Video: Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford & Company of SWEENEY TODD Celebrate Opening Night

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World

Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical masterpiece, Sweeney Todd, is back. Under the direction of Thomas Cale, it welcomes back to Broadway

Josh Grobin and Annalie Ashford, and we're here on opening night to celebrate with the company

Welcome home to Broadway. How does it feel? Oh, my goodness. You know, when I took my final bow at Great Comet, I was just, I was so, I missed it already

And, you know, it's been an incredible, well, with the exception of two very traumatic years for everybody, you know, it's been a wonderful time away to make music and do all kinds of other things

But every minute of that time, Broadway was pulling at me and was making me feel like it was a place I needed to come back to

And it's not every day you have an opportunity to do something that's like this, that's a masterwork of this caliber

And so I feel very just humbled and honored to have this opportunity this year. What's made this so special for you with working on Sweeney

You know, it's such a gift to be back into the words and heart of Sondheim

So it's been a gift to revisit his puzzles every night. And also, I think this show is a special show for everybody connected to the theater

And so it feels like a piece of nostalgia for everybody's heart

And I'm just happy that we got to breathe life into it and make it grow again

What's made this so special of doing this? this show doing Sondheim and sharing the stage with Anna Lee

With Anna Lee, who is just such an extraordinary partner out there

She gives so much on stage and off the stage. She just been such a tremendous force to be able to play off of and to be able to work with every day as well as just being an extraordinary person But this you know this is a show that I think I speak for everybody in this cast that we have loved for the entirety of our lives both before and after we became professional actors

And so we want to do right by it. We want to honor Sondheim in a way that he'd be proud

And we all just feel an enormous swelling of gratitude that we get to bring this show to audiences old and new

that we love so much. And when we come out of stage door every night and we see people who have seen

seen it 50 times and we see people say we didn't know that there was going to be this thing

that happened to this thing and this is our first time. It just, it makes it, it makes it so

special. So we're excited to invite people here every night. Sharing the stage with Josh, what is that like

Josh is the sweetest man in show business and man does he sing pretty and act real good

So we're having a ball. He's been such a rock and so strong and steadfast

And it's just been a treasure spending this time with him. It is opening night, my friend. How do you feel

I feel ready. I feel excited. And just, I can't believe that this moment's here

This company is so fantastic. And it's just time to let it loose

So I'm really looking forward to this. Doing Sweeney Todd on Broadway, playing Toby, Steven Sondheim

I mean, this is like we were all brought up on this stuff. Like, you're doing it. Oh, we're doing it

I think, we thought about the idea of, like, when I was super young

my mom was always like, you'd be so good as Toby. And I was so, I was so, I was like, that's my mom being

my mom and I remember like being when I was doing La Miz down the street

We were jazzed about that but we never really thought that it would have an opportunity

to be back on Broadway for a very long time considering there was a wonderful production in 2006

and it had so many wonderful spots in the city ever since Barrow Street was brilliant the off production And we have Barrow Street people here And it was such a gorgeous take

And once we heard that we were doing it bigger than ever, it was just like..

And just getting the audition initially was just all I could have ever dreamed of

And that was all I wanted was to just get in the room. And so the fact that it's come to this is just brilliant

When I was 12 years old and I sat down and I saw Sweeney Todd for the first time, I said, I had no clue that theater could do this to me

It can make me feel all of these things. It's thrilling. It's thrilling from top to bottom

You go on a whole emotional roller coaster and are challenged with the question of how far would you go, right

And I think that as a performer, as an artist, we sit down and we think about that often

Like, how far would we be willing to go to achieve this thing in our art and our work and our career and our lives, whatever that is

And this is a cautionary tale. And to be able to return home to my feelings. favorite place to work on a show by, pardon me if I tear up

who by Stephen Sondheim, my favorite composer, creative ever in existence. The day that he passed, I looked at my wife and with tears my eyes, I said

I want my next show on Broadway to be a Sondheim piece since my friend, like, yeah

I can't believe that it's happening, truly. What's made it so special for you

The people in this cast and the creative team, everyone is just so gracious and so loving

and we have truly become a family. What's been so special, well, I know the show very well

and I've done the show before, and so to be reintroduced to this show with new actors

and just like the personal spirits of every single person and how lovely everyone is it tells the story differently And I think that exactly the kind of story I came to tell and we doing it together The fact that I familiar with the material I think it gives me an opportunity to get further and further

into the details and the extraordinary depth in Sondheim's music and Wheeler's book. It's just so..

There's so much in it, I think, because that's the thing. I think what's really made it so special for me

is that I'm in the cast with my brother Jonathan and it's the first time we've done a show together since we were little kids

so it really feels like summer camp the whole time. Well, made so special, we've had the craziest audiences

Today, in many ways, just feels like a celebration of the work we've done

because we see the reaction that they're giving, and it's lovely to have that response and to have that confidence

and I'm just so proud of this cast. Okay, this is the first time the original Jonathan Tunic orchestrations

have been heard since the original Broadway production. What is it like? that every night

It is a thrill. You know, I don't often get to conduct Broadway shows, so to be able to do something as grand

as this, as operatic, where you really have to breathe with the actors, right

You have to bend a little bit because perhaps they said that line differently, or you have

to pause a little bit longer because the audience reaction is just so. I enjoy that dance

It's like jazz in a way, so I really have been having a great time. I mean, I think what I've been so struck by as I stand in the back of the house, is

it the show is getting people who have seen Sweeney 10 times? People have never seen it, people have heard about it, people who maybe saw the movie

So we're getting this incredible mix of folks who are watching the show for the first time together

So even if you know it, I think that you sort of slip into this, wait, that happens, what that happens, what that happens

And this cast is just everybody firing in all cylinders, you know, from left to right, all of them