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Annaleigh Ashford can’t remember a time when she didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim was. One of the first songs she sang as a girl growing up in Denver, Colorado, was “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from the musical Gypsy, for which Mr. Sondheim—who died in 2021 at 91—wrote the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music. “I remember knowing as a little person that the lyrics to that song were very special. They told stories that transcended the music,” Ashford tells me on a recent phone call. She sang “Our Time,” from Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, at both her high school and college graduations. “I was trying to expose people to Sondheim any way I could!”
These days, Ashford keeps up her Sondheim evangelism seven times a week at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street, where she dons the iconic harridan coiffure and mangy petticoats of one of Sondheim’s most wicked—if also grimly sympathetic—Broadway heroines: Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Starring opposite Josh Groban (as Sweeney) and Stranger Things’s Gaten Matarazzo in the gothic tale of a mad barber with a bloody score to settle in Victorian London, Ashford plays the menacingly devoted Lovett with intuitive lightness and a dashed-off comedic timing, at once paying homage to the role’s originator, the late Angela Lansbury, and adding a dimension that is all her own.
In Sweeney Todd’s original Broadway production, which premiered in 1979, “Angela created such an incredible roadmap—not just for me on the page, but also physically and spiritually,” Ashford says. “There is something that is undeniably her.” Mrs. Lovett is running a down-and-out pie shop—think shepherd’s, not apple—when Sweeney Todd returns to town from prison to exact revenge on the judge who put him there. A barber by trade, he sets up shop chez Lovett, and when his revenge fantasy devolves into indiscriminate bloodlust, Lovett identifies an opportunity for free pie filling.
“She is trying to survive, and the only way to do that, in that time and place, is through a man. From the moment he walks in to the moment she departs us, she is trying to get him to stay with her, to love her. Times is hard!” she adds, quoting a lyric from her opening number, “The Worst Pies in London,” which she describes as a “river raft” of a song full of vocal twists and Sondheim’s signature lyrical runs.
With the long shadow of Lansbury’s portrayal—not to mention Patti LuPone’s, from a 2005 Broadway revival—looming over the production, Ashford makes quick work of making Lovett her own, grounding a role that can tend towards camp and introducing a (subtle) slapstick humor. (A particular mid-act thump down the shop’s stairs brings the house down, among other delightful bits.) Costume designer Emilio Sosa also makes satisfying use of the period’s calico prints and soft cotton textiles for this Lovett, though they appear appropriately disheveled and worn. “I think this was the only skirt she had been able to buy for the last five years. Her undergarments are hanging on by a thread, which I love,” Ashford says.
The Dickensian déshabillé of her wardrobe lends itself to a more sensual and physically amorous Lovett than we are perhaps used to seeing. While it’s always been implied that Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett are lovers, here her lust is on full display—which is of a piece with Ashford’s knack for physical comedy. “Sondheim is the same as Shakespeare: You have to go to the text. You mine it for every clue you can possibly have,” she says. “I have a line in ‘By the Sea’ where I say ‘my rumpled bedding legitimized,’ which means they’ve been lovers. We decided to lean into that.”
Without the show’s composer and lyricist around to pose questions to, as he had been when Ashford starred as Dot in the 2017 revival of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, she is content to find answers wherever she can. (Sondheim passed away the week before an early staged reading of this production.) “Patti LuPone said in an interview that she missed Steve and she missed his notes. Ugh, I second that, Patti,” she says. “I know he’s in heaven looking down on us, watching us do his puzzles.”
With this year’s Tony Awards less than a week away, Ashford, who is nominated for best leading actress in a musical, is now in the process of finding a red carpet look with her stylist, Brad Goreski. (In 2015, she won a Tony for her featured role in You Can’t Take It With You.) “The show has such a unique aesthetic—you think gothic, red and black—and with the Tonys you think summer, sequins, light, bright,” she muses. She’s veering toward the bright and sequins-y side of things, naming Bob Mackie as an inspiration. “I’ve been worshiping at the altar of Bob Mackie since I was a little girl!”
Whether that’s a hint or just a wish, we will see on Sunday. “I like to think of these awards as a big pageant,” Ashford says, crediting Sweeney’s director, Thomas Kail, with the perspective. “They can be stressful, but it’s like a festival…. ‘I wish to go to the festival!’” she quips. It’s a quote from Into the Woods, another Sondheim show up for a raft of Tonys on Sunday.