A Conversation with John Rapson

Broadway's Beadle Bamford

John Rapson has played Beadle Bamford more times than any other actor in the role’s history, It was such a pleasure to sit down with John to talk about the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, the acclaimed Barrow Street production, conversations with Sondheim, horror films, the Beadle’s falsetto, and more. Our conversation begins below:

It’s so good to meet you. We’re speaking more than a year since Sweeney Todd closed on Broadway. I’d love to know how you reflect on that production now, a year on.

I actually just started listening to the album again, around the time we hit the year mark. It’s hard to put into words the love that I feel reflecting back on it. It’s the professional highlight of my life so far. To have been involved with my favorite musical—perhaps pretentiously, I call it my favorite piece of modern art, because that really is to me what it is—and to have done it in a production that I loved so much, with a cast that I love so much, was really special. I truly have nothing but gratitude for it—as well as happy tears, and huge belly laughs.

Working on a show like Sweeney, which obviously is very buoyant but has some real darkness underlying it, I think one of two things can happen. I think you can really play into the darkness, and it can be a hard place to go to work—or you can do what our cast did, and just have the most joyous time. It was really a beautiful experience in every way.

You played Beadle Bamford for the entire run, with a number of principals changing around you. Do those cast changes help to keep your experience of the show fresh each night?

Yeah, absolutely. It was really exciting. And it’s not like the energy of the show was diverted in any one way. It’s just that the changes became this really exciting thing of figuring out what the new energy of certain scenes would be, and what the new energy of songs would be.

My really great moment with one of the two leads in the show is “Parlor Songs” in Act II. I got to do it with four exquisite Mrs. Lovetts over the course of the run. To have seen what they all brought to it, and to have done that exquisite dance with each person—it was always exciting. On the first day I rehearsed with Sutton [Foster], it was thrilling to be like, “What is she going to bring to this?” Which, of course, was incredible. And originating it with Annaleigh [Ashford], who is a comic titan—to have gotten to develop that with somebody who is so caring of where beats and jokes land—it was a really amazing thing.