An oral history of Mrs. Lovett, one of theater’s greatest, bloodiest roles

Sure, it’s Sweeney’s name in the title. But talk to any actor who has played his lovesick accomplice, and they’ll eventually bring up the same point: Mrs. Lovett’s underhanded actions lead to most of the show’s slit throats and tickled ribs. Now that Sutton Foster has settled in for the final weeks of the third Broadway revival, we assembled eight members of the Lovett lineage to discuss what exactly makes this idiosyncratic character sing.

• Julia McKenzie: The English actor played the part with vibrant vibrato and a delightfully batty edge in a 1993 revival at London’s National Theatre.
• Christine Baranski: The “Gilded Age” and “Good Fight” star traded her polished persona for a playfully brassy interpretation in 1999 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and 2002 at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
• Patti LuPone: After starring in concert performances in 2000 at the New York Philharmonic and 2001 at the San Francisco Symphony, the three-time Tony winner played the tuba while headlining the intimate and edgy 2005 Broadway revival.
• Helena Bonham Carter: The “Fight Club,” “King’s Speech” and Harry Potter actor played to the medium with a more restrained take on the character in the 2007 film adaptation directed by her then-partner, Tim Burton.
• Lea Salonga: The “Miss Saigon” star and beloved Disney singer lent the role a mischievous streak during 2019 runs at the Theatre at Solaire in Manila and the Sands Theatre in Singapore.
• Bryonha Marie: Playing up her character’s malevolence, the Broadway veteran starred in last year’s production at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va.
• Annaleigh Ashford: The “Sunday in the Park With George” alum leaned on lust with a gleefully handsy turn to kick off the current scaled-up Broadway revival.
• Sutton Foster: The “Younger” star and two-time Tony winner took over for Ashford and will stay through the show’s May 5 closing.

(Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

Moving into Fleet Street

Lansbury, the stage and screen icon who died in 2022 at age 96, initially balked at playing second fiddle to Len Cariou’s Sweeney and, according to theater legend, told Sondheim, “Your show is not called ‘Nellie Lovett.’” But the composer played some of his score for Lansbury and convinced her of the character’s potential. Subsequently, Sondheim often anointed or approved the actors playing Mrs. Lovett.

LuPone: I saw the original and I was gobsmacked. I remember crying for several reasons — the brilliance of it, the fear of it, the sadness of it. But after seeing Angela, I just didn’t imagine that anybody would ever consider me for that role. I remember when my agent called and said that I was being offered Nellie Lovett, and I went, “Does Steve [Sondheim] know?” Because I thought he hated me. He had given his blessing, but I still don’t understand how I came to mind.

McKenzie: I wanted to play that part more than anything in the world, and I was so grateful that Steve asked me to do it. It’s one of the great parts for women in musical theater, no doubt.

Inspiration aplenty

In a 1981 interview, Lansbury said she intentionally brought her famously bubbly onstage persona to the conniving baker: “I think that is something that I have imbued her with way over and above what was on the printed page.”

Ashford: I met Angela Lansbury three times, and I cried every time. I felt really connected to her because she was a true character actress, and that is what I have always dreamed of being and strive to be. She played women who are dimensional and dynamic, and have been hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

Salonga: I listened to Patti LuPone, I listened to Imelda Staunton, and, of course, I listened to Angela Lansbury. There were so many ways to attack it, and none of them was wrong.

Bonham Carter: I’ve been a fan of the show since I was 14, when I first saw it with Sheila Hancock and Denis Quilley in London. I played and played and played the score, and I learned a lot of the songs. I just had never heard anything quite so exciting.

Marie: I had never seen a Black Mrs. Lovett, and I said, “I really want to bring my culture to it.” Being a Black woman is lots of things, but one thing about myself is I am not afraid to step and stand in my own power. I’m not afraid to be — and this is a terrible word — sassy. Ultimately, sassy is just someone who’s able to know their worth and to speak on it. I wanted to bring that to Mrs. Lovett. It was important to me for her to be African American. I didn’t want to model her after older White ladies who I had watched and admired.

