Jordan Fisher Sings in Full Color

Jordan Fisher has racked up a devoted fanbase stepping into some of the hottest modern Broadway musicals around—in recent years, he joined the second Hamilton cast and became the first Black actor to portray the title role in Dear Evan Hansen. His charm has also translated to the screen, a skill honed through several Disney Channel and Nickelodeon series early in his career, and perfected in arguably the two best televised musicals: Rent: Live and Grease Live!, where he turned the otherwise forgettable "Those Magic Changes" into a doo-wop standout.

He's now facing a grander, much darker challenge starring in the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's murderous musical about a vengeful barber and the down-and-out baker who cook up a profitable solution to her lack of meat and his surplus of corpses. The production is momentous because it stars an impossibly deluxe cast, including the ubiquitous Josh Groban and Tony winners Annaleigh Ashford and Ruthie Ann Miles, as well as restores Jonathan Tunick's terrifying, ear-piercing original orchestrations with a 28-person orchestra for the first time since 1979.

For Fisher, the experience also marks a more personal milestone: The 29-year-old actor is experiencing Broadway stardom as a new father. His son, Riley, was born less than a year before the revival's opening. "It's a brand new realm of things to learn how to juggle, but thankfully he's a sleeper," Fisher jokes over the phone, less than twelve hours after taking his latest bows for the sung-through, nearly-three-hour musical. "My whole career, I've done multiple things at the same time, so that's kind of par for the course for me, but this is completely different. I think the way that you approach the work, how you communicate with people and navigate through the world, just shifts."

Playing Anthony—a lovestruck sailor pining after Sweeney's daughter Johanna, who has been imprisoned by the sinister Judge Turpin—would already activate any actor's protective side, but Fisher says fatherhood has deepened his approach to his character's motivations. "When you have a kid," he explains, "anything that you're doing, anything that goes through life, or that you see happening to another individual, it's hard to not imagine your own kid. The sense of protection that Anthony feels over Johanna isn't a fatherly one but I'm coming from a place of, 'Holy shit, I want to do everything I can to protect my kids from absolutely everything in the world.'"

It's been one revelation after another for Fisher, who gets goosebumps thinking of the nuanced dexterity of Sondheim's lyrics. "I get to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and discover something new in the show every single day—to the point where I'm like, 'Am I actually a professional? How did I miss this? How did I miss that?'" he laughs. "But that's all of us, we've all stewed in this material for so much of our lives that to be able to go and discover new shit every night is such a special thing."

Sondheim's score is one of his richest, a sweeping, cinematic work that would fare just as well in a concert hall, or at a haunted house. Tunick's original orchestrations are rarely recreated because of their costly demands, and Fisher, knowing not to waste his golden opportunity, spends most of his time offstage in the orchestra pit. "They keep a chair for me over by the strings because I'm down there all the time; those are my homies," he says. "I'm a musician, you know? They're my people. I love music so deeply." To call the opportunity golden, though, echoes another reason this chance is special for the actor, who experiences synesthesia, a rare neurological phenomenon which some people experience as processing sound through color and shape: "It depends song to song but, man, there's a kaleidoscope of color and story which also makes me wonder if Tunick or Sondheim have any version of synesthesia as well."

Fisher's wife Ellie, a painting enthusiast, has encouraged him to paint a series based on his experience in the show. The two childhood sweethearts, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, recently departed their longtime home of Los Angeles for more familiar shores, moving to a small beach town along the Florida Panhandle. "I was in L.A. for fifteen years—nose to the grinder, audition after audition, movie after movie," he recounts. "When the pandemic happened, a lot of people decided that L.A. wasn't home for them, and there was a Friday night when we looked at each other and realized that we didn't have one person to call to hang out. It was a very sobering moment. Everyone's lives had shifted and we realized we didn't need to be there anymore. You got to be wherever you want to be."

After their move, the couple developed a small painting studio in their garage, which has deepened their appreciation for the different ways they can engage with art. "She brought up the synesthesia idea a while ago, and I think I better give it a shot to try to take people on that journey with me," he says. "There’s discovery in art if you submit to it and allow it to happen. It's what makes my job so much more than just pretending to be another person for two-and-a-half hours; it's trying to express to people an authenticity beyond the math that two plus two equals four. You watch Annaleigh do her thing, it's a masterclass of just this: Talk about levity, talk about character discoveries but, at the end of the day, regardless how funny she is, she's still heartbreaking."

Despite the Sweeney cast's star power, its individual members might not initially jell together in the imagination. Groban's a take-home-to-mother vocalist; Ashford, an old-school musical comedian; Miles, a more traditional Broadway powerhouse; and Fisher, despite his classical training, is best known for modern pop musicals. But Broadway's latest sailor thinks the casting is pitch perfect, partly because of its disparateness. He points to the honesty in Ashford's approach to character, emphasizing that, as soon as he heard she was involved, he knew the show would be in good shape. "And Josh brings a touch of reality that everyone can see themselves in. I've never seen a Sweeney with as much predetermined damage before. When he comes in, you can tell that he's damaged, and truly has put all of his trust and energy into this idea that maybe life actually won't be that bad," Fisher adds. "But, at the end of the day, how far will he go? I think that's the question posed to everyone: How far will you go to achieve the things you want to achieve, regardless of if it's actually going to make you feel better or not? If it's for revenge, or protection, or love—how far will you go to accomplish that thing?"

For Fisher, it's that soul-stirring investigation that ties the cast together—as well as the audience who, based on the nightly roar of ovations, is all in. "It's been that way for pretty much every show," he says. "For people to come back to Broadway, and for me to do a piece that has been in my life for as long as this, has been a dream come true. And to also take on the dream of being able to do it while having a family? That’s a win."

Sweeney Todd is now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York. Read this story and many more in print by ordering our sixth issue here.

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