Sweeney Todd: Last News

The 2023 Tribeca Festival has announced its lineup of world premieres of new and returning television, including the world premieres of Steven Soderbergh’s Max series Full Circle about a botched kidnapping that reveals long-held secrets in present-day New York City, Prime Video’s Sweeney Todd-inspired The Horror of Dolores Roach and BET+’s Diarra From Detroit, a dark comedy executive produced by Kenya Barris that centers on a divorcing school teacher.

Patti LuPone says that she requested a role in the second season of Schmigadoon!, but was rejected for being “too old.”

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (★★★★★). The big question looming over the head of every theater geek when the cast was announced: Is Josh Groban menacing enough to play Sweeney?It was a fair query. Sweeney Todd is about a British man wrongly punished for a crime he didn’t commit.

Jordan Fisher opened up about being diagnosed with an eating disorder while his wife was pregnant.

Carla Renata A veteran of stage and screen, Tony winner Jane Krakowski returns to “Schmigadoon!” In the second season of Apple TV+’s musical series, Krakowski plays Bobbie, a trial lawyer who sings and dances while roller-skating blindfolded, holding sparklers in her hands and doing splits and flipping around on a trapeze bar. “We tried to pick things I mostly already knew how to do, except trapeze. So, I was allowed to go to trapeze school for like a week and grab five lessons before we filmed,” Krakowski told Variety on the red carpet at Thursday’s FYC event in Los Angeles.

Emmerdale's Charity Dingle didn't quite get the new hair she was hoping for in Thursday evening's episode of the ITV soap, with a trip to the local salon turning out to be disastrous. Charity has been getting ready for her upcoming wedding to Mackenzie Boyd and headed to Mandy Dingle's salon for a hair makeover ahead of her big day. However, Mandy got distracted by some drama between Paddy Kirk and Chas Dingle, which saw her leave Charity's rollers in for too long and use the incorrect hair products.

Broadway showed signs of a spring blossoming last week, with box office receipts and ticket prices taking their traditional climb during the tourist-bumped week leading up to Easter. In all, the 33 productions grossed $38,594,054, a 12% increase over the previous week.

With two weeks left in its 35-year Broadway run, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera posted a huge box office gross last week of $3,247,106, nearly 10% of Broadway’s total take for the seven-day period ending April 2.

Broadway’s The Phantom of the Opera had yet another smashing, down-to-the-wire week at the Majestic, grossing more than $3 million for the second consecutive week as the countdown to its April 16 closing continues.

The Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd is officially open!

In a Broadway season that might be remembered for a lovely, pared-down minimalism – the intriguing starkness of A Doll’s House with Jessica Chastain, the less-is-more near-concert-style presentations of Into the Woods and Parade – director Thomas Kail’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will stand out for, among many other attributes, its full-on, unabashed ambition. A prodigious theatrical event that aims for greatness and achieves it, this revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler masterpiece is not to be missed.

Stephen Sondheim’s horror-musical in which throats are gruesomely slashed and cannibalism is positively hilarious. 2 hours and 45 minutes with one intermission. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W.

Naveen Kumar The cannibalist startup in “Sweeney Todd” kills two birds: For Sweeney, the ruined barber who holds a grudge as steadily as he does a blade, it means turning enemies into actual mincemeat. For Mrs. Lovett, who laments that alley cats were too quick and meager to carve up anyway — well, it’s a living, innit love?  Slitting throats and baking bodies into pies is a wild and wicked business. But in the stately and star-filled revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s macabre 1979 musical that opened on Broadway Sunday night, the people-to-pastries pipeline quickly assumes a grim air of mundanity.  For its stars Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, this lushly orchestrated and opera-scale production, from “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail, proves a magnificent showcase for their respective, jaw-dropping talents. Groban’s weighted-blanket baritone makes the prospect of reclining in his company and never waking up again seem like a great way to go. And Ashford’s fleet, agile instinct for comedy, which earned her a Tony Award for “You Can’t Take It With You,” is like a dippy bird for dopamine. But only one of them is a genuine thrill.