LuPone: I saw Julia McKenzie play the role in London and I saw Angie on Broadway. Julia did something in “Not While I’m Around” and Angie did something [in “The Worst Pies in London”], and Steve tried to get me to do both of those things. I have said over and over again that you can’t get an actor to imitate another actor. They have to find it organically. So I would not do either of those things because they weren’t in my interpretation.

Foster: It was the musical at Carnegie Mellon when I was a freshman, and I’d never heard of “Sweeney Todd.” I auditioned for it, but they needed really high sopranos and I couldn’t sing it, so I ended up working in the costume shop and became obsessed with the story. I also had the biggest crush on the guy who played [Sweeney’s friend] Anthony — he would enter from the aisle, and I would get an aisle seat just so he would walk past me. It was ridiculous.

‘The Worst Pies in London’

Audiences are introduced to Mrs. Lovett with the sardonic tongue twister “The Worst Pies in London.” As Sweeney stumbles into her struggling pie shop, she rambles about her plight while violently pounding dough and squashing insects. Giving Sweeney a bite, she defeatedly sings: “Is that just disgusting?/ You have to concede it/ It’s nothing but crusting/ Here drink this, you’ll need it/ The worst pies in London.”

Baranski: That song, I can say — and I’m sure any singing actress who has attempted it would agree — is a freakin’ bitch.

Foster: “The Worst Pies in London” is like being shot out of a cannon. I always say, “We’re still not friends. We’re getting closer to being friends.” For me, it’s the hardest moment in the show. There’s so much that she’s doing, there’s so much that she’s saying, there’s so much that she’s establishing. It’s delightful, terrifying, and I’m still in constant discovery with it.

LuPone: The first time I did it at the New York Phil, I left my body. I don’t know how I got through it. I was so scared, so nervous. But it’s so much fun. It’s so clever. It’s Steve at his best writing.

Ashford: It’s laid out for you beautifully on the page, so every lyric tells you what to do next physically. For that reason, I practiced it every single day. I would go in by myself and I would actually watch in front of the mirror sometimes to see what I looked like. I was constantly working on it, even till my last show.

Salonga: There are a whole lot of built-in reversals and crazy shifts. And I don’t mean vocal, but rather where she goes emotionally. It’s like this woman is the multitasking queen.

Baranski: I worked so hard to get the musical intervals right. It’s not easy musically. It’s not easy lyrically. Lyrics matter with Steve Sondheim, and all of the physical business has to be syncopated with your lyrics. It’s wonderfully challenging, and once you master it, there’s a reason it brings down the house. It almost feels like the rest of the show is easy.

Bonham Carter: It’s a completely different story filming than doing it onstage. You have the safety net of a second take, but having said that, you’ve got other demands. You have to make a pie and sing, and you’ve got to do it exactly the same [each take] for continuity. Plus, we prerecorded it before we staged it, so you’re committing yourself to choices before actually getting onto the physical set. It’s a bit of a head f---, to be honest.

A meaty role

Sweeney arrives at Mrs. Lovett’s shop fresh out of prison, having been sent away for 15 years by the corrupt Judge Turpin on a bogus charge. By recognizing Sweeney as the barber who once lived above her shop, relaying the news of his wife’s apparent suicide and putting a razor in his hand, Mrs. Lovett sets in motion events that will end with a pile of bodies — and a gruesome answer to her pie shop’s meat shortage.

Baranski: She has a tremendous life force. Of course, she’s a scavenger. There’s a book I read for research called “London Labour and the London Poor,” which is about the underclass in Victorian England. If you read about it, you know it was a grisly life — almost, at times, bestial. So there was an animalistic quality to her.

McKenzie: I think you have to, first of all, make a big choice as to whether you think she’s just thoroughly evil or whether you think she was coping with those terrible Victorian times when everyone was just fighting to live, really.

