Cygnet Theatre Company in San Diego, CA was founded in 2003 by Bill Schmidt and Sean Murray. The theatre's name is a reference to the Swan Theatre, a prominent competitor to Shakespeare's Globe. One of San Diego's major theatre companies is the Old Globe Theatre.

Cygnet is known for producing critically acclaimed and often provocative musicals and plays. Their first season included Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Bed and Sofa, and Fully Committed. Highlights in the first eight seasons include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Little Foxes, The Invention of Love, Yellowman, Copenhagen, Fences, A Little Night Music, The History Boys, Noises Off, Sweeney Todd, The Norman Conquests, Cabaret, and the World Premiere of Stephen Metcalfe's Tragedy of the Commons.

Cygnet presents at the Old Town Theatre in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, a newly-renovated, state-of-the-art venue. The State Park receives more than six million visitors annually.

Programs include:

1) Mainstage. Cygnet presents six mainstage productions each season in the 248-seat Old Town Theatre. Cygnet has made its mark by producing top-quality theatre, including 19 city, regional, Southern CA, West Coast and World premieres in its first eight seasons, while garnering over 90 awards for theatre excellence.

Sweeney Todd is a fictional character who first appeared as the murderer of the Victorian penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846–1847) and he was later introduced as an antihero of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and its film adaptations. Claims that Sweeney Todd was a historical person are strongly disputed by scholars, although there are possible legendary prototypes.

In the original version of the tale, Todd is a barber who dispatches his victims by pulling a lever while they are in his barber chair, which makes them fall backward down a revolving trapdoor into the basement of his shop, generally causing them to break their necks or skulls. Just in case they are alive, he goes to the basement and "polishes them off" (slitting their throats with his straight razor). In some adaptations, the murdering process is reversed, with Todd slitting the throats of his customers before they are dispatched into the basement via the revolving trapdoor. After Todd has robbed his dead victims of their goods, Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime (in some later versions, his friend and/or lover), assists him in disposing of the bodies by baking their flesh into meat pies, and selling them to the unsuspecting customers of her pie shop. Todd's barber shop is situated at 186 Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan's church, and is connected to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means of an underground passage. In most versions of the story, he and Mrs. Lovett hire an unwitting orphan boy, Tobias Ragg, to serve the pies to customers.

Jason Robert Brown (born June 20, 1970 in Ossining, New York) is an American musical theater composer, lyricist, and playwright. Brown's music sensibility fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics. An accomplished pianist, Brown has often served as music director, conductor, orchestrator, and pianist for his own productions.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York for 2 years. During summer, he attended French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in Hancock, New York. He said Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday in the Park with George were two of his biggest influences, and had it not been for them, he would have joined a rock band and tried to be Billy Joel.

When Brown was 23, he and a friend were invited to see Stephen Sondheim's show Passion by Sondheim himself. Brown's friend, whom he refers to only as "Franz Liszt", wrote to Sondheim, and that is how they both got the tickets. Sondheim also invited them to dinner afterward. At the show, they sat in front of the New York Times' Frank Rich. They went to dinner, and after twenty minutes, Sondheim asked them what they thought of the show: they both were silent. Brown described the dinner after that moment as "many extremely awkward silences punctuated by bursts of frantic, desperate conversation about anything other than the slaughtered elephant in the room." Brown called mutual friend Daisy Prince the next day, asking if there might be any way to repair the damage after the dinner. She and her family decided that Brown should call Sondheim. Brown paraphrased what Sondheim said:

Mark Christopher Lawrence (born May 22, 1964) is an American character actor, stand-up comedian and voice-over artist. He is perhaps best known for his role as esoteric D.J., Tone Deaf, in the 1994 satirical rap mockumentary, Fear of a Black Hat. He has co-starred in popular films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Planet of the Apes, Lost Treasure and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Lawrence can currently be seen in his regular role as Big Mike on the NBC series Chuck. He has made guest appearances on many television programs, most notably Heroes, My Name Is Earl, Crossing Jordan, Dharma & Greg, Malcolm in the Middle, Touched by an Angel, Malcolm & Eddie, Men Behaving Badly, Seinfeld, Murphy Brown, and Martin. He is also featured on the Radio Series Adventures in Odyssey as "Ed Washington".

A native of Compton, California, Lawrence and his two siblings were raised by a single mother. In tenth grade, he became involved with his high school’s debate team—immersing himself in forensics competitions and theater. After winning his school district’s Literary Olympiad competition, Lawrence went on to compete at the state and national levels as a member of the Cerritos Community College forensics squad. There he went on to capture the collegiate Bovero-Tabor Award, awarded to the top junior college speaker in the country.

Mark Christopher is a conservative/libertarian talk radio host. His show titled The Mark Christopher Show initially broadcast on 99.7 WWTN and then, 1510 WLAC both in Nashville, Tennessee where he was named the Associated Press talk show of the year for 3 straight years, and the #1 talk show in Nashville in 2006.

Since that time The Mark Christopher Show has aired on KTRS St. Louis and Knews Radio in Palm Springs.