by Patti Lupone
In April of 2005 I was home briefly before leaving for Portland, Oregon, to perform my concert Matters of the Heart when I got a telephone call from my current agent, Gary Gersh. This time the question was not “Are you interested?” This time the question was “Do you play an instrument?”
“I’ve played the piano, the cello, and the tuba in my lifetime,” I said. I began studying music in the Northport, Long Island, public school system, whose educators believed that a music education was as crucial to the development of a child as math or sports. Their music department is equally as strong today and those students are unbelievably lucky.
“Why are you asking? Because I haven’t played any of those instruments for a very long time.”
“Because they’re mounting a Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, and they need singers who also play instruments,” he answered. I had an edge on snagging this Nellie. The London Nellie played the trumpet. Tuba, trumpet—close enough, I thought.
Since I was leaving the next day, the producers arranged for the director, John Doyle, to fly from London to Portland to meet me. I finished the show and went to my hotel lobby to find my visitor. There was a gentleman sitting in a chair, looking very jet-lagged.
“You must be John Doyle,” I said. “I’m Patti LuPone.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry you had to travel such a long way. It must be about five A.M. London time.”
At this he stood up and asked, “Where can we get a drink?” My kind of director, I thought.
I took him to a great little wine bar that was right around the corner from my hotel. I drank lots of wine, he had several gin and tonics, and we talked about life, our families, and our backgrounds. It was the best meeting I’d ever had with a director. As we were walking back to the hotel, we stopped in front of a shirt store. We looked in the window, and I saw a shirt that I thought would look nice on Matt. I said so. “You’ve got the part, Patti,” he later told me he’d thought at that moment. Being a normal person clinched the role for me in John’s eyes.
John Doyle’s concept for Sweeney was spare, and based on the very successful production that he had previously directed in England at the Watermill Theatre in Berkshire, and in the West End transfer. It was also very different from what I’d been doing. For the concert productions I’d participated in, Lonny Price had built ramps for the actors that ran through the midst of the orchestra. For John Doyle’s production, we were the orchestra. And there were just ten of us in the company. We, the actors, would be making every sound that came from that stage. During that production, I became a proud card-carrying member of Local 802, the musicians’ union.
As we came into September 2005, both Michael Cerveris, who had been cast as Sweeney, and I were performing in Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle at Ravinia. As a result, we missed the first week of Sweeney rehearsal in New York. Previews were to begin in early October, so both of us had to catch up quickly. I played several instruments in the show, not the least of which was the tuba. I became very fond of my tuba—so fond I actually named her “Irene.” I had a teacher in Connecticut whose friend lent me her tuba while I studied. Her name was Irene. Irene, the ¾ tuba, was placed in my dressing room closet every night, and as I closed the door I always said, “Good night, Irene.” (Okay, it’s not the best story in the book, but it’s a happy memory, and you can never have too many of those.)
John Doyle’s patience, and the clarity with which he presented his vision of the show to the cast, made this a great rehearsal period. I think that there is a scarcity of good directors in my world. When you are blessed to be working with a director who knows what he is doing in the rehearsal process, then you have an exceptional experience.
John was phenomenally prepared when he came into the rehearsal room. He was both inspired and inspiring. Not only did he motivate us with his opening remarks, but at the end of the day he left us with wonderful ideas to think about and to bring into the next rehearsal. Because we were both the cast and the orchestra, the process was complicated. Although none of us had ever worked onstage in quite this manner before, it never felt difficult, because he knew how to rehearse us and how to inspire confidence. It came down to the simple task of drill.
John said that he could not cast musicians because they would never memorize the music. For actors, the music would become an extension of the character. A musician sits in an orchestra and his music is in front of him on a music stand. We couldn’t have music stands—we were moving around the stage with our instruments most of the time. John expected every note to be memorized. As I learned the music, my prop track and blocking cues became easier. Eventually, memorizing the music became an integral part of everything I did in the production. I would get up from playing the tuba to pick up a bucket of blood, move to stage left, and on a note from Judge Turpin’s trumpet, pour blood from one bucket to another. Every piece of music became part of my character: I walked onstage. I hit the orchestra bells. I hit the triangle. I picked up my knitting. I poured blood. All integrated. All of us relied on one another for physical safety as well. Props, instruments, and blood were flying on that stage.
The rehearsal process was so complete that when we left the Ripley-Grier rehearsal rooms and moved to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on West Forty-ninth Street, the transition was seamless. We all realized as an ensemble that nothing had changed from the rehearsal room to the theatre. We had been prepared with such discipline and such nurturing under John and under Sarah Travis, our musical director, that we were comfortable onstage immediately.