Salonga: Given the time period in which she is existing, it’s like, “Of course she would figure out a way to off people and make money off of that.” It’s not even, “But how can you kill people?” It’s simple — you’re desperate and you need money and you’ll do anything. How does she justify murder? Well, prosperity is at the other side of it. It makes her frightening.

Bonham Carter: I remember meeting Sondheim, who is a god and was a god to me, and I had this idea that maybe Mrs. Lovett was a bit of a prostitute at the beginning because she had really hit hard times. He was horrified. He said, “That’s not a bad idea — it’s a false idea.” I then got really pissed off with him [laughs]. But he ended up being my ally, which was just so great. That was probably one of the riskiest parts I’ve played, and the most demanding and the most scary and most fulfilling.

Marie: My Mrs. Lovett is a little bit edgy, and she’s really dangerous. Angela Lansbury is incredible — I think she’s cute as a button, though. I wasn’t super scared of her. I was much more scared of Sweeney in that production. But when we really looked at the text, it seemed that Mrs. Lovett was the one behind all the ideas. So I really ran with that.

LuPone: She’s a manipulator, and she’s the villain of the piece.

‘A Little Priest’

Mrs. Lovett sees opportunity in Sweeney’s nihilism. As she plants the idea of murdering the barber’s customers and grinding their corpses into meat, the duo launch into the song “A Little Priest” and giddily cycle through the different flavors for their menu. For example: “It’s fop/ Finest in the shop/ And we have some shepherd’s pie peppered/ With actual shepherd on top.”

Foster: The song really is about these two people trying to top each other with their wit. I feel like that’s really when Mrs. Lovett becomes unhinged or unleashed.

LuPone: The two characters are having so much fun. Is this the first time we see Sweeney laugh? He’s just declared that he will have vengeance. And then it’s “A Little Priest”! It’s macabre and wicked and wickedly funny.

Ashford: “A Little Priest” was like being inside a puzzle that is Stephen Sondheim and his lyrics every night. All of those jokes and rhymes getting to play out in a song is so unusual.

Baranski: It’s got to be the showstopping first-act number of all time. The audience is practically, literally eating out of the palm of your hand with all of those witty lyrics.

Bonham Carter: We filmed “A Little Priest” the day I discovered I was pregnant, and I was in real morning sickness. There’s a sort of waltz at the end and Tim, who was in fact the father of the little embryo inside me, put me on a spinning machine and I just thought, “I’m going to throw up at any point.” My daughter is called Nellie Burton, so she can thank Mrs. Lovett for her first name.

Having a laugh

Although the unabashedly amoral Mrs. Lovett generates most of the comedy in “Sweeney Todd,” there are varying opinions on how broadly an actor should play her sillier scenes.

Baranski: You can get endless laughs in the first act as Mrs. Lovett. I mean, it’s almost comedic gold. But I was careful not to lean too much into her comedic side because you have to earn the final act of “Sweeney,” which turns really dark and tragic. You have to be invested enough in the seriousness of the piece to be genuinely horrified and stunned and shaken by the violence. So be careful.

Salonga: With a lot of Sondheim musicals, if he intends for something to be funny, it will be written funny. There’s very little that any actor really needs to try and push because it’s already there.

Bonham Carter: In front of an audience, you probably end up being much broader because you play up to them, but Tim is not into broad comedy. Everything has to be held back. Sometimes it was irritating because I wanted to be bigger. It is innately funny, but we didn’t play it for laughs.

Ashford: If comedy is good, it’s honest. So I had to make sure that Mrs. Lovett really was grounded in honesty, even though her physicality was sort of wild and zany.

Marie: I love “Sweeney Todd,” but it’s long and it’s arduous. To me, any time you can flip it and give absolute top comedy or silly takes, as long as they are rooted in the real thing that’s happening onstage in the text, I think it’s all fair game.

