On a round table in her dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Annaleigh Ashford is always busy with a 1000-piece puzzle. The current one reveals a picture of a cat. Fellow “Sweeney Todd” cast members fit into pieces as they come and go throughout the night, bringing cohesion out of the chaos and creating a whole out of many parts. It’s, Ashford said, “our little tribute to Steve,” in reference to Stephen Sondheim, the musical’s composer and a puzzle and game enthusiast.
On a recent Monday, her only day off, Ashford had come to the Uncommons, a board game cafe in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, to find a new puzzle. She would put it together while talking about playing Mrs. Lovett in the musical, a pie-maker with a creepy approach to fillings. She arrived in a short-sleeved, high-necked white jumper studded with outsized ladybugs, and her affect was as wholesome, earnest, and embracingly eccentric as her style. If she had worn a flower in her blond hair, I would have expected that flower to spray.
The Uncommons only had a few puzzles to offer: an image from the game Exploding Kittens, a riff on “A Christmas Carol.” Then she saw another, an 800-piece rectangle titled “Theatre District.”
“Oh,” she said, “we must.”
A Tony winner for a delirious turn in the 2014 revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” and a 2013 nominee for a brash performance in “Kinky Boots”, Ashford, 37, knows her way around the theater district for a while. An actress of vulnerability and spunk, with a voice built for the back row of the balcony, she often finds herself between shows on a Saturday praying for the other actors on Broadway.
“Like, have a good show everybody,” she said. “God protect everyone as they go on their journey today.”
No other journey has demanded as much from her as “Sweeney Todd,” a macabre illustration of a terrible story about a murderous barber and his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, who reuses his victims as her key ingredients. Ashford’s dizzying parts, her wounded parts, the mother, the lover, the clown – these are all ingrained in her Mrs. Lovett, a performance that earned her a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.
“Everything goes,” Thomas Kail, who directed this revival, said of its star.
That’s what Mrs. Lovett deserves. “She’s one of the great characters of the American musical theater canon, one of the greatest roles ever written,” Ashford said. She found a missing piece of the “Theater District” puzzle, snapped it into place, and sat back contentedly. “How could you ever not love her?”
Ashford, who grew up in Denver, seems to have come out of the womb with her baby fingers doing jazz hands. She was a child of athletes and had little physical strength. So her mother instead enrolled her in singing and acting and dancing, which she embarked on with unusual seriousness.
“Even as a little person, it wasn’t just about being seen, it was about telling the story,” she said.
After graduating from high school at age 16, she enrolled at Marymount Manhattan College – the only New York school that would hire her. (She knew she wanted to be a New Yorker ever since she saw the R-rated movie “All That Jazz” at age 8.) After graduating from her Bachelor of Fine Arts at age 19, she released the next going from audition to audition for three years, but couldn’t land a single callback. Eventually, she landed a role in an early version of “Next to Normal”, as well as a spot on a “Wicked” tour. Then Jerry Mitchell, the Broadway director and choreographer, mistook her for “Legally Blonde.” She auditioned for the role of Margot, the dizziest of the sorority sisters, a woman who has deep conversations with a chihuahua.
“She was the only person who really made me laugh,” Mitchell recalled more than 15 years later. “Because I really believed she was talking to the dog.”
Mitchell had been concerned about her limitations as a dancer. But he found that over time she could master every step he threw at her. Every note too. Most importantly, her instinct for comedy turned out to be passionate and flawless.
Other roles came along, including several variations of the dumb blonde: Glinda in “Wicked”; Essie in “You Can’t Take It With You,” her Tony-winning role; Sylvia in ‘Sylvia’, in which she played a blonde dog. Television has often cast her this way as well. Most recently, as Gina, a kidney donor, in Chuck Lorre’s sitcom ‘B Positive’. Lorre described her method in an email message as “a perfect blend of mastery and joy.”
Ashford always struggled, she said, “with playing girls who weren’t the brightest rock in the box.” She now plays a somewhat wider range of characters – savvy blondes, guileless brunettes – and she struggles less. “Maybe I’m not in a box of rocks anymore,” she said cheerfully.
Of course, her intelligence has never been doubted. “Annaleigh is brilliant,” said Michael Greif, who cast her as Maureen in the post-Broadway run of “Rent.” “Part of the genius is how savvy and sharp and original that mind is.” So original that she asked if she could wear udders during Maureen’s performance art number “Over the Moon.” (Greif said no.)
Tense with that spirit is a clarity of purpose tinged with a belief in the divine that can seem like a kind of innocence. Sarah Paulson, who worked with her on “Impeachment: American Crime Story” and filmed a movie with her last summer, described that clarity as something that gave Ashford a certain buoyancy.
“She can seem like she’s kind of dancing in the ether,” Paulson said. But Ashford also has a seriousness to her, which Paulson described as “a fierce self-control, this unassailable confidence that’s wild to me.”
Ashford was first introduced to Sondheim as a child through cassette tape. She can still remember hearing “Sweeney Todd” in elementary school and thinking it was so creepy and wild. With the exception of a benefit reading of “Assassins,” her first professional experience with Sondheim was in 2016, when she played Dot, the artist’s model, in “Sunday in the Park With George.” Sondheim often attended rehearsals and answered all questions.
“He gave the best nuts,” she said. “They did everything they could to make sure the audience heard and understood the story.”
So when the call came about Ms. Lovett, a role another of her heroes, Angela Lansbury, had originated, she answered. Eager to work with Sondheim again, she moved her family back from Los Angeles. (She is married to the actor Joe Tapper, and they have a young son.) She had many questions about the part, but she didn’t want to bother the composer. She would wait for the first reading, she decided. Sondheim died in late 2021, just days before that lecture. It went on without him.
“We had to show up and do the job,” she said. “He would have wanted it, he would have loved that.”
Without Sondheim to advise her, she turned to the music, the lyrics and her colleagues.
Gradually she found a Mrs. Lovett who was younger than the usual iteration and needier. She wants Josh Groban’s Sweeney not only as a protector and butcher, but also, and eagerly, as a lover and husband. (“We always say I climb on him like a tree,” Ashford said.)
Groban marveled at the creativity and seriousness with which she could make jokes. He remembered watching her put together the song “The Worst Pies in London,” experimenting with the rolling pin, the flour, the ball of unruly dough.
“There’s so much to play with, there’s so much to react to,” said Groban. “There’s so much she gives and gives and gives.”
Ashfords Lovett isn’t just a clown. Or rather, her clowning comes from a place of real pain. Ashford can even pinpoint that fear in a manic silly song like “The Worst Pies in London.” But in the line ‘Times is hard, sir’ she lets the wound show through under the lyrics.
“He gives you these little clues,” Ashford said of Sondheim. “Because it’s a puzzle.”
For the answers to other clues, she has often imagined conversations with Sondheim. “I’m asking for help solving the puzzles for tonight,” she said, the puzzles of how to unlock a character’s motivation, how to make a joke. “Usually we find an answer. Or at least a version of the answer.”
After an hour and a half with the Uncommons, the “Theater District” boundary was almost complete. A few pieces were missing. It didn’t matter. Because Ashford has already solved the more important puzzle: how to take all the wounds and sparkles and joys and pour them into this part.
“I need to be an artist,” she said, tossing the pieces back into the box. “There’s nothing else I could ever do. Thank God it worked out.”