Caissie Levy – the star performer who first brought Elsa to life in Frozen on Broadway – was just settling into a “new phase of life” when she received an offer to return to West London for the first time in more than a decade End.
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 during an early morning feeding she received an unexpected and exciting job offer.
“I gave the baby a bottle at 5am and got an Instagram message. I looked at it with tears in my eyes and it was Mike’s,” she said. Mike is the British director Michael Longhurst, who directed her in the musical Caroline, or Change on Broadway last year. The message asked her to helm the British premiere of the multiple Tony-winning musical Next to Normal at London’s Donmar Warehouse.
“I thought, ‘This is surreal that I’m being offered a job like this with a baby and a bottle; I don’t even know what day it is,” Levy said. “But it was exciting to get a message like that. In our 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 features rock music and the subject matter it covers is also unusual: it’s about a woman struggling with bipolar disorder and its effects on her family.
If that sounds like a downer, it is anything but. “The show deals with a lot of taboo topics: mental health, intense grief, loss of a child – really difficult things. But it is very funny and it has the mess of life,” says the 43-year-old.
It had taken fifteen years to get to London and last summer’s Donmar run sold out quickly. Now it returns, this time to the 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 took part in a Broadway revival of the classic musical Hair. “I was doing the ultimate rock musical at a time when the next generation rock musical was premiering.”
She saw Next to Normal twice and was “floored by it,” at the time relating to the character of teenage daughter Natalie. Now she plays the mother Diana. “To have it come my way now, it’s such a different stage of life to revisit it.”
The complexity of the character was what appealed to her. “There are things that immediately attract me, such as motherhood. Plus, I have a healthy amount of anxiety and depression that I’ve dealt with my whole life, so that was definitely a way to cope.”
She’s never suffered from performance anxiety or stage fright, but she says she “sometimes feels a little down or down, and it’s been great to talk about that.”
There is no stigma around mental health in her family – her father is a GP – “but it’s cool to have the opportunity to talk about it when it comes to work. Not that I’ve kept it hidden, but it’s nice to have a reason to say, “I can relate to this element of the story and I think a large part of our audience does too.” It’s a kind of liberation.”
With the feeling of connection, Diana was a part she knew she could disappear into. “When you’re a younger actor, you want to be a star. You want to be the center of attention. I find that the older I get, the more eager I am to disappear into the parts. I’m not really interested in the diva roles. It is more attractive to do something else.”
In preparation, she read a lot and went on YouTube to listen to people with bipolar disorder talk about their experiences. The creative team called in experts for advice. “Many of the guidelines have changed since the story was written in 2009. Many of the ways they use medications have changed the length of time between visits.” Therefore, the writers updated the musical to ensure it was accurate according to current treatments.
In one scene, Diana pours all her pills down the sink. What does the show say about drug use? “We were careful to make sure it was ambiguous. It wasn’t like, ‘Drugs are bad, you have to stop taking them’ or ‘Drugs are the only way’. We wanted to keep it gray, because it is gray.”
Later there is a difficult moment when the character undergoes electroshock therapy; an expert came by to talk 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 didn’t sensationalize it,” says Levy. ‘Because it’s standard now, but it’s a lot milder than, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the footage we’ve had. That was a learning experience for me.”
Ultimately, the family wants to be normal — the daughter says, “something beyond normal would be okay” — and that’s what we’re all striving for, Levy says. “We live in the age of social media and we all think everyone has their act together and no one does.” Not even West End stars? “Oh God no, not at all!”
We meet in a quiet corner of the bar in the chic hotel The Londoner on 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 looks elegant in all black. Her husband, David Reiser, who was a performer (“we met through friends, we weren’t a spectacle!”) is now a theater professor, and he flew back to the US earlier today.
When he talks about the deep themes of the show – and touches on a hugely emotional moment – Levy suddenly becomes emotional. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I miss my children and I have to go home to see them. That’s hard, and it’s hard to play every night.”
Although the show is “a hard sing-along,” that’s not what makes Levy stand out – it’s the emotional weight and sheer physicality that the role requires. “It’s two and a half hours in fight or flight mode and I never leave the stage. I storm into the landscape, I push Jamie Parker [who plays Diana’s husband Dan]I run up the stairs.
“At the Donmar I came off and my legs were just throbbing. It’s like a train: once you’re on the train, you don’t have a chance to prepare for the next scene… it takes a lot out of your body, I had a lot of physiotherapy during the whole flight. The crying, the running, the screaming… it’s a lot, but I’ve never been so satisfied.”
The Donmar is an intimate theater and there were performances when the overwhelmed audience walked out or needed help. That intimate space worried her at first, but “then I got hooked, that immediate payback, that connection with the audience was amazing. It was also difficult when you could see that someone was going through something. There were times when people were overwhelmed, someone fainted. It was heavy.”
There is a quote from the New York Times that says it is not a feel-good show, but a “feel everything show”. “That sums it up so well,” says Levy. “Sometimes you go to a musical to escape. I feel like 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 are a big theater family,” she says. Her earliest memories are of her father – who could play the piano by ear – singing her to sleep with old show tunes, and she was harmonizing at the age of four. “That’s how I learned to sing.”
She saw Les Misérables when she was eight, which was a real formative moment. “I was very jealous of little Cosette and thought: why don’t I do that?”
After singing in bands and appearing in plays in school, she dreamed of Broadway. On a whim, she applied to the AMDA acting school in New York. “I got in and my brother said, ‘Dude, you just got into the NBA.’”
Levy appeared in Rent, Hairspray and Wicked soon after graduating. She first came to London in 2010 for the production of Hair, which transferred to the Gielgud Theatre. She returned a year later, starring in Ghost the Musical.
Looking at her resume, it seems that Levy has rarely been offstage in the 2010s, including fulfilling her childhood dreams by starring in Les Mis in 2014 and 2015. But the role that looms large is Elsa – she originated the character on stage in the adaptation of Disney’s blockbuster Frozen and was on the show for two years.
Taking it “entailed a lot of denial about how big the deal was. It was scary. I never thought I would one day be cast as a Disney princess. I’m a tomboy, I never ran around in a ruffled dress. I felt like an unlikely choice, which is probably why I was a good choice for Elsa, she’s someone who doesn’t feel completely comfortable in that world.
“It wasn’t just about shouting Let it Go, it was about: who is this girl who is afraid of everything and afraid of hurting everyone? I thought, ‘I’m talking about!’ I want to be perfect for everyone and make sure everything goes well.”
She was there for two years. She loved the routine and finding more things in the show. “Doing eight shows a week is like doing yoga every day. You do the same poses, but it’s different because you’re different [each day]. Some days I was a darker Elsa, feeling down, angry or tired. Other days I was more bubbly or funnier. There is freedom in it.”
What is her relationship with Let it Go? “I will sing that song until the end of time. I will forever sing it at concerts and galas and I’m fine with that. It’s like this in my body now. I feel so honored that I could be her and make her a real person. Everyone in New York wanted that job.”
Playing Elsa has won 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, whom she saw on her first trip to New York in 1996 in How to Succeed in Business Without Real Trying.
“We had never had a stage door before, it didn’t exist at the time. And I begged my parents to wait for her. It took forever, 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 have never forgotten it. I appreciate that she taught me how to do that with people at the stage door.
Next to Normal runs at Wyndham’s Theater from June 26 to September 21; book tickets here