Note: This story was written by UGA alumna Charlotte Headrick and originally appeared in Georgia Magazine in shorter form. Headrick is a professor of theatre at Oregon State University and a director with a special interest in Irish studies. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association.

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There’s a DAWG on Broadway! UGA alumnus John Doyle directs Sweeney Todd

 “. . . when it comes to atmosphere, invention and a total commitment, this ‘Sweeney Todd’ packs a knockout punch.”
– Daily Telegraph

“John Doyle . . .quite simply (is) the best thing to have happened to the British stage musical in the 15 years since Cameron MacIntosh, Trevor Nunn and John Caird first went to work on ‘Les Miserables’ . . .”
– International Herald Tribune

“I feel as if I am still standing next to the Coke machine in the Fine Arts Building at UGA.”
– John Doyle to Charlotte Headrick, Liverpool, 1991

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On November 3, 2005, John Doyle opened his version, with the approval and support of Stephen Sondheim, of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. First developed at the tiny Watermill Theatre in Newbury, touring the United Kingdom, then transferring to the Trafalgar Studio Theatre ultimately transferring to the Ambassadors’ Theatre in the West End, John Doyle’s innovative treatment of Sweeney Todd with a total cast of nine actor/musicians was simply brilliant and typical of the small-cast, actor-musician musicals for which he is known. On Broadway, New York theatre legend Patti Lupone (she plays the tuba) plays the pie-making Mrs. Lovett and Tony Award-winner Michael Cerveris plays revenge-driven Sweeney (acoustic guitar); the cast has been increased from nine to ten.

John Doyle is no stranger to the United States. In 1973-1974, he was the junior visiting artist at the University of Georgia on a Rotary exchange. Jack Kesler recalls that late UGA theatre professor and chair “Leighton Ballew began the Rotary Program. It was designed to bring an international student to UGA for a year's study to a MFA. . . . There was one every year. The program was underwritten by the local Rotary International Club.”

John was a full participant in the activities of the drama program at UGA. He took classes, acted on the main stage in Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors and formed long-time friendships with his fellow students and teachers. Although John and I were not close at UGA (I was a Ph.D. student and expected to live in the library), he and I had a mutual friend in fellow student Michael O’Brien. It was through Michael that we kept up with each other over the years and it was Michael who helped to arrange my sabbatical in Liverpool with John in 1991 when John was the artistic director of the Everyman Theatre. Having camped in his upstairs guestroom for three months in Liverpool, John and I became fast friends. It was in the rehearsal hall at the Everyman that I saw John come in day after day and take properties and costumes away from the actors, encouraging them to tell the story of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle with the absolute minimum of stage paraphernalia. It was also the UGA connection which led me to invite Doyle to the Oregon State University campus to conduct workshops, lectures, and to direct on his second visit The Journey to the Cross, composed of the Easter section of the York Cycle Plays. That production was performed on the OSU campus and at the First Presbyterian Church in Corvallis.

While he was the artistic director of the Theatre Royal York, John made international news in 1996 when he directed the York Mystery Cycle and cast a woman in the role of God. By the time it was over, John had won over even the Archbishop of York with his brilliant staging of the plays.

In 2000 and 2001, John won acclaim for his re-workings of Carmen and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, both originating at the Watermill Playhouse. Gondoliers transferred to the West End in 2001 to great acclaim. Not only is John internationally known for his casting of actor-musicians thereby making it possible for small professional companies to produce musical theatre, but he is also known for his “reduced” Shakespeare, paring down Shakespeare to be done with a minimum of actors. Along with his long list of Shakespeare credits in the United Kingdom, because of his UGA connections, he has also directed three Shakespeare plays at Western Kentucky University. John’s friendship with costume designer Jackson Kesler (formerly on the faculty of UGA and in charge of the Period Dance Company, 1973-1976) and his wife, Betty, led Kesler to arrange for John to teach voice and direct three Shakespeare plays over a three-year period at Western Kentucky University. It was on the occasion of John’s first visit that Kesler organized a mini-drama reunion of former UGA students: Deborah Bleckley Dickey and her husband, Jerry, Maureen Conway, Michael O’Brien, and myself. The Dickeys are on the theatre faculty at the University of Arizona, and I am on the theatre faculty of Oregon State University. In 1997, Doyle made his first visit to Oregon State conducting workshops, speaking all over campus and working with actors during the University Theatre’s first all-Shakespeare season (1997-98). One result from that visit was meeting Ray Lischner, (a cast member of Titus Andronicus), with whom he collaborated to write the highly successful Shakespeare for Dummies.

It was in Liverpool in 1992 that John came up with his innovative way to stage musicals. Adam Green in the September 2005 Vanity Fair describes the process: “His budget for a production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide was large enough to pay for a cast or an orchestra but not both. So Doyle came up with a novel solution – hire actors who can play instruments – and, in the process, stumbled on a fresh approach to musical theater. Since then, his intimate reinterpretations of such well-know works as Pal Joey, Cabaret, and Fiddler on the Roof, performed by small casts of actor-musicians, have won high critical praise.” John is the winner of numerous awards for his staging of musicals outside of London and was nominated for the Best Director Award in London for his staging of Sweeney Todd in 2004; the production also won a 2006 Drama League Award for Best Revival of a Musical.

Despite his Irish surname (as he says, his “grandmother was a Fraser”), John hails from Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland, where he is very quick to tell you, they speak the most perfect English. A graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow he has been the artistic director of the Swan Theatre-Worcester, the Everyman-Cheltenham, the Everyman-Liverpool, and the Theatre Royal-York. He is now an associate director of the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. In the summer of 2005, he staged Jerry Hermann’s Mack and Mabel at the Watermill. Like Sondheim, Hermann was also impressed with Doyle’s staging and Mack and Mabel is now on tour.

In London in the summer of 2004, I was with John Doyle as we madly dashed to the opening night, along with lighting designer Richard Jones, of his Pinafore Swing, a reworking of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore set on a transport ship during WW II with swing music at the Watermill. The very next night he opened Sweeney Todd at the Trafalgar. He and music director Sarah Travis job-shared. While John was with one show, Sarah was with the other. It was a dizzyingly wonderful twenty-eight hours. Sondheim liked Doyle’s Sweeney Todd so much that he was instrumental in bringing Doyle over to direct it for New York audiences. On Broadway, as at the Watermill, John has directed and designed the production. He brought with him the artistic team from the original production; Travis is music director and Richard Jones is the lighting designer.

John learned many lessons during his year at UGA and continues the friendships he made there. While I was working on my doctorate at UGA, the theatre program brought in not only international students on Rotary scholarships, but they also brought in international and nationally known guest artists. One of these was the respected director John Reich, one of the famed Max Reinhardt’s last directing students; John studied with him while Reich was on the faculty at UGA during the 1973-1974 academic year. On the wall of John’s office in Hastings, England, is a plaque given to him by fellow student Michael O’Brien. Burned into the wood is a quotation that Reich drilled into his students: “The sole purpose of an artist is to increase the treasure of light in the universe.” John Doyle, with his brilliant directing and teaching, continues to do just that, following the lessons he learned at the University of Georgia.

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