The Eugene O’Neill is a great theatre, and it was well suited for Sweeney Todd. It’s one of Broadway’s smaller houses, and seats an audience of about 1,100. It’s also one of Broadway’s haunted houses. I had a ghost in my dressing room. The ghost let me know he was there one day when I thought I’d stepped on one of my dresser’s feet as I backed away from the closet. I apologized and Lolly said, “For what?” She was ten feet away. The ghost was right behind me, or so we both thought. Our ghost would turn the shower light on and close the dressing-room door to let us know he was there. I liked him. He was friendly and a male. I asked our head property man about ghosts in the Eugene O’Neill and he said, “You should be here on a painting call. They’re running all over the stage-left side of the theatre.” My dressing room was stage left.
Our Sweeney company was an incredible group of actors. In addition to being a great director in rehearsal, John also has a keen eye for casting actors in the right roles. Then he brings out the best in the actors he’s chosen, and he trusts his decisions. That’s one thing that can bother me about creative staff. They cast us—then they second-guess their own casting decisions and get mad at the actor for whatever reason. (See Sunset Boulevard chapters 12 and 13.) John is a different story altogether. He is decisive: These are the people I want. This is what I know I can bring out of them. And he does. All of us in the cast were the best we could possibly be in that production because of our director, John Doyle.
Everything about that show worked—the rehearsals, the staging, the company, the director, and great stage management. One of the best parts was Michael Cerveris. The actor playing Sweeney Todd carries the show. Nellie Lovett is the comic relief. Like George Hearn before him, Michael always gave me plenty of room for the laughs to register. That does not always happen if you’re the comic relief and a female. We had a shared history, having worked together at Ravinia, and our relationship onstage had developed a shorthand. We played well together. You pretty much have to in those two complicated roles. We went out there every night without a safety net. There was danger, but it was never scary, because I knew he was there for me, as I was for him. In fact, you could say that about every member of the cast: There was a mutual support onstage all the time, from one actor to another. Our production stage manager, Adam Hunter, likened us to a band, not a company of actors. High praise indeed.
We had a long period of previews, about a month; official opening night
was November 3, 2005. When the reviews came in, we were a hit, not just with the public but with the critics as well. And we were a hit for the right reasons—they actually got what we were trying to do.
“Though it uses only ten musicians, this Sweeney never stints on the music’s drama, intricacy, or sheer beauty.… Every note and sound, whether from a plucked violin or a tinkling triangle, seems to count fully,” wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times, in a highly positive review. “Because the performers are the musicians, they possess total control of those watching them in a way seldom afforded actors in musicals. They own the story they tell, and their instruments become narrative tools.”
Exactly. For example, the two lovers in the show, Anthony and Johanna, played dual cellos, so they played their love scenes, sang their love scenes, and acted their love scenes. The fact that John had been able to find two actors who each played the cello is phenomenal in itself.
Michael Cerveris and me as Sweeney and Nellie in John Doyle’s production.
PHOTO BY © PAUL KOLNIK
You could see that with every cast member—the instrument became a part of them. Many members of the company played more than one instrument. These actor/musicians blew me away. To watch Alex Gemignani or Donna Lynne Champlin on three or four instruments was intimidating. They were the backbone of the production and another reason music in schools should never be cut from the curriculum. These actors were triple threats in a whole other way—actor, singer, musician. Alex and Donna Lynne made up two members of a piano tag-team quartet. When one of them who had been playing the piano had to act in the next scene, another actor, either Ben Magnuson (Anthony) or my beloved Mano Felciano (Tobias), would just slip into the seat and start playing without missing a note. It was all closely choreographed, and very impressive to watch.
Mano Felciano as Tobias Ragg.
PHOTO BY © PAUL KOLNIK
Early in the run, Angela Lansbury, the original Mrs. Lovett, came to the performance. Our portrayals of Nellie were so very different, yet she was on her feet at the end of the show and came backstage to congratulate us. This Sweeney Todd was just so wild that even if you’d seen the show ten times before, you had never seen it quite this way. Before we opened we knew we had something special on our hands. We just didn’t know how special. The piece was so dark, so modern, so scary, and the small space of the Eugene O’Neill enhanced that feeling—audiences were frightened and fascinated. Whenever someone was killed, we poured buckets of blood and the stage lights glowed red. But no blood came out of the human cut. It was deceptive and deeply theatrical—bloody and extremely intimate.
The intimacy was one of the things that made Sweeney very powerful to the audience. Too often audiences can’t achieve an emotional connection with the characters because Broadway productions have become so electronically overproduced. In several musicals that I’ve attended, the singer’s voice doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the stage where my eyes are looking. There’s a subtle disconnect, which ultimately prevents the audience from having a theatrical experience—a listening experience and an emotional connection to the characters onstage.
With Sweeney Todd, there was no way to avoid the emotional connection. We all wore microphones, but the Eugene O’Neill is one of those Broadway houses with perfect acoustics, and our sound designer was such a master that he didn’t disturb the acoustics but rather sparingly enhanced the human voice. Our voices sounded real and came from the stage, allowing the audience to connect their eyes with their ears. It was great. There’s nothing more exciting than hearing a deafening silence from the house because an audience isn’t dealing with distractions and can focus and listen.
