A Conversation with Erin Rose Doyle

on Sweeney Todd, Parade, and The Hills of California

It’s a pleasure to welcome Erin Rose Doyle to The Sondheim Hub. Already a veteran of two Broadway productions — playing Mary Phagan in Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Parade before joining Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California — Erin has most recently taken on the role of Johanna in Sweeney Todd. Today, Erin discusses her journey from Broadway to training, her approach to finding psychological depth in characters often dismissed as ingénues, and what drew her back to Sondheim’s darkest masterpiece. Our conversation begins below:

📸: Andrew Alstat Photography

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It’s so good to meet you. Let’s start with Sweeney Todd. Is it a show you’ve known ever since you first started falling in love with theatre, or did you come to it more recently?

Of course! In 2019, a theater near me was doing the show. I was in the ensemble, understudying Johanna. I actually had to leave that production because I was cast in something else, but that’s when I was first introduced to Sweeney Todd. I mean, how can you listen to “God, That’s Good” and not become obsessed with the entire show? I loved the music — especially any of Lovett’s numbers, actually. They are just so fun to sing. There are so many little earworms that get stuck in my head when I’m cleaning.

And then, when I was in Parade, Sweeney was running at the same time. Gaten [Matarazzo] was at City Center with me, and then he went to Sweeney and I went to Parade for the transfer. We would get out before them, so I would leave the theater, stop at Sweeney’s stage door, say hi to all my friends, and then go home. I became really good friends with Jordan Fisher as well, and those two guys became my rocks during the Broadway run. Both of them had done it before, so I was able to talk to them and ask for advice. But that revival really ignited something in me about Sweeney, and I re-fell in love with it.

Then all of a sudden, last semester, I got word that my school was putting it on this current semester — directed by the incredible L Morgan Lee, Tony nominee — and I was lucky enough to get cast as Johanna.

Most people train and then might one day make it to Broadway. For you, it’s the other way around. I’d love to know a little more about that journey, and why the musical theater program at Pace spoke to you post-Broadway.

I was cast in Parade on Broadway when I was a senior in high school. I actually never saw myself going to college in New York City — I’m from Houston, Texas, so I never really saw myself moving to New York ever. During the audition process it became very important to me to find a musical theater BFA program that also allowed me to continue my career. A lot of programs are very strict: you can’t audition for outside shows, you have to finish in four years, or else you can never come back.

What stuck out to me about Pace’s program is that so many Broadway kids have gone there and still been able to work. They have a wonderful program called the Learning Experience Program — you get one semester where, if you book something, you can go online and do your math, your science, your whatever. Then you’re able to work in the city. That was so important to me, and I was lucky enough to do that when I was cast in The Hills of California.

It’s been so cool to go the opposite way: Broadway to school instead of school to Broadway. I was able to learn from the greats. My first show was with Ben Platt, Micaela Diamond, Howard McGillin, and all of these Broadway icons I’ve always looked up to. And the real-world experience before coming to school has made me appreciate the education process even more.

Also, industry people work here. Tony nominee L Morgan Lee is my professor. Shonica [Gooden] is one of our dance teachers and she was in Hamilton for ten years. That’s something so special about Pace: you have all these professors saying, “In the real world, this will happen” — and you can trust their knowledge because they are in the real world. It’s people being like, “Yeah, when I was in A Strange Loop, this happened, so you have to do this in order to prepare.”

Zooming back in to Sweeney, how did you feel about Johanna as you prepared to play her?

I was so determined to make her a four-dimensional character. Johanna can be so easily written off as the love interest: she’s there, she sings pretty, she has a couple of ditties, and that’s all she has. I was so determined not to have her be two-dimensional, because there are so many layers to her that, if you’re just looking at her on the surface, you don’t notice.

I had a lot of conversations with L Morgan Lee about this. She had such a cool vision: that we were all spirits trapped in this cycle of telling this story, in hopes that one day the cycle will be broken by Sweeney realizing that the Beggar Woman is Lucy before killing her. Having that vision already in my mind, I was so excited to play around with Johanna. I realized that so many people have her be just this naive girl who then goes crazy in the asylum. My take on her was: she’s not necessarily naive — she’s 16, but the only thing she knows is the stuff that Judge Turpin allows her to know. She is confined to one room her entire life. She’s already crazy. She does not magically turn crazy in the asylum.

So my vision for Johanna was that the asylum is the first time in her life that she feels sane. Because she’s surrounded by people whose minds work like hers — everyone is crazy around her, so she’s finally heard. It’s like the birds are singing back to her. “Green Finch” is all about her wanting the birds to sing back to her — she’s singing at them, help me sing, let me sing. And finally, in the asylum, she’s surrounded by the lunatics who are singing.

Thinking about your voice type and potential future casting, do you feel a responsibility to advocate for characters like Johanna? Because we can all think of other characters like her, perhaps dismissed as ingenues but who actually have a great deal going on beneath the surface. Are you conscious of that as you think about repertoire and auditions going forward?

