Josh Groban Tony Watch Q&A: How Broadway’s Great Comet Landed On ‘Sweeney Todd’

deadline.com:

Even longtime fans of singer Josh Groban could be forgiven some degree of surprise upon seeing the multiple-Grammy nominee in his 2016 Broadway debut Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, so impressive was his Tony-nominated performance in that splendid, eccentric musical.

And those that saw his turn as that production’s bookish, melancholic Russian aristocrat Pierre might just as easily be forgiven still further surprise upon seeing Groban in his latest Broadway endeavor as the mad title character of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. “I always said that Great Comet was the greatest challenge I’ve had in my career,” Groban told Deadline during a recent conversation after Sweeney had brought him his second Tony Award nomination, “but this role has definitely topped that.” Even after I urge him to put aside any false modesty to describe how it feels to have landed in the upper reaches of the Broadway leading man heap, the amiable Groban brings it back to the material: “I have really been two for two in terms of the just brilliant works that I have been so lucky to give to the audiences.” Groban is new enough to the Broadway game that he’s capable of coming to the stage from a place that’s somewhere near the polar opposite of blasé.

This is a man who has sold more than 35 million albums worldwide and spent decades headlining great venues the world over, yet delights in the stagedoor devotees who giddily ask about his decade-old cameo on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

Josh Groban takes it all in. Deadline spoke to Groban in the weeks after his Tony nomination for Best Leading Actor/Musical.