Because of the gruesome subject matter of Sweeney Todd, we had a peculiar relationship with the audience. The premise of the show was that we were inmates in an asylum, performing our little skit for our families, the nurses and doctors. Each night we deliberately made eye contact with the audience and it was great to watch them look back at us in horror.
It was particularly interesting because of who was in the seats. With student rush tickets, Sweeney attracted a much younger audience, adolescents and young adults in their late teens and early twenties. One night after a performance I called Steve on my way home to Connecticut. “The theatre is alive,” I told him. “There are kids in the house.” The show became known as the “slasher musical,” and they came back, again and again, with their friends in tow.
One of the many rituals that came about with this show happened before I even took the stage. My dressing room was on the second floor of the theatre, facing West Forty-ninth Street. Each night I was transformed into an East End grunge barkeep—or Goth cupcake, as I liked to call myself—with a tight little black skirt, corset, and a severe black hairdo. The traffic on Forty-ninth Street is westbound, and every night the Waterways bus slowed down because of traffic as I was getting dressed. I guess I could have drawn my blinds, but I kind of enjoyed being the nightly entertainment for a busload of suburban commuters en route to catch their ferry to Jersey.
Even without the busloads, it was one of my favorite dressing rooms. All kinds of Broadway types passed through there—cops, playwrights, composers, ghosts, and even private investigators. It was a Damon Runyon–esque dressing room. Steve Sondheim would often join me. Sometimes he left for dinner after the show went up; sometimes he saw all or part of the show with friends. To me, this was New York theatre—Steve backstage in my dressing room, with a glass of wine, some raw almonds, reading the New York Times. I had two rooms, an outer room and a private room, but the door was always open between them. Sometimes we’d shout back and forth to each other. He once asked my dresser, Pat White, if I sang through “The Worst Pies in London” every night before the show. Pat told him yes, I did. That’s what I had to do to “speak with distinction,” not be “flannel mouth,” and prove my critics wrong. Even with a Cockney accent, the audience needed to understand every lyric in Steve’s brilliant score.
Steve gave me great insight into the character of Mrs. Lovett. He explained that she’s the real villain of the piece because she’s a pragmatist. She has all the facts: Lucy, Benjamin Barker’s wife, is deranged but alive, and Johanna, their daughter, is living down the road as the ward of the dreaded Judge Turpin. Sweeney knows none of this and dear Mrs. Lovett does not tell him. Sweeney has one sole purpose, to kill the judge. Mrs. Lovett’s sole purpose is to hold on to her love. It’s a masterpiece of tragic proportions.
When the Tony nominations were announced in May, we received several nods, including Michael, Mano, and me. It was the second time I was predicted to win in every newspaper across the country. Win hands down. Can’t possibly lose. (You see where this is going.) The night arrived again. I sat and waited. None of the actors won. I saw the writing on the wall when Pajama Game won Best Revival. No, I saw the writing on the wall when I clocked where they had seated the Sweeney nominees. It was a flashing instinct. It was an accurate instinct. The show did win two Tonys: John Doyle for Best Direction of a Musical, and Sarah Travis for musical arrangements. Both were richly deserved. For me, it was hard not to be disappointed again, but I did get some great consolation notes.
Sadly, our audiences began to taper off. When that happens, it’s the beginning of the end in my mind. Sometimes hit shows fall apart when the closing notice is looming. Not this show or these hardworking, very talented actors. Sweeney stayed tight and it worked every night.
The show also gave me memories and moments I’ve only had a few times in the theatre. They are rare moments when you lose yourself and you transcend the reality of being onstage. The person playing opposite you has become real, not a character. It sounds so cliché, but there are moments where you’re so lost in the setting that you stop acting and you’re living. It’s a heightened reality, an amazing, almost out-of-body experience. It’s why I’m onstage.
The moment in Sweeney happened mainly when Mano Felciano was singing “Not While I’m Around” to me. It was i
n that moment and in that entire scene that I was transported to the London slum we were living in—for real. It was transcendent.
In the late summer, I was slated to take a three-week hiatus from Sweeney Todd to play Mama Rose for the first time in Gypsy at Ravinia. This was to be the last show in Welz Kauffman’s five-year Sondheim celebration. The Sweeney audiences were already diminishing and I knew we were coming to the end of the run. I was not surprised to learn just before opening in Ravinia that Sweeney would be closing in early September. After Gypsy I returned to the Eugene O’Neill for a handful of performances and to close Sweeney Todd on September 3.
We ran 384 performances. Experienced actors who have been through many closings simply say their farewells, but when you’re younger, there are always tears, and for the performers making their Broadway debuts, this was a tough farewell.
Closing night was especially sad, because this experience had been so good and so intense for all of us. On most closing nights the audience is made up of family, friends, and fans who have seen the show several times. On this occasion fans in both the orchestra seats and the mezzanine bombarded us with roses. By the end of the curtain call, the stage was covered with flowers. Steve was in the tenth row, on his feet cheering like everyone else.