Oh my goodness, yes. That’s why I love Into the Woods so much. Characters like Cinderella and the Baker’s Wife are given an arc that in other shows they wouldn’t have been given. People hear “soprano” and write them off as, oh, they sing pretty, they’ll wear a pretty dress, I’m sure there will be a kiss or two, and then they get to bow.

As much as it’s so nice to have a princess track, it is frustrating, and honestly a little misogynistic, that the second we hear a high voice, we can be like, oh, they probably have nothing else to them except being a love interest — when there’s so much more depth. That’s why I love specifically Cinderella and the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods, because yeah, they sing pretty and they have some of the best songs in the show, but my god, they have trauma.

It’s a bit like when someone sings a belty song and they just add a bunch of riffs. Yeah, it sounds great, it sounds cool, but you need to justify them. It can’t just be five million notes on every word. It needs to be justified through emotion, or through movement, or something. One of my favorite things to do right now is to take soprano-y songs and soprano-y characters, and figure out what’s going on in their brain.

So I do feel a sort of responsibility — and it’s also fun. It’s so fun to take a character that’s usually two-dimensional and give her this crazy arc, so that people are like, I never used to pay attention to that character, but now I love her. When I saw Sweeney Todd for the first time, I didn’t care about Johanna. I was more worried about this poor Toby kid. He’s going through it! He needs therapy! But then the second I got my hands on the score and the script, I was like, oh my god, this poor girl is suffering.

I really hope I get to do that more in the future, because sopranos are written off and they need to not be. Those songs are hard — but I want the juiciness. I want: why are they hitting a high C? Is there a reason?

When you think back to Parade now, do you have any sense of a through-line between Johanna and Mary Phagan?

With Mary Phagan, obviously I had to do so much research. I thought it was very important to play her as her family saw her, because I know that a lot of people took her story and used it for the worst. The Knights of Mary Phagan, who then turned into the KKK a few years later, took it and ran with it that way. I just wanted her to be this light. Because she’s talked about in such a sad, dark way throughout the entire show, I wanted the second you saw that purple dress to feel like you could breathe. Even in the darkest part of the show, I wanted the audience to be like, okay, we’re good.

📸: Joan Marcus

She’s not in the show a lot, but she is talked about on every single page of that script. It was so important to me to justify both her absence and her presence, because Michael Arden had me present in a few extra places. I was present in the courtroom at the end of Act 1, and that was so special as an actor. I heard from a few audience members that seeing Mary Phagan watching over what her death had resulted in added so many more layers.

Mary Phagan was only 13, and it was a long time ago. But being able to give her even the slightest bit of an arc was really important to me, so she’s not written off as “the 13-year-old that died.” She’s one of the most important 13-year-olds in history. You have to think back to when you were 13: how did you move? How did you talk? How did you see the world? And the same is true with Johanna: how was I when I was 16? How did I move? How did I see the world? How did I react to adults?

I had flashbacks of researching Mary Phagan while I was researching Johanna. Jordan Fisher was so sweet when I told him I got the part. He gave me The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia and said, “Use it.” As I was going through it, I had flashbacks of scrolling the internet at 2:00 a.m., finding Mary Phagan’s autopsy report and little bits of information. I am a research girly — I think it’s the psychology minor in me. I just have to know everything.

Both of your Broadway shows involved the creators being in the room with you — Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry on Parade, and then Jez Butterworth on The Hills of California. How important was that creative collaboration for you?

I was so blessed to be in rooms where the shows were still, in a way, being workshopped. Yes, Parade was a revival, but Alfred Uhry, when he came and saw our run, went up to Michael and JRB afterwards and was like, “Here’s a new scene.” People think of revivals and assume it’s just going to be a new vision of an old show, but Alfred was still wanting to make it better and more heart-wrenching. It was so cool. And at City Center, Jason came in one day with two pages added to “That’s What He Said.”

With The Hills of California, we started rehearsals and I got the script — but I had bought it beforehand, because I couldn’t wait, and Act 3 was completely different. I found out that after the West End production closed, Jez and the four sisters got together and rewrote Act 3, which is just insane to me. It made it even more heartbreaking.

I love Jez Butterworth. He is one of the sweetest souls ever. Every time he was at a rehearsal there was just this light in the room — and he’d come back with so many notes. During previews, some jokes would not land, and then we’d get an email: here’s the new script. I think we had six or seven or eight different scripts throughout previews.

It made me so excited about the collaboration of this industry. A lot of times it can feel very scary — if I don’t do exactly what the director wants, they’re going to hate me and I’ll never get cast again. When in reality, if the actor’s not comfortable, the director doesn’t want that either. It was so eye-opening to realize that’s what the industry really is — not this looming, scary thing where you never see the director and never see the writer. No, we were all in the same room, all in conversation with each other. We all have each other’s numbers still. I was just so blessed to be in such a collaborative space on my Broadway debut.

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