by Caissie Levy – the star performer who first brought Elsa to life in Frozen on Broadway – was just getting ready for “a new phase of life” when she was offered to return to London’s West End for the first time in over a decade .
It was early January 2022, and it couldn’t have felt more surreal. She had just moved to New Jersey and given birth to her second child, and it was during an early morning feeding that she received an unexpected and exciting job offer.
“I was giving the baby a bottle at 5am and I got an Instagram message. I looked at it and it was from Mike,” she said. Mike is the British director Michael Longhurst, who she directed in the musical Caroline, or Change on Broadway the year before. The message asked her to lead the UK premiere of the Tony-winning multiple musical Next to Normal at the Donmar Warehouse in London.
“I thought, ‘This is surreal that I’m getting offered a job like this with a baby and a bottle; I don’t even know what day it is,” says Levy. “But it was a great thrill to get that kind of message. In our line of work you have to fight for everything you get.”
Next to Normal is not a traditional musical. Written by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, it has a rock score and the subject it deals with is also unusual: it’s about a woman struggling with bipolar disorder and the effects on her family.
If that sounds like a downer, it’s anything but. “The show deals with a lot of taboo subjects: mental health, grief, losing a child – really tough stuff. But it’s darkly funny and there’s that messiness of life,” says the 43-year-old.
It took 15 years to reach London and the Donmar run sold out quickly last summer. It is now returning, this time to Wyndham’s Theater in the West End, where it opens next week.
Levy saw the show when it first opened in the US in 2009, when she was in the Broadway revival of the classic Hair. “I was making rock music out of the blue at a time when next generation rock music was happening.”
She saw Next to Normal twice and was “floored by it”, at the time regarding the character of her teenage daughter Natalie. Now she is playing the mother Diana. “For it to come my way now, it’s such a different phase of life watching it again.”
What she liked was the complexity of the character. “There are things that immediately draw me in, like motherhood. I also have healthy anxiety and depression that I’ve dealt with my whole life, and that’s definitely a way in.”
She has never suffered from performance anxiety or stage fright but talks about “feeling kind of low or blue sometimes, and it was great to talk about that”.
There is no stigma around mental health in her family – her father is a GP – “but it’s great to have the opportunity to talk about it when it comes to work. Not that I hid it, but it’s nice to have a reason to say, ‘I relate to this aspect of the story and I think a lot of our audience does too.’ It’s a form of freedom.”
With the feeling of connection, Diana knew part of her that she could disappear into. “When you’re a younger actor, starting out, you want to be a star. You want to be the center of attention. I find the older I get the more I want to go into the parts. I’m not that interested in the diva roles. It’s more attractive to slip into something else.”
To prepare, she read a lot and went on YouTube to listen to people with bipolar disorder talk about their experiences. The creative team brought in experts to advise. “So many of the guidelines have changed since the story was written in 2009. A lot of the ways they give medicine, the length of time between visits has changed.” So the writers updated the opera to make sure it was accurate with the current treatments.
In one scene, Diana spilled all her pills down the sink. So what does the show say about medication use? “We took great care to make sure it was ambiguous. It wasn’t like, ‘Drugs are bad, you should get off them’ or ‘Drugs are the only way.’ We wanted to keep it gray, because it is gray.”
Later, there is a tough moment where the character goes through electroshock therapy; an expert came in to speak to help them portray it responsibly. “The way it’s been portrayed in the past isn’t exactly accurate, so we wanted to make sure we weren’t making a sensation,” Levy says. “Because it’s a standard thing now, but it’s a lot lighter than, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and those scenes that we had. That was an education for me.”
Ultimately the family wants to be normal – the daughter says, “something close to normal would be fine” – and that, according to Levy, is what we all want to achieve. . “We live in the age of social media and we all think everyone has their shit together and no one is.” Not even the stars of the West End? “God, absolutely not!”
We meet in a quiet corner of the bar in the swanky hotel The Londoner in Leicester Square. It’s the day after the Oliviers – she was nominated for Next to Normal but lost to Nicole Scherzinger for Sunset Boulevard – and she’s looking all elegant in black. Her husband, David Reiser, is now a theater professor who was a performer (“we met through friends, we weren’t in your show!”) and had flown back to the US earlier in the day.
Talking about the show’s deep themes – and enjoying a very emotional moment – Levy suddenly becomes emotional. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I miss my children and I have to go home and see them. That’s hard, and it’s hard to play every night.”
Although the show is a “hard song”, that’s not what makes Levy stand out – it’s the emotional weight and physicality the role demands. “It’s fight or flight for two and a half hours, and I never leave the stage. I’m smashing into the scenery, I’m pushing against Jamie Parker [who plays Diana’s husband Dan]I’m running upstairs.
“At the Donmar, I’d come off and my legs were just crying. It’s like a train, when you’re on, there’s no chance to prepare for the next scene… it takes a toll on your body, I’ve been in a lot of physiotherapy during this time. The crying, the running, the screaming…it’s a lot, but I’ve never been happier.”
The Donmar is an intimate theater and there have been performances where the audience was too large to walk out or when they needed help. That intimate space worried her at first, but “then I became addicted to it, that instant payback, that connection with the audience was amazing. It was also difficult when you could tell someone was going through something. There were moments when people were under siege, someone died. It was tough.”
There’s a New York Times quote that says it’s not a good show, but a “feel everything” show. “That pretty much sums it up,” says Levy. “Sometimes you go to a musical to escape. I think you come to Next to Normal to connect. It’s very different.”
Levy grew up in Hamilton, Canada, about an hour outside of Toronto, surrounded by culture, “We’re a big theater family,” she says. Her earliest memories are of her father – who can play the piano by ear – singing her to sleep with old show tunes and, at the age of four, she would harmonize. “That’s how I learned to sing.”
She saw Les Misérables when she was eight, a truly formative moment. “I was very jealous of little Cosette, thinking, why am I not doing that?”
After singing in bands and acting in plays at school, she dreamed of Broadway. She applied to AMDA drama school in New York on a whim. “I went in and my brother said, ‘Dude you just made it to the NBA.’”
Levy in Rent, Hairspray and Wicked came quickly after graduation. She came to London for the first time in 2010 in the production of Hair which transferred to the Gielgud Theatre. She returned a year later, starring in Ghost the Musical.
Looking down her CV, it seems Levy was rarely off the stage during the 2010s, including fulfilling her childhood dreams by starring in Les Mis in 2014 and 2015. But Elsa is the role growing a lot – it was Elsa who established the character on stage. adaptation of Disney’s blockbuster cartoon Frozen and was on the show for two years.
That meant “a lot of denial about how big a deal it was. It was scary. I never thought I would become famous as a Disney princess. I’m a tomboy, I didn’t run around in a frilly dress. I felt like an unlikely choice, and that’s probably why she’s a good choice for Elsa, she’s someone who’s not entirely comfortable in that world.”
“It wasn’t about putting a belt on Let It Go Directly, it was like: who is this girl who is afraid of everything and is afraid of hurting everyone? I was like, ‘In relation!’ I want to be perfect for everyone and make sure everyone is okay.”
She was there for two years. She loved the routine and found more things in the show. “Doing eight shows a week is like doing yoga every day. You do the same situations but it’s different because you’re different [each day]. Some days I was a darker Elsa, I was feeling down or angry or tired. Other days I was softer or funnier. There is freedom.”
What is her relationship with Let it Go? “I will sing that song until the end of time. I will forever be singing in concerts and popular and I’m fine with that. It’s like that in my body now. I’m honored to have had her and made her my true self. Everyone in New York wanted that job.”
Playing Elsa brought her many young fans, and Levy takes her responsibility to those at the stage door very seriously. It was something she learned from Sarah Jessica Parker, who she saw in 1996 on her first trip to New York in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
“We never had a stage door, it wasn’t a thing back then. And I begged my parents to stay with her. She took ages, but when she came out I said, ‘I want to be just like you.’ And she said, ‘You can do it!’. She was so kind and warm and I will never forget it. I credit her with teaching me how to do that with people at the stage door.”
Next to Normal is at Wyndham’s Theater from June 26 to September 21; book tickets here
