A Conversation with Allison Sheppard

Today we welcome Allison Sheppard to The Sondheim Hub, fresh from her Johanna debut in Jason Alexander’s production of Sweeney Todd at La Mirada Theatre. In our conversation, we discussed her deep and nuanced understanding of Johanna’s inner life, her fight for agency and survival, and the production’s haunting asylum framing device. Our conversation begins below:

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It’s so good to be speaking with Johanna so fresh in your mind. What was your relationship like with Sweeney Todd before the La Mirada production was on the horizon for you?

Sweeney Todd has actually been my dream show since I was in 6th or 7th grade. I’m a die-hard Sondheim fan. I’m a very math-science-brained person, and I love puzzles, so I always really gravitated towards his work. I think all of his shows are spectacular, but Sweeney was a huge favorite of mine. And Johanna, in particular, was always at the very top of my bucket list of roles. It’s a part that I’d practised in my room a million times. And then this production came along, and I couldn’t have dreamed of a cooler thing to be a part of, truly.

The theater announced that Sweeney was going to be part of their seasons in August of every year, and immediately I was like, I’ll be there with bells on, with everyone and their mother, at this audition. It was also announced that Jason Alexander would be directing it, and he is a staple of my childhood and adolescence. Seinfeld was such a huge show in my house, and Brandy’s Cinderella with Whitney Houston — he was peppered throughout my entire adolescence. So the chance to work with him was a dream.

It was interesting, though, because I had done two and a half years with Jagged Little Pill on the road, which is very much not Johanna — very belty, pop-alto world. My heart has always been with soprano, classical work, and the earliest parts of my career were very much based in that, but I had taken a huge detour into the more pop-contemporary world. So I was nervous about the audition, because the casting team knew me more as a belter. I didn’t know if they would even consider me for it.

We had five rounds of auditions and callbacks. I filmed my first tape at the beginning of August, the show was cast in November, and rehearsals started in January. It was wild.

What was your overall impression of Johanna going in? Particularly, as you say, having been in such a different vocal space beforehand, what was your sense of her as a character?

To me, Johanna is a huge symbol for women of that time period. There’s a major commentary on a woman’s role in society during this era, and what value is placed on women. Because you never really get the whole story from Johanna’s point of view — you get it from Sweeney’s. He has this entire backstory of Johanna being taken from him as a baby, but then there’s a huge chunk of time you don’t see. We don’t see her with the Judge as a child, we don’t know for sure how she was raised, and then we see her in this state of captivity.

So, in my mind, the interesting layers to play with are these: the Judge didn’t necessarily set out, when he saw her as a baby, to hold her captive. He wasn’t lusting after the baby. When he gets this child in his care, in my eyes, he’s parading her around the streets as this beautiful little specimen that completes the image he wants for his life: this upstanding family man with this smart, beautiful little daughter.

And I imagine her as having had all the best tutors. Other than the Judge, she’s probably the most educated person in their entire town, because she’s had access to knowledge. She might not be street smart or understand the ways of the world, but what she has are books. So there’s a level of intelligence to her, and you can hear it in “Green Finch” — in the differentiation between each bird. I did a four-page analysis on the different birds she mentions throughout “Green Finch,” what their lifestyles are like, where they live, how they flock, when they call out, when they sing and when they don’t, and why that ties into who she is. For her to be drawing from all of those different references, it comes from a place of a deep understanding of the world.

So, I imagined that growing up, Johanna had been treated as this little princess, this wonderful gift being paraded around, and she’s seen the world — and then, as men started to view her differently, the Judge’s walls went up to protect her, so that no one else could have what he has. In that isolation, it gives her an added layer of, what have I done wrong? What is now wrong with me, with my body, with who I am, that I don’t deserve to be out there anymore? I think she’s so deeply trying to do right by the Judge and say the right thing and follow his orders, because it comes from a place of: well, maybe if I’m being the right kind of daughter, maybe then I can walk the streets again and find some semblance of freedom.

And how about her and Anthony?

Yes… The age-old question of does she actually love him, or is it the idea of him? The Judge talks about how many men come to the door and stare at Johanna. There are lines about him having to shoo people off. But Anthony is the first person — and Jason made this moment so beautiful, he really highlighted it — who really sees her at the end of “Green Finch.” He sees her interaction with the birds, and he decides to buy her a bird. He’s so gentle with her.

That’s why the whole beginning of “Johanna” is marked piano, because he’s so gentle with this bird, and he’s not coming at her from a place of greed. He does talk about her beauty, but it’s not in such an intense way — it’s, I see you. I feel you. I’m bringing you something that you clearly want more than anything. There’s a level of gentleness she has not experienced from any man in her life, because her whole life has been in service of the image of the men around her. And this is the first man who walks up and says, this matters to you.

In our production, for the Act Two “Johanna” sequence, I was in a straitjacket on stage. The passage of time was shown through Johanna’s character and how the asylum changes her, because she’s in the asylum for nine months. When you’re watching the show, it’s sometimes hard to understand that passage of time, especially because normally Johanna is seen in a window again, or it’s done as a shadow play like in the original. But I was in a full-on straitjacket, twenty feet in the air, losing my mind.

I was reading in your Johanna article where someone said Johanna feels most at home in the asylum — which is such a fascinating take. I do think that, in a way, she finds power in the asylum. My take is a slightly darker one: I think it’s because, at this point, she literally has nothing left to lose. What else could people do to her? Fogg even says that he had to torture her the most, because she never stopped singing. Singing is an act of protest. It’s her way of fighting her circumstance. The whole point of what he’s trying to do is to beat the fight out of her — and she only starts to take her power back when she kills Fogg.