‘By the Sea’

The Act II number “By the Sea” arrives when Sweeney is serenely slitting throats, the pie shop is thriving and the couple is enjoying newfound prosperity. Cozying up with her sociopathic sweetheart, Mrs. Lovett imagines living out their days at a cottage on the coast.

Foster: It’s that classic moment in storytelling where everything’s great. Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney, they’re making money. They’re planning their retirement. It’s the last reprieve before it all goes to s---. God bless Aaron Tveit because he’s such a trouper as I just basically molest him with my feet and my body during that song.

Marie: Sondheim gives you so much room to just be silly and have an imagination. It’s like an actor’s playground.

Ashford: I used to say it’s her “I want” song, but it’s late in Act II. It’s a masterpiece, and I just was delighted to share my dreams as the character every night with my love — Sweeney, who didn’t really love me back — and the audience. I really saw that house by the sea every night. It’s always been a love story to me, first and foremost.

McKenzie: At the top of the music, [Sondheim] has written “in one breath.” If I can quote you: “By the sea, Mr. Todd, that’s the life I covet/ By the sea, Mr. Todd, oh, I know you’d love it/ You and me, Mr. T, we could be alone/ In a house what we’d almost own” — first breath — “Down by the sea.” I thought, “Why the hell did he do that?” Well, if she took a breath, Sweeney Todd would say, “No, I’m not going.” But she doesn’t stop — she pushes and pushes and pushes on.

Baranski: Steve actually paid me such a high compliment because he said, “I never thought of that song as a showstopper.” It is Mrs. Lovett at her happiest and silliest when she goes, “The seagulls squawking, hoo-hoo!” But being a woman in that grisly Victorian era, she would hardly have a notion of romantic bliss with this man who clearly almost has a demonic energy. It’s a longing that they could be together and that she could have domestic respectability.

LuPone: It’s so sweet, as if it’s going to happen for them. As if. “Bring along your chopper,” the seagulls — what was Steve thinking when he wrote it? Where was he when he wrote it? You have to be just in awe of his imagination.

Salonga: The most challenging part of doing “By the Sea” for me was figuring out that seagull. What does a seagull actually sound like? For this, I did not refer to anybody. I didn’t listen to Patti. I didn’t listen to Angela. I went onto YouTube to find seagull sounds. That’s it. It was basically channeling those seagulls in “Finding Nemo.”

Nellie’s undoing

Of course, there is no peaceful retirement for Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett. She’s been undermining him all along, hiding the truth that his wife is still alive, roaming London as a crazed beggar woman. Although Sweeney dispatches of Judge Turpin, he also kills the beggar woman in his haste — only to belatedly recognize her as his wife. With Mrs. Lovett’s deception exposed, Sweeney coldly burns her alive in the bakehouse oven. The pie shop’s traumatized young apprentice, Tobias, then cuts the bereft barber’s throat.

LuPone: She lies right at the top of the show. She doesn’t tell him, “There’s your wife.” She’s going to hold on to him. She says, “I always had a fondness for you, Mr. Todd,” and she manipulates the whole thing. She creates this event for him to, in fact, get his revenge. That’s her downfall.

Salonga: Her crimes caught up with her, and her greed — not just for Sweeney but her greed for money. And her absence of a moral backbone.

Bonham Carter: There’s a lack of a moral compass, but it’s in the name of love. She was doing everything to win his heart.

Foster: I feel sorry for her. She’s so f---ing desperate for attention and love that the idea of self-love just doesn’t exist for her. Maybe that’s her fatal flaw: She’s unable to love herself. Oh, that makes me sad.

Ashford: I’ve always been interested in exploring this woman’s need for survival and how it unfortunately played out by her cooking people into pies. She’s one of the best characters ever written. It’s so Shakespearean. It’s so broad. It’s so wild. It’s so grounded in reality in the way that all of us just want to be loved and find security. You know, I find her to be less Lady M and more Puck.

Baranski: That role takes you everywhere from almost-vaudeville comedy to grand opera. But the last act, it’s tragic. So it’s true comedy-tragedy.