Jenelle Riley Deputy Awards and Features Editor Pictured: Casting directors Katja Zarolinski and Geoff Josselson of JZ Casting. This article first appeared as part of Jenelle Riley’s Acting Up newsletter – to subscribe for early content and weekly updates on all things acting, visit the Acting Up signup page. Casting director Geoff Josselson just checked off a major bucket list item. When he was asked what show he dreamed of casting, he would say “Into the Woods.” And just last year, working with Telsey Casting, Josselson was part of the team that assembled the heralded Broadway revival starring Sara Bareilles, Brian D’Arcy James and Joshua Henry. Josselson is on a bit of a Stephen Sondheim spree — with Telsey he also helped cast the new production of “Sweeney Todd,” starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. And he and his partner at JZ Casting, Katja Zarolinski, just collaborated for the first time with the Pasadena Playhouse to cast “A Little Night Music,” playing at the theater April 25-May 1. 

Audra McDonaldAudra McDonald is one of Broadway’s brightest stars — and one who is only a single award away from completing her EGOT.With six Tony Awards to her name, she has more performance wins than any other actor and has also won in all four acting categories.In addition, she has already won two Grammy Awards, for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Album, and an Emmy for her performance in Sweeney Todd (Live from Lincoln Center) in 2015. However, the only award missing from her impressive collection is an Oscar, which may prove elusive given her limited involvement in movies. Bette MidlerBette Midler, the renowned singer, actress, and comedian, has been tantalizingly close to achieving EGOT status for some time now.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Stephen Sondheim’s final musical “Here We Are” is hitting the stage in the fall. The legendary musical theater figure, who composed “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd” and countless other Broadway classics, died in 2021 at the age of 91. The musical, formerly known as “Square One,” was in the works prior to his death and took inspiration from two Luis Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” Joe Mantello, whose credits include Sondheim’s “Assassins,” as well as “Wicked” and “Take Me Out,” is directing “Here We Are.” The strictly limited engagement will begin September 2023 in The Shed’s Griffin Theater, an Off-Broadway venue near Manhattan’s Hudson Yards neighborhood. Casting will be announced soon.

A raft of Broadway’s recent arrivals led by Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street helped push the industry’s total box office last week to $28,638,821, up 13.8% from the previous week. Total attendance was up commensurately to 229,771.

The revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne, is firmly in Broadway’s $1 million club, with receipts for the week ending March 5 at a bloody good $1,526,254. And that’s just for six performances.

Some recent Broadway arrivals added both star power and box office receipts to the weekly grosses reports, with both Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Parade selling out (the latter despite some loudmouthed neo-Nazi protesters), and A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella coming close.

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is back on the Great White Way for the first time since 2005.This time around, the story of a murderous barber will call the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre home when previews begin on Sunday, Feb. 26.The cast also features a murderer’s row of theater heavyweights including Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford, Jordan Fisher, Ruthie Ann Miles and “Stranger Things'” star Gaten Matarazzo.Not sold?For the first time since 1980, Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning score will be performed as it was in the original production.Plus, “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail is helming this iteration of the classic.And while ticket prices are rather high for the first few weeks after the crowd-pleasing musical opens, we’re happy to report that they’re a bit cheaper if you buy seats to see victims turned into meat pies far in advance.In fact, we found some tickets going for as low as $66 before fees on Vivid Seats for a matinee in May.All prices were found at the time of publication and are subject to fluctuation.Once ‘Sweeney Todd’ leaves Fleet Street and lands on 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the show will adopt a fairly typical schedule.Audiences can catch “Sweeney Todd” five nights a week from Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.

Tim Burton has reportedly been dating Italian actress Monica Bellucci in secret for "four months".The innovative film director, 64, who was in a relationship with Harry Potter star Helena Bonham Carter for 13 years, first met Monica, 58, 16 years ago. Having got back in touch last year, the pair are said to have secretly started seeing each other in October, as reports emerged of the new romance this month. It's also believed that the duo made things official around the time Monica presented Tim with the Lumière lifetime award on stage at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, France.The festival was being held from Saturday 15 to Sunday 23 October 2022.