Tobias Ragg
fictional character

Tobias Ragg (also spelled as Tobias Wragg and sometimes referred to as Toby) is a fictional character who appears in various adaptations of the story Sweeney Todd. The character is an apprentice to the abusive barber Pirelli until Pirelli is murdered by Todd. Tobias proceeds to stay with Todd and Mrs. Lovett, helping the latter out in her meat pie shop. Later, Tobias discovers that they have a joint venture to cook the men Todd shaves into meat pies. He ultimately kills Todd after Todd kills Lovett and Lucy Barker, along with multiple others.
Various actors have portrayed Toby, most notably Ken Jennings, the original actor in the 1979 Broadway production, Neil Patrick Harris in the 2001 concert version of the musical, Manoel Felciano in the 2005 revival of the musical, Edward Sanders in the 2007 film of the musical, and Gaten Matarazzo and Joe Locke in the 2023–2024 revival of the musical. Toby participates in multiple songs in the play and movie, having a solo in "Not While I'm Around".
Fictional biography
In the penny dreadful The String of Pearls, Tobias Ragg is the apprentice of Sweeney Todd, a barber who murders his customers. Sweeney Todd has him committed to a lunatic asylum after Tobias finds proof of Todd's guilt and decides to contact the police.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3992105. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 2001, 2005 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tobias Ragg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.