But then we segue into the scene in the barbershop, and this was one of my favorite things we did with the Anthony-Johanna journey in our production. She has just escaped nine months in an asylum, just killed someone, and is out on the streets she has been wanting to reach for so long. But she is not well. She is fundamentally broken. The Judge could be anywhere, and everyone works for the Judge, so there is no safety. She gets into this barbershop, which also isn’t safe, and then there’s this man who, yes, she knows vaguely, who says, “Great, you’re going to stay here.” And once again, she’s being caged. Once again, there is a man dictating how she is supposed to live her life. And she’s thinking, no, no…

I gave Johanna a nervous tick: her fingertips became her birds. She would have conversations with her birds. So the birds came back in that scene in the barbershop when he was singing.

Something Jason did that was really cool was, instead of having the policemen come in at the very end to see Toby and the destruction, it was Anthony and Johanna who ran down the stairs and through the door and found everyone. So in that final moment, I got to stand over the Judge’s body and see him dead for the first time. And that was the first moment in the entire show where I felt, I actually am free. There is finally no one who can hurt me.

So when everyone was feeling all the emotions of that ending, and Anthony is distraught for obvious reasons, and Toby is losing his mind at the meat grinder, I was in probably my greatest moment of joy in the entire show. Tears were streaming down my face, but it was the biggest spark of hope Johanna had had the whole show.

For readers who might not be familiar with Jason Alexander’s concept for this production, could you talk a little about what made it distinctive and how it informed your performance?

The whole show took place in Fogg’s Asylum. This was actually pitched in the original breakdown, and it’s why I was so excited about this production — I knew it would be a darker, more introspective, film noir-esque approach, which played into everything I love about the show. I thought, this could be a place where my Johanna can live.

Basically, the inmates of the asylum were putting on the story of Sweeney Todd. Everyone was an inmate. In the ten minutes before the show started, we were all on stage as our inmate personas, just improvising, doing some immersive work. Then Mrs. Lovett, played brilliantly by Lesli Margherita, was the nurse, and Beadle Bamford was the security guard of the asylum. When the steam whistle blew, we all scattered to our starting positions, and the nurse brought out this older gentleman who walked out and sat up high. You never saw his face — he was basically our master of ceremonies, and we all had very different reactions to him.

During “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” they changed up the solo lines, so Mrs. Lovett as the nurse actually started our show. She walked around with different costume pieces attached to different characters, casting the show as it went. We were doing the show for the man — the Overseer, his name was — in the chair above. The inmates transformed, and once we became our characters, as principals we stayed as our characters. And the ensemble would go back and forth between Londoners and inmates depending on what was happening.

Our inmate personas were just as deeply and fully realized as our Sweeney Todd tracks. Everyone had something that would cause them to get chosen for their role. For anyone who knew the show, it was always a very fun thing for them to sit and figure out, oh, because of that, I think that inmate is going to play that character.

All of our props and set pieces had to be things you would actually find in an asylum. So our meat pies weren’t actually meat pies — we had little burlap sacks tied up. Everything was appropriate to that world. The Sweeney killing chair was a very old-fashioned wheelchair. There was a platform, and for all the deaths they would roll out this giant coal bin, like they were going to be taken to the incinerator. It was a three-level set, and there were all these cubbies that would close with sheer curtains, so no one ever left the stage. We were all just living in our different cubes and cubbies. And as soon as you stepped out into the playing space, you would transform into your character.

You don’t find out who the Overseer is until the very end, after everything has happened. Spoiler alert: when Sweeney normally does his “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” we had a little movie magic moment where Will Swenson, who was our Sweeney, was in the chair as the Overseer, with a stitched-up slit neck. And Mrs. Lovett, as the nurse, was there beside him. At the very end, they both put their arms out, crossed them, fell backwards, and died. So: the Overseer in Jason’s vision was Sweeney. Sweeney hadn’t actually fully died — they had committed him to Fogg’s Asylum. And in the years since, he’s been trying to figure out where he went wrong. He uses the inmates to retell the story so that he can figure that out.

Other people believed — and this also makes a lot of sense — that Sweeney did die and was sent to hell, and that his version of purgatory was being committed to Fogg’s Asylum, forced to watch everything that happened again and again and again. That wasn’t the original concept, but it’s such an interesting reading.

Jason is one of the greatest directors I’ve ever worked with. He was so thoughtful, he had such a clear vision, but he also really trusted everyone in that space to show up and do the work. It was such a collaborative process.

Jason and Sondheim worked together multiple times and were very close friends, so Jason said, “This is my love letter to Steve.” He wanted every single thing Sondheim had written for this show to be there. So we added back in Johanna’s time in the trunk, when the Beggar Woman comes in and sings her lullaby. And the thing that’s so important about that is, if you track the music of Sweeney Todd, all of the songs from the present are reflections of songs we hear from the past. Everything Mrs. Lovett sings is a callback to something else, which is great commentary on her as a character: she’s trying to be someone she isn’t.

So to hear that lullaby at the end, and to hear that it’s the melody of “Poor Thing” as well as different bits of the Beggar Woman’s music — to hear that Mrs. Lovett chose to tell the story of Lucy’s rape and breakdown to the lullaby that Lucy used to sing to her daughter — it adds such a fascinating layer to Lovett and her choices throughout the whole journey. That has to be a melody she knew would appeal to Sweeney, because it’s something the woman he loved sang to his child. Adding it back in was so meaningful. Jason just really wanted to honor the material completely. He wanted it to be something Sondheim would have been proud of. I hope it was.

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