How playing the Beast is helping Josh Groban prepare for Sweeney Todd
Attend the tale as old as time...
Josh Groban is getting rather beastly lately. First, the recording artist stars as the Beast in ABC's Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration on Dec. 15. This spring, he'll be taking on another monstrous figure — the character of Sweeney Todd in a splashy Broadway revival of the eponymous Stephen Sondheim musical.
While the Beast's bark is worse than his bite once Belle (H.E.R.) gets to know him, Sweeney Todd is a murderous barber out for revenge for himself and the family that was taken from him. Yet Groban has found surprisingly useful parallels between the two men.
"The thing that makes the Beast's character interesting is almost a reverse of the same thing that makes Sweeney Todd and Benjamin Barker interesting," he explains. "You're dealing with the duality of a monster and a man, and what creates that? What do we see in each character that we see in ourselves?"
ABC/Christopher Willard Josh Groban
In each instance, Groban is focused on finding the humanity inside both men, as opposed to judging them for their actions. "With both characters, it's far more interesting to connect with the human being inside instead of the brute force, broad strokes monster," he says. "Finding that humanity in the Beast role was great prep for trying to find Benjamin Barker, the family man, the businessman, the person who was wronged before he did all of that wronging."
At the very least, portraying Sweeney opposite Annaleigh Ashford's Mrs. Lovett won't require Groban to operate a 60-pound puppet as he does as the Beast.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens March 26, 2023, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Ruthie Ann Miles, Jordan Fisher, Gaten Matarazzo, and more star opposite Groban and Ashford.
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