Groban is having a moment, and Sondheim revival is next
NEW YORK
Josh Groban says one of his adolescent dreams was to be middle-aged. No, really. “I couldn’t wait to be 40,” he recalls. “I was an 18-year-old kid who couldn’t wait to have that gravitas. Because my voice was big but I was not. And I loved the roles that were bigger, darker. More aged.”
That does help explain why he was in such a rush back then, leaving theater school at Carnegie Mellon University in his freshman year to embark on a recording and concert career, one that shot him out of the gates like an oddson favorite at Churchill Downs. With a sumptuous baritone, a yen for show tunes and standards, and a nerdy handsomeness that many a mother could love, he amassed all of the tokens of singing star success: Grammy and Tony nods, multiplatinum albums, sold-out world tours.
The fame and money came a lot faster than did 40. But that finally happened, too – on Feb. 27, 2021, to be exact. Having successfully conquered that chronological goal, the now 41-year-old Groban has been looking for other hurdles befitting a person with a zeal for midlife advancement. Offbeat movie roles. A guest slot in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Freestyle Love Supreme.” And that capstone affirmation of artistic maturity: a lead in a Sondheim musical.
And not just any lead, but one of the most coveted in the canon of the late Stephen Sondheim: Sweeney Todd. On Jan. 12, Groban will start rehearsals alongside Annaleigh Ashford (as the redoubtable Mrs. Lovett) in the third Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” since the 1979 original that starred Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. The director is Thomas Kail, who shepherded to Broadway the most influential hit of the past two decades, Miranda’s “Hamilton.”
Groban is materializing in parts both whimsical and tailor-made these days: as a waiter in
“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” on Roku; as the Beast opposite H.E.R. in “Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration” on
ABC. “Sweeney Todd,” with a score by Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, is a far bigger deal. It ticks off a lot of boxes for a guy whose more serious ambitions have been fixed toward bigger and darker.
“I’ve thought about it,” Groban says, “ever since I was a camper at Interlochen.” (That’s the highly regarded training center for the arts in Michigan he attended in the 1990s – and where he lost out one summer on playing Sweeney.) “You know, I’m not one of those people who just wants to shoehorn something in just because it’s something I love. So it had to be right.”
In the coming months, audiences at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where “Sweeney” is set to begin performances on March 26, will judge whether Groban is right for it. The voice being a match for the music is a given. But can this preternaturally genial fellow plausibly play the serial revenge killer of this blood-soaked musical? In the past, Sweeney’s been the Broadway property of brooding types such as Cariou and Michael Cerveris, the latter starring in a 2005 revival opposite Patti LuPone, and of course, Johnny Depp in the 2007 film version.
Groban is a performer with a sunnier stage temperament; he’s a pleaser who slips easily into lighthearted assignments, as, for instance, co-host of the Tony Awards (with Sara Bareilles in 2018), or headliner of his own variety show, as he did in April in “Josh Groban’s Great Big Radio City Show” before 6,000 people at Radio City Music Hall.
On the question of whether Groban can satisfactorily deliver a Sweeney with gravitas, though, Kail has no doubts. “When
Josh plays Sweeney, it’s an exploration of a Sweeney who had a light and how that light gets extinguished,” the director says on the phone from Romania, where he’s shooting a series about a family convulsed by the Holocaust, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” for Hulu. “How his