s particularly the case for a production that’s returning to Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, and boasts a towering set by Mimi Lien that, like Eugene Lee’s original set, employs a working crane and moving pieces ringed with cast-iron staircases.But Kail, who was friendly with Harold Prince, the director of the show’s original production, is intent on marking out his own territory.“That production was influenced by Brecht; it was about alienation, distancing,” Kail said. “That approach was enormously effective for them, and it is quite different from what we’re going to try to do.”Whereas Prince found his hook in the grime and tumult of the Industrial Revolution, Kail and his team, which also includes the costume designer Emilio Sosa and the lighting designer Natasha Katz, are looking to “find beauty in the underbelly and in the grotesque,” Kail said. Inspired by the play’s stark dichotomy between “those above” and “those below,” they are trying to embody its levels and hierarchies.Lien, whose scenic designs for shows like “Great Comet” and “An Octoroon” are typically characterized by surprising use of three-dimensional space, was struck by the show’s references to “the great black pit, the hole in the ground, the vermin — this kind of characterization of that underclass population of Victorian London as being like sewer rats, living underground.”In addition to the gantry crane and mechanized set pieces, Lien’s set is framed by a brick archway and an iron bridge that could serve in a production of “Oliver!”Sosa’s costumes, too, are stressing both beauty and division.“If you look historically at the clothing, the cuts and silhouettes are very similar between those of less means and more affluent people,” Sosa noted. “Everyone has a top hat. It’s the condition of your hat that’s variable, that sets where you stand in the scheme of economics.”The new production’s larger scale also means the return of the trick chair and blood packs. (Some past revivals artfully stylized the show’s onstage murders and finessed the mechanics of Sweeney’s purpose-built chair.) Its blood effects are being created by Jeremy Chernick, who helped Elsa’s world transform to ice in “Frozen” and stocked the blood cannons for “American Psycho.”And when I spoke to Hoggett about the show’s movements and transitions he told me, “I spent all day yesterday being slid down the chair into a pit, so I could show all the actors how not to bang your chin and where the floor is. It was great; we were offering $5 rides.”Atop the table, from left, Gaten Matarazzo and Annaleigh Ashford in the revival of “Sweeney Todd” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGroban as the murderous barber Sweeney Todd and Ashford as the pie-shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett in the new production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe extent to which “Sweeney Todd” is itself a kind of thrill ride, a brilliant machine for delivering scares and laughs, remains a question. Sondheim was clear about his inspiration: When he saw Christopher Bond’s blank-verse play in London in 1973, itself adapted from a hoary English legend, the composer saw an opportunity to indulge his intersecting affinities for Gothic horror, melodrama and Grand Guignol. And in later years he was on record as savoring intimate versions of “Sweeney,” not least because they hewed closer to his original vision.But there’s something else in the show’s DNA that may account for its endurance, and may explain why, despite Sondheim’s expressed preference for smaller stagings, he was apparently eager to see Kail’s production. (He died just days before he had been scheduled to attend a reading of the show.)When Sondheim enlisted Prince — who was initially ambivalent about the show’s melodrama and horror until he sparked to its larger social themes — the composer was inexorably drawn into writing something with more epic heft than he might have originally imagined.As Ashford put it: “Every time you work on a great piece, you are exploring an author’s work from that moment in their life. I always thought ‘Sunday in the Park’ was an extension of Steve at a time in his life when he was really examining himself as an artist and what art meant to him.“In this piece, where he was in his life — I can’t speak for him, but it feels like he and Hal Prince were setting the world on fire. And he was like, ‘Here’s everything I got, I can’t wait to show it to you.’”There may be something even more personal at the show’s bloody core that speaks to its emotional size, if not its physical scale. When Sondheim played a bit of the score for Judy Prince, Hal’s wife, she was startled, and told him, “Steve, it’s the story of your life.”I once asked Sondheim what she might have meant, and he replied by drawing an analogy between Sweeney’s vengeful murders and works of art inspired by a sense of having been wronged as a young man. (Sondheim had an infamously stormy childhood.)The clues can be read in the music. The harmonic palette of the “Sweeney” score was influenced by the film music of Bernard Herrmann, a German neo-Romantic who brought utter emotional conviction to his work, whether he was accompanying dueling skeletons or the capering psychodramas of Alfred Hitchcock. The yearning and anguish Sondheim poured into the music of “Sweeney Todd” may finally be as telling as any of the bloody action in the script.Tunick, who said his original orchestrations “leaned on the film music masters heavily,” knew Sondheim well. Whether “Sweeney Todd” expressed something darkly personal about his colleague, Tunick couldn’t say. But he did note significantly: “All of his other shows were brought to him by somebody else, whether it was Hal Prince or James Lapine or whoever. This is the only one of Sondheim’s shows that was his idea.” More

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      Aneesa Folds, Back on Broadway, Is Still Getting Used to This

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      There has been an am-I-dreaming quality to Aneesa Folds’s life lately. That much she wanted to make clear.Yes, that was her in the glittering gold jumpsuit at the Tony Awards, performing in knockout voice with the troupe Freestyle Love Supreme. But a few mornings later, sitting in a booth at a hotel restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district, she was still doing a mental double take at the memory of Broadway stars saying hello to her backstage “as if I wasn’t a pedestrian.” And meeting a reporter for a profile interview? That wasn’t normal either.“I love that you’re talking to me as if this is regular for me,” she said, and laughed.On the other hand, she is on her way back to Broadway with Freestyle Love Supreme. Founded by Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Veneziale, the longstanding hip-hop improv comedy troupe got fresh attention with the rise of “Hamilton,” which led to a Broadway run two years ago. Now, it’s back for a limited encore engagement that starts previews on Thursday and opens Oct. 19.Folds, who even offstage has an easy charisma, is a relative newcomer to the group. When she and Kaila Mullady joined in 2019, they were entering what had been all-male territory. Then, as now, they had only a week’s worth of rehearsals to acclimate before stepping in front of the first audience.At the Tony Awards, from left: James Monroe Iglehart, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Wayne Brady and Folds.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“You’re going into this space with all of these people that have been doing a show for 18, 19 years,” said Folds, 28. “They know each other like the back of their hands, and they’re like, ‘OK, we’re just going to improvise.’ And then you go to Broadway the next week and they put you onstage.”In 2019, she spent rehearsals in survival mode, trying to soak up as much knowledge as she could about the mechanics of the show. This time feels different — more like “playing with your friends,” she said.But to Kail, the show’s director, it was obvious even in the jam-session audition ahead of the original Broadway run that Folds, with her boldness and talent, belonged.“I was in the session with Chris Jackson and James Iglehart, who have both been in the group for a long time and have both been on Broadway for a long time,” he said in a phone interview. “She was doing her thing, like full Aneesa, and they looked at me and they were like: ‘Bro. Bro.’ I was like: ‘I know! Like, try to be cool. She’s still in the room.’”If Folds could turn back time — the way Freestyle Love Supreme does in one of its signature bits — and tell her child self what she is up to now, it might come as something of a shock. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens, she loved singing and felt safe blending in with a choir, but she was mortified whenever her talent was singled out for praise.“I was afraid of my voice,” she said. “I just was very insecure.”She had teachers who pushed and prodded her, though, and a mother who agreed when they encouraged her to do things like perform in the school musical. Her mother also found programs that helped her daughter blossom, like the Wingspan Arts theater conservatory in Manhattan and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.From left, Chris Sullivan, Christopher Jackson, Andrew Bancroft, Folds and Iglehart during Freestyle Love Supreme’s Broadway run in 2019.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesStill, musical theater — which, when you get right down to it, is what Freestyle Love Supreme does — was a tough sell for Folds as a child, partly because, she said, “it felt very white to me.”“I didn’t really see myself,” she added. “I just didn’t know if I could be in that world, if I was allowed to be in that world, to take up space in that world. And I was a very, very shy kid. I didn’t really speak much.”At Repertory Company High School for Theater Arts, in the Town Hall building on West 43rd Street, Folds emerged from her shell, making jokes and rapping in the cafeteria. (That’s also when she came up with the rapper name Young Nees, which she uses in Freestyle Love Supreme.) And thanks to Miranda’s “In the Heights,” a show she first listened to on a Young People’s Chorus trip to Austria, then saw repeatedly on Broadway, she thought there might be a place for her after all.“That was the show that made me feel like, OK, they’re changing musical theater,” she said.But not nearly fast enough. This spring, Folds told Playbill that most of the racist encounters she has had in her life have been in theater.“When I wasn’t doing Broadway,” she said, “I was doing a lot of regional shows. I’ve been in a lot of spaces where I was the only person of color, so as you can imagine, I’ve heard all sorts of things.”Like comments from wig designers who didn’t know how to work with Black hair — remarks so painful and common that Folds pulled in her shoulders to make herself smaller as she spoke of them.“When I get into a wig chair, I start apologizing,” she said. “Like: ‘I have a lot of hair, this is all mine, I have locs. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”Once, she said, she was assigned to actor housing in a home whose white owner had a collection of mammy dolls, and took them out to show her.This season, productions by Black artists are abundant on Broadway, but Folds said she feared those higher numbers will be a mere blip before the industry reverts to its old ways.“I really pray and hope that it doesn’t,” she said. “So that the little girl that’s sitting in Queens, New York, who maybe wants to do musical theater, does see herself.”It was during a visit home, when Folds was a college student at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford, that she first saw Freestyle Love Supreme. An instant fan, she wanted to do what they did. “It felt like everything I was good at,” she said.Freestyle Love Supreme, Folds said, “felt like everything I was good at.”Lia Clay Miller for The New York TimesSo in 2019, the year after the troupe started an academy, she applied. And while Kail said the program is not meant to be a training ground for new members, people there quickly told him they had found someone.With the addition of women, Folds said, suddenly the group had a wider pool of topics to talk about onstage. She particularly relishes the memory of a woman shouting “period cramps” when Veneziale was collecting audience pet peeves for the cast to rap about.“He didn’t hear her,” Folds said. “Which men often don’t. And I was like, ‘I’ll take period cramps.’”She did her rap, the crowd screamed with delight, and women came to the stage door and raved about it.“It’s awesome to be one of the women in the group,” Folds said. “We’re here and we’re switching it up.”Freestyle Love Supreme has led to work for her on other projects, including Miranda’s recent animated musical for children, “Vivo,” and his film adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” out next month in theaters and on Netflix. In that movie’s recently released trailer, she is in the opening shot.All this contributes to Folds’s pinch-me feeling. A small, doubting part of her wonders if she is where she is because her higher-profile colleagues are also her friends. A more brisk and confident part knows that she didn’t fall into any of her success — though if she’s a pleasure to be around, that doesn’t hurt.“My name does mean friendly and well-liked,” she said. “I try to live up to it. Be nice: That’s the first rule of theater.” More

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      How Lin-Manuel Miranda and Friends Made an Old Bookstore New

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      The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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      Drama Book Shop, Backed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, to Open in June

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      The quirky bookstore, which sells scripts and other theater-related work, was acquired by a team of “Hamilton” alumni after years of struggle.The Drama Book Shop, a quirky 104-year-old Manhattan specialty store that has long been a haven for aspiring artists as well as a purveyor of scripts, will reopen next month with a new location, a new look, and a new team of starry owners.Those new owners — the “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as the show’s director, Thomas Kail, lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, and the theater owner James L. Nederlander — said Wednesday that the store will have its long-delayed reopening on June 10.The opening, at 266 West 39th Street, is a sign of the team’s confidence in Times Square, which has been largely theater-free since March 12, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to close. Broadway shows are not planning to resume performances until September, but the new store owners say they are ready for business.The “Hamilton” team bought the Drama Book Shop, most recently located on West 40th Street, in early 2019 after years in which the store had struggled to survive the challenges of Manhattan real estate, e-commerce, and even a damaging flood. Kail had a particular passion for the bookstore, where he had run a small theater company in his early years as a professional; Miranda joined him there to work on “In the Heights,” a musical Kail directed. “In the Heights” has now been adapted into a film which is being released on June 11, the day after the bookstore opens.The new owners had initially hoped to reopen the store in late 2019, and then in early 2020, but the project was delayed, first by the vicissitudes of construction, and then by the pandemic. The new shop has been designed by David Korins, the “Hamilton” scenic designer, and includes a cafe.The store is encouraging visitors to make reservations online; capacity will